Data Collection Competition

By far, the success of any growing a salon depends on generating a core group of regular clients and treating them with the respect they deserve. In fact, I am a big fan of spending quite a bit of my marketing budget on regular clients and we have our salon loyalty scheme to maximise their custom.

It can be a game changer to think of a client “lifetime spend” – IE. How much will they spend over all the time of their custom – not just on one visit. It’s why I hate things like Group On for salon campaigns.

So, already being an advocate of our salon software provider, I was quite excited when they released a new, update to their Smartphone App for our clients to utilise. When you think about it, an App is a great extension to customer loyalty, as clients have a quick and easy way to book online and check their appointments. What’s more, it also saves you an immense amount of time (and money) when compared to manually booking clients by phone.

Data Is King

Current marketing needs to be channeled directly to your salon clients offering them the information and deals that are relevant to them – technology has made started mass marketing down the path of being obsolete.

But, the key to making this work is to ensure you have great data in your salon software or marketing database and although these platforms have the ability to collect and organise it, you also need to remember that (a) your team need to understand why it’s important for them to get the information in the first place; (b)  it’s not always practical to get all the client details you need in a busy salon environment; and (c) some clients simply don’t want to give you their details because they don’t trust you.

Making It Worth Their While

We recently ran a competition to encourage clients to offer to update their details on our salon software by offering an iPad as a prize.

Clients coming in for a treatment just had to fill in their details on a card, which was entered into a box. The receptionists, then checked each card against our records in the system and updated the ones that had out-of-date details.

Remember – that was our number one goal for the whole exercise!

Marketability

One of the great side-effects of running a competition for your salon like this is that it gives you something to talk about – it gives you a marketing story to share… A beginning, middle and an end.

And that’s the trade-off. You see, your clients (all consumers) are looking to see what’s in it for them….

Cost

The total cost for this campaign (not including time) was £388 + VAT. That covered the iPad, the print and the suggestion boxes. I’d tag onto that perhaps around £150 for design and artwork which we did in-house.

You could do it differently of course – chose a less expensive prize, print entry forms yourself, etc. It’s all about the potential benefits available versus these costs.

Benefits

Now £538 + VAT (£645.60) might seem a lot to spend on a  salon competition but I always like to balance up the other side of the cost – the potential ‘gain’.

In total we had about 500 entries. From that, around 100 of the cards had details updated. That works out (including the VAT) at £6.46 per person. Now, that’s not actually a lot of money to get back per person over the potential lifetime of the client.

£6.46 per person.

In fact, if in the quiet months of October / November I decide to run a marketing campaign for the salon, armed with my new, improved data, I honestly think I may get a large chunk of that investment back straight away as I have better data to communicate with with 100 people that I may not have been able to speak to before.

We also came up with a different kind of way of picking a winner.

So, rather than think of the overall cost, think about how much would you pay for 100 new clients?