It’s the beginning of a new year which means now is the time to look at your business and create a plan for the year. If you want to grow your salon in 2024, here’s how to do it, writes Kamrin Hira.

Create loyal clients

Loyal clients are essential to the growth of any salon, spa or clinic. It costs much less to keep an existing client than to attract a new one, and loyal clients are the most likely to recommend you to their friends, family and grow your business by word-of-mouth.

Your salon software should have features specifically designed to help you create loyal clients, such as an integrated loyalty program to track and reward client spend at your salon, or even offering discounted concessions for your services that require regular visits. Concession sales provide income in advance and help create a habit of repeat appointments. Making concessions more appealing for your clients by offering an incentive such as ‘ten services for the price of nine’ is a great way to promote lasting loyalty.

Focus on marketing fundamentals

Great marketing will help you attract new clients, retain existing ones and even open up unexpected opportunities to grow your business and brand.

Make sure you look at your online presence—is your website up-to-date with all your services and pricing, along with any promotions you might be running? Add a button for your online booking page and make it easy for clients to contact you by ensuring your phone number, email address and contact form are correct and easy to find.

You can also consider making email marketing a focus in 2024. Emails are a great way to stay in touch with your clients when they’re not in the salon chair. Take the time to set up email marketing templates that can be used time and time again, and use your salon software to automate things such as reminders, thank-yous and birthday messages.

Sell more retail products

Retail sales can make a huge contribution to your profits and are an important part of caring for your clients between visits.

One way to sell more retail products is to become an expert. Learn everything you can about the products you stock and share your expert knowledge freely with your clients. There are a lot of products to learn about so make learning easy by focusing on a product each week or month and holding a quick team training session on all the products’ benefits and which type of clients they should recommend them to.

You’ll want to follow up a push in upselling retail with a sound stock management process. Your salon software should allow you to easily track the stock you hold, provide information on the most sold products to identify which ones need to be purchased more often, and even automate stock ordering with your supplier for you.

Engage your staff

It’s proven that happy, engaged staff make for happy, loyal clients, so not only is creating a positive working environment for your staff going to ensure they stick around, it’s also going to reflect positively on your business.

One way to engage your team is to share your strategy and come up with a business-wide target. It’s great having personal goals and targets but shared targets can also unite a team towards achieving something together. For example, create a shared target to increase your rebooking rate by having each team member ask their clients to rebook. This will encourage your team to support each other in the goal as they’re all working towards it together. If your team achieves the goal together, make sure you celebrate together too!

Finally, remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was your salon! It takes time to create a great workplace, and while you cannot expect success immediately, you will get there with a strong business plan, organised marketing strategy and a powerful team to back you.

Kamrin Hira is a marketing expert at Kitomba Salon and Spa Software. To learn more about how Kitomba can help your salon achieve success in 2024 visit www.kitomba.com

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