10 Tips To Make Your Salons Newsletters A Sure-Fire Success
- Sending out newsletters is one of THE best ways of building relationships with clients. Email is quickest and cheapest so it’s the one I personally prefer most of the time. That said, email is a funny thing – you need to make sure your email newsletters aren’t too heavily sales based. Make sure to include lots of free tips and tricks for clients (as well as your latest offers) so that they look forward to them arriving and open them with anticipation of picking up some new bit of info.
- Your weekly newsletters are doing lots of your work for you. They are relationship building between you and your clients. If you’re sending them via email, try to make sure to send them each and every week. Even if you’ve run out of time, and it’s just a short tip for the week and nothing else, never skip a week if at all possible. Keep that relationship up and over time you’ll find more and more of them book in regularly.
- Are you adding all your new clients to your email list? Every single new client or enquiry should be added onto your list. That way you’ll get the best coverage and the most responses.
- Statistics show that most people only read about one in every 4 emails they receive properly. So if you are sending them a weekly newsletter, they are probably only reading one of them fully once a month. This doesn’t mean you should drop your frequency down to once a month though! If you do this, that means they would only be reading one email from you once every 4 months… which really is not very often! So keep it at once a week and know that you’re getting at least one quality bit of contact with your clients per month.
- There’s been lots of research and most statistics show that it takes between 5 and 7 contacts with a new client before they want to book or buy. So if you add a new client on your mailing list, it might be several weeks before they then book in to see you. But remember if you don’t put them on your mailing list, you won’t have any contact with them and they may never book. So add all new clients on asap.
- Getting some clients unsubscribe from your newsletter? Not a problem. It’s very common with email marketing that clients will unsubscribe when they are too busy to read your emails. HOWEVER, it’s also very common for clients to wish to re-subscribe later when they’ve got more time or energy to devote to whatever it is you are offering them. So always be polite and never take an unsubscription personally. If you’re highly professional and always welcoming they may well be back in the future.
- If someone asks to unsubscribe from your newsletter but you can’t see their email address on your list, ask them if they have an alias or another email address. Many people now days have 3 or 4 different email accounts and if they’ve subscribed to your newsletter under a different email address, you’ll need to know what that is to remove it.
- Are your friends and family on your mailing list? Do make sure to add them if they aren’t. They’ll be your best promoters and your worst critics. Which means if there’s ever anything wrong, they’ll be the ones to let you know asap so you can fix it. And when its fantastic, they’ll forward it on to their friends straight away.
- Do encourage your clients to forward your e-newsletters on to their friends. The more people you have finding out about you and your services, the quicker and better your business will grow.
- A great idea is to have a feature in your email newsletter about once every 4-6 weeks on referrals. Offer clients a voucher or free gift for referring a friend. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. So ask for referrals and you may well be pleasantly surprised with the results.
- Bonus tip - Competitions are another brilliant way to get referrals. People love to tell their friends about great prizes they might win. So once every 3-4 months have a big competition. Give away a gift basket or package and feature it in all your newsletters and marketing materials. Then actively encourage clients to forward on your newsletters to friends so they can enter too. How? Just ask. EG “we are having an amazing competition this month. See the details below. Do make sure to forward this email onto all your friends, colleagues and loved ones so they can be in to win as well!”
So what are your tips? Post a comment below and share with everyone else what your favourite strategies are for staying in touch with your clients…!
February 5th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
HiI run a netowrking group called North London Network for self employed people in the area. We are just rebranding to open up to franchising around the country. We are just redesigning our web site to include a top tips for our members. Your newsletter top tips would fit in very well. Would you be interested in putting it up on our site when it’s done ( in a month or so). It would be credited to you and have a live link to you as well as short blurb. We have a lot of women, therapists and life coaches.
Thanks Dominique
February 6th, 2009 at 12:24 am
I always ask clients for their date of birth during the initial consultation and then I file their birthdays month by month-making sure I send them a birthday card each year-they love it.
February 6th, 2009 at 9:21 am
Flippin’ heck, are you psychic?!
I had my very first “unsubscribe” this week and I blubbed like a gurl!
Thanks for all the tips, Rebecca!
February 6th, 2009 at 9:40 am
Lynne - I totally understand. It can be really upsetting to start with (espcially if the person is having a bad day and phrases it a little harshly), but I find the positives always outweight the negatives. For every person that decides theu want to leave your list, there’s bound to be another 20 who love what you do and really look forward to opening your emails every week. Just wait till you have someone accidentally unsubscribe and then email you in a panic wanting to rejoin… puts you in a great mood all day
Dominique - Absolutely! Please do. Your group sounds fabulous. For anyone who is in the North London area and is interested in networking, their website is http://northlondonnetwork.com/
Best wishes,
Rebecca
PS… Love the birthday card idea Olivia!
February 6th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Hi Rebecca,
Thanks for the great tips!! However I have one BIG problem - I don’t have many clients email address. This was a big mistake I made in the beginning, not asking for this info on the client record card and as some of these are about 10 yrs ago I think it is a bit late to start calling them now for an update!! So let that be a lesson to all - GET THE EMAILS!!
Keep up the good work..
Best, Pearl
February 6th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Yes, the first time someone unsubscribes does hit you a bit. I felt that. Now I focus on only those people who are really interested in what I’m doing will be drawn to me and those who aren’t will leave. That way I’m not wasting my time with people who don’t resonate with what I do. Focus on what you want not what you don’t want. If you’re not getting what you want then look at your thoughts and beliefs again, as your beliefs are creating your reality.
Blessings,
Leah
http://www.healinglightwholistic.com
November 7th, 2009 at 9:43 am
there’s bound to be another 20 who love what you do and really look forward to opening your emails every week. Just wait till you have someone accidentally unsubscribe and then email you in a panic wanting to rejoin… puts you in a great mood all day.
January 9th, 2010 at 7:50 am
I would LOVE to have a newsletter, but I am a massage therapist with ONLY my services to offer, nothing else. I don’t do any product sales of any kind.
What on earth could I put in a newsletter? I would TOTALLY run out of material
to put in one!
January 10th, 2010 at 10:41 pm
Happy New Year by the way
hope it brings you Health, Wealth and over all things happiness.
New years resolutions,a funny thing.
One of mine is to send a weekly newsletter to my client list, thanks to reading on and off parts or full posts of you.
I am very busy with my business, I am a Yoga therapist.
I only have 2 hands - a typical 1 wo’man show’.
So where to go from here?
As I plan on moving counties in 2 years time I want to work on a better banding for my business, write down all I know and maybe train someone up to take over what I ve worked on for the last 7 years.
As English is my 2nd language I never had the confidence to write, I still will need to find an editor;_-0.
My first hurdel and my main question is:
I have a list of contacts over 200, how do I send e-mail newsletters without just ending up in the spam? Is ther software, is there a tick??
Thank you for your time, any help is welcome.
Namste
Simone Moir
Bless you for your time and energy you invest in this
p.s. I am re-launching my site beginning of next week and wanted to make that my 1st newsletter : relaunch - reinvent yourself
letting go of the old to make space for the new
detox tips
and tricks how to make your New Years resolutions stick.
should one send newsletters as a Http? or a word doc?
January 12th, 2010 at 11:51 am
Simone - Brilliant question!
I use software that sends emails one-by-one so that they don’t end up in spam with too many recipients all being sent it in one go. But before this I used to just use a regular email program.
What I did was BCC them all (so that they can’t see each others email addresses!). And after I’d written the email, I’d also copy/paste the email several times in my draft folder. Then I’d break the list down into smaller groups and send each group separately. Ie I’d send the email to 25 people, then another 25, then another 25 until they were all gone. Took me about 5mins longer than usual but it meant the email always got through
Hope this helps, Rebecca
February 20th, 2010 at 9:02 am
We have been emailing clients (but only once a month) for five years at our salon in Farnborough, and just starting from scratch with our new salon in Basingstoke.
We use an online solution called Campaign Monitor - http://www.campaignmonitor.com - really good for creating forms and keeping the database up-to-date. It’s cheap to use and also give you reports on open rates and click-throughs as well.
Technically, BCC’ing people is not the best way to email as it will potentially flag your email as spam to quite a few email filters.
One thing we have done in the salon to get people to subscribe is to offer them something in return. We give people a £5 voucher for signing up - it makes them more emotionally attached to the email and keeps the unsubscribes down. In Farnborough, we now have 1400 subscribers.
The web and email is the only marketing we now do. Hope this helps and thanks for the article.