½ way down, ½ way to go!

It doesn’t seem two minutes since we were typing to you to wish you good luck for 2016…and now here we find ourselves in June, I know, already?! Which, for you guys this is the start of summer peak so you’re all busy, busy- and how have you all been getting on in the last few weeks? I hope that the first half of the year has been a great success for you all and you’ve got plenty of bookings to be tending to.

However once your summer of weddings, proms and holiday packages comes to a halt, you need to start thinking about the next quarter, and you want to make sure that you are prepped for your Autumn/Winter custom, that you have done enough marketing and promotional activities to ensure that you have those clients already lined up and you generate those big sales!

Understandably it's hard to think about this now when you are in the height of a busy period and sales are thriving. However, September on-wards you have back-to-school, the autumn (where everyone wants a tan, new style and colour change) and also, the big one, Christmas.

You don’t necessarily need to start the actions for this yet however, just when you get a spare couple of hours, do a little evaluation of what worked well for you last year and perhaps what didn’t. Also, take note of how you manage the high demand through this peak summer season and see how you can implement some of these tactics in to your Autumn/Winter strategy. This way, you are prepped mega early and you don’t have to cram in last-minute ideas.

If you are currently a salon software user, why not run a report of your sales throughout the summer, and have a look at peak times against certain marketing campaigns that you send out. This then highlights to you the types of messages that have worked well for you and indicates the types of approaches that you should be using to keep a good client retention from Summer through to Autumn/Winter.

Re-booking! A great one to push to clients who visit you throughout July & August, as then you are guaranteeing yourself extra custom in the September and October months, where salons are a little bit quieter before the start of the peak Xmas season in November.

Create a new Winter treatment list…(and it might be here that you don’t actually make that many changes!) ..but if you freshen up that service list both in the salon and online, create some ‘wintery’ titles for some of your treatments and change up the design a little bit, this small change could mean a big one in the eyes of clients. Use your social media channels to push the ‘refreshed services.’

Retail products, do you supply different products in the summer to what you do in the winter? If so, order these early, just to ensure you have that quick turn around when it comes to the Summer-Autumn/Winter changeover! Also, it’s all about the presentation of those. Get your most creative technician to do a bit of visual merchandising with your retail products to increase their appeal value to customers.

Staff working preferences. Throughout Autumn/Winter, you have an array of events, including Halloween, Bonfire Night and Christmas. Demand for days off or early finishes around this time could be high, therefore plan these shifts early and get your staff to fill out a shift preference sheet, to keep it fair and to give yourselves plenty of leeway with time to arrange these shift patterns accordingly. This way, you’re not shooting yourself in the foot if all of your therapists come running with the same day-off request, last-minute.

This is just a start off…and the aim was to provide few little pointers for you to think about over the summer season in the lead up to autumn. It may be that you don’t actually action some of these until the end of the month, but it just gets you in the planning mode and gives you a few ideas in how to manage the season switch up! Keep posted as next week we’ll be offering you our best Father’s day marketing and promo techniques for how you can capitalise on this event in the salon. Until next time…

Salon Tracker x