Salon Tracker Feature of the Month: SMS Marketing

Marketing methods are extremely important for businesses with a B2C model, especially in the salon industry as it is so media-influenced by current celebs and bloggers, content needs to be constantly refreshed and up to date with present existences.

There are many different methods of marketing direct to the consumer, however for salon industries, dependent on size and budget, these channels may differ from business to business in terms of affordability.

SMS marketing however is one of those types of marketing that costs exactly the same per message to each client, obviously dependent on how large a salon’s database is, that is when you then see the cost increase. Like any business though, the larger your client base and annual revenue, this usually results in the higher your marketing budget. So for March, we’ve chosen SMS marketing as our feature of the month and here’s why we think its’s so useful to salon businesses.

The simplest reason why SMS marketing is such a beneficial marketing opportunity is that nowadays consumers always have their phones to hand, meaning that your message is instantly communicated to them. You’re probably thinking now, well, an email is easily delivered and that’s free? The same with an app notification, or a Facebook post? And yes, we would agree with you, and all of these types of marketing are equally just as good, but the reason we focus solely on SMS marketing is that this first of all can be used by salon businesses of all sizes. For example some local salons may not have a company social media page setup yet, or their network following of those may not be very strong. Similarly with an email campaign, it’s often that for retailers and salon businesses many consumers’ sign up to newsletters with their so called ‘spam’ accounts, in other words ‘un-important email accounts.’ This increases the chance of a message being missed due to being hidden in a rarely checked email inbox alongside many other B2C marketing emails. With a text, the message is instantly delivered to the clients’ phone and they are likely to open it immediately on receiving it.

Great methods to utilise SMS marketing is to plan ahead when you are going to be running an event or around national holidays such as Spring Bank Holidays or Xmas. Work out what promotions and new products you’ll be offering around those times, weigh up your client database and work out how many messages you would need around that time to directly market to all your clients with SMS. What is great about the SMS marketing feature on Salon Tracker is that you just purchase the messages ad-hoc when you want to run a campaign, meaning that there are no marketing funds wasted as you can run it on a pay-as-you-go service. An example of a promo message that you might run for Easter or May Bank holiday for example could be:

Hi <<Forename>>

Be Beautiful this Bank Hol! We're offering a free [ENTER VALUE] voucher with every booking made this week, redeemable against all of our bank holiday services!

<<CompanyName>> <<CompanyTel>> T&Cs Apply

For an even better return on investment and to help you to increase your client database we have also included many marketing filters, which help you to direct your SMS marketing messages even further. One of our filters is to advertise to customers that haven’t visited you in a while, in which the system will track customer spend and highlight clients that haven’t been in for an appointment for some time. An example of how one of those pre-filtered messages would look is:

Hi <<Forename>>

You are missed! All appointments booked before [ENTER DATE] will receive [ENTER DISCOUNT] discount. 

<<CompanyName>> <<CompanyTel>> T&Cs Apply

You can then manage the return on how sales have reacted to your campaigns by using the Salon Tracker reporting tool, which you can also view annual sales charts to identify which times SMS marketing campaigns may also be essential to help boost footfall. Similarly, we have just introduced a Sales by Hour report, which identifies peak and quiet times of the day. Another great tool for determining when to run a promotional campaign and also when to schedule the SMS message to notify clients of the offer.

For more information on our SMS marketing tools or any of our software features, head over to www.salontracker.co.uk or call our office on 0113 350 8230 to book your software demo.

And don’t forget, you can also trial Salon Tracker FREE of charge for 2 weeks, and we give you 50 FREE texts to try out the marketing feature for yourself!

Salon Tracker x