Text marketing software: leveraging its true potential for your salon

14 Oct 2013

Written by Alice Smithson

Text marketing: are you leveraging its true potential?

The best salon and spa managers know that communicating with their customers and clients will ultimately help to increase profitability. Your customers like to be kept in the loop and to feel appreciated, so good communication can help to promote brand loyalty over time. Salon software services such as text marketing can help to open more channels of communication between your salon and its customers, but are you leveraging the advantages of text marketing to their full potential? Take a look at just some of the opportunities you could enjoy thanks to the benefits of text marketing. Is there more you could be doing to help your business?

Appointment reminders

One of the most valuable assets of the average salon or spa is the repeat customers who bring in tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of trade between them every year. Repeat customers can usually be relied on to make regular appointments and book frequent slots in your salon or spa, but should they cancel their visit or simply forget to attend, your business could be down on profits as a result. No-shows represent one of the biggest drains on salon profits here in the UK, but text marketing can help you to put a stop to such problems. Automated text appointment reminders have been proven to reduce no-shows, ensuring that your salon’s appointment calendar doesn’t end up with a bunch of wasted slots.

Treatment, product and service updates

Text marketing can be used as more than a simple appointment reminder, however. As we mentioned earlier, your customers like to be kept up to date with changes to your company, as it helps them to feel involved and appreciated. With that in mind, it pays to send them text updates when your salon or spa makes any changes: when you bring in new staff, for example, or add treatments, products and services to your range in line with current trends. Not only can these updates help to keep your customers in the loop, but they can also work as marketing activities too, advertising desirable new services that may not have been available before.

Promotions and offers

Using text marketing, it’s possible to take your salon’s marketing activities further even than this. Should your salon or spa introduce new promotions, offers or loyalty schemes, it can be beneficial to advertise these through automated text updates. Again, your customers will appreciate being kept in the loop, while particularly attractive offers and promotions might tempt them to spend money they wouldn’t otherwise have parted with. While money-saving offers might slightly reduce your profit margins, they can help to increase the popularity of products and treatments that may have otherwise struggled to sell. Additionally, you can promote last-minute availability of bookings to a selected list of people you know might be able to make it at short notice. Even if you offer treatments for 20% off, an 80% cost salon booking makes more profit than an empty chair.

Text marketing is an excellent opportunity for your company to consolidate existing customers and win new ones, but it’s not the only progressive feature offered by our salon software solutions. If you want to make your salon or spa a more cost-effective, efficient and profitable enterprise this year, take a look at our range of salon software solutions or contact us today for more information.