Increase Salon Bookings with Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the oldest, yet most effective forms of marketing your beauty business can use. Effective marketing emails will convert potential clients into salon bookings while increasing the chances of turning them into loyal and returning ones.

It was shown that emails can generate $38 for every $1 spent, which is a large return on investment. With many email platforms such as MailChimp, there are no costs to use the service if you have under a certain number of subscribers. This allows you to grow your email marketing list without spending a dime.

How Effective is Email Marketing?

With the dominance of social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, email marketing is often overlooked by salons. However, email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. Since you are gathering your own emails, the audience is already targeted, engaged, and interested in your services.

While social media platforms are great for branding your beauty business, the engagement levels don’t meet up with the open rates for email marketing. The number of fans that see your Facebook posts on their newsfeed is only 6% while the open rate for email marketing messages is generally in the 20-30% range. This means your message is 5 times more likely to be seen through email than Facebook.

The reason for this is how crowded social media platforms can be. Your potential clients could be following thousands of people on social media, increasing the chances of your content getting lost. Since people usually only hand out their emails to selected businesses, your message will have a higher chance of getting seen.

Building Your Email Marketing List

Your email list should include regular clients, those who have booked with you, and those potentially interested in your services. Within your email marketing platform, you can create multiple email lists specific to their needs. For example, you will need to separate your potential clients because you will need to spend more time nurturing the leads.

Email marketing will be your direct line of communication with your email marketing lists. It will be used to promote your services, announce special promotions, gain feedback on your services, and provide appointment reminders. The more emails you can collect increases the number of salon bookings you can get.

Ask for Email at the Time of Booking

You can collect client emails at the time of booking to secure their appointment. If you accept walk-in clients, then be sure to ask for their emails before they leave your salon. Obtaining their emails at the time of booking will allow you to send appointment reminders, waivers, and forms before their appointment. This will automate the process and make things

Offer an Incentive

If you’re trying to collect emails and they’re not a client yet, you will need to offer an incentive. Potential clients are less willing to hand over their email. Various incentives you can provide to build your email marketing list are:

• Giving a discount for signing up to your newsletter
• Free ebook or training
• Running a giveaway or contest
• Complimentary consultation
• First access to upcoming promotions

Offering free ebooks and training is great at building your email marketing list, nurturing potential clients, and standing out as a leader in the industry. Think of questions your potential clients may ask then write a short ebook or offer free webinar training to address them.

For example, common questions clients may have are, “What is the difference between microblading and ombré powder eyebrows?” or “What products should I use for my skin type?”. Create a guide providing the answers and offer professional recommendations. In the end, you can offer a free consultation to draw them into your salon. With this method, you are sparking interest with potential clients and showing them how your expertise can help them.

Add Call-to-Action Button on Social Media

Facebook pages and Instagram Business Profiles allow you to add call-to-action buttons. On Facebook, you will add a page button and set the action as “Send Email”. On Instagram, it will be the “Email” button under “Contact Options”.

By adding these buttons, you are making it easier for potential clients to contact you. Whenever you receive an email with a request or inquiry about your services, be sure to add it to your email list. Even if they don’t follow through with a booking, they are still interested in your services and may decide to book later on.

Strategies to Increase Salon Bookings

Make the Subject Line Catchy

Your clients are getting many emails a day from other various brands. The subject line is one of the very first impressions you have on your email recipients. It’s your job to make it catchy and stand out from the rest.

Your subject line should have a sense of urgency and curiosity. You want your clients to wonder about the content of the email, thus encouraging them to open it. To do this, your subject line should provide a benefit to your audience.

Other tips for creating effective subject lines:

• Highlighting promotions and sales
• Personalization with the recipient’s name or location has been shown to increase open rates for most users. This works well with targeted campaigns, such as birthday deals or post-purchase follow-ups
• Be direct and descriptive to send a clear message to your audience
• Consider the length of your subject line (longer subject lines may not entirely show up on mobile devices)
• Test your subject lines to see which one will perform better. MailChimp has a free subject line researcher tool to predicts how well a word or phrase will perform

With these tips in mind, here are examples of email subject lines you can use:

• “Pamper yourself with a free manicure”
• “Happy birthday, Sally. We have a gift for you”
• “All Blowouts $20 Off - One Day Only!”
• “Sally, are you ready to receive 15% off your next facial?”

Use Visuals

If your email is too long, your clients may not read the whole thing. You should keep the emails short, concise and straight to the point.

Using visuals such as promotional banners help to execute the messaging. They can work a whole lot better at capturing your client’s attention. When people hear information, they are likely to remember only 10% of it three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with the same information, people retain 65% of the information within the same timeframe.

A great tool to create promotional banners is Canva. It’s a free, simplified tool that allows you to create a wide variety of graphics.

Include a Call-to-Action

Always have a call-to-action regardless of the reason for your email—announcing a promotion, reminding them of an upcoming appointment, or asking for feedback. Including a call-to-action button instead of a text link can increase conversions by as much as 28%.

Example of call-to-action phrases you can use are:

• Learn more
• Reserve your seat
• Book an appointment
• Count me in!
• I am ready to see a change

Personalization

Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. There are emails you can send to everyone on your email marketing list, such as announcements or seasonal promotions. If you narrow your marketing list down into several different lists, you can further personalize the message to resonate with the audience.

If you own a beauty bar offering a variety of services such as facials, nails, eyelash extensions, and permanent makeup, there are a ton of opportunities for personalization. It wouldn’t make much sense to email your skincare clients with information about eyelash extensions if they haven’t had the service yet.

You can divide your client list among all the services you have and determine how you will communicate with each one. From there, you can send a variety of emails personalized towards their particular needs and relevant to each service, such as:

• Additional maintenance and care tips
• Promotions on fills and touch-ups
• Product announcements and recommendations

Test Your Emails

Email platforms are always geared with analytics allowing you to further improve your email marketing strategies. If you aren’t getting enough salon bookings with your emails, you can perform tests to see which campaigns are most effective. This is often called A/B or split testing, a method of comparing two versions against each other to determine which one performs better.

Many email marketing services will offer A/B testing integrations at an additional cost, however, you can manually test your email yourselves. This can be done by looking at your analytics and determining what you can change to get different behavior in the future. You can:

• Increase open rates by testing different subject lines
• Increase click-through-rate by testing different templates, colors, and writing
• Increase booking rates by testing your messaging and content

You will need to keep in mind who your audience is and how you should be communicating with them. Be sure to always be friendly and personable in both the subject line and context of the email. Your emails shouldn’t always be about selling. They should be about building and fostering your relationship with current and potential clients.

Automation

Take the hard work out of email marketing by automating the process so you can focus on your beauty business. Email marketing services offer automation features to allow you to create targeted emails that send when triggered by a specific date, event, or activity.

This means you can create and schedule emails ahead of time. To be successful in email marketing, you will need to be consistent. Automation ensures you’re staying connected with your clients. You’ll never have to worry about missing an email or disappearing on your email lists

You can set automation to send emails to :

• New clients with their waivers and forms
• Appointment reminders
• Appointment follow-up
• Say “Happy Birthday” or greetings on special days

Automated series is another great way to introduce yourself to new email subscribers. Once they are added to your email list, you automatically send an introduction email. After a few days, they will receive an email with information about your services. Then a few days later, another email can be sent with promotional deals and additional resources.

This automated series takes potential clients through a journey of getting to know you and your beauty business. To increase salon bookings with email marketing, it’s all about being personable and building trust. Clients need to trust you and your expertise before they will book with you.

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While you want your email marketing strategy to work in favor of getting more clients and salon bookings, you will need to refrain from sounding “salesy”. Turn off your promotional tone because that’s not what your audience wants. Clients want to book with beauty professionals who they trust and are comfortable with. Being personable and insightful is what’s going to get you those salon bookings.