The SalonBiz team is so excited to kick off the holidays with you! Marie Marshall, our Customer Success Team Lead and Salon Guru, and Denise Boudreaux, our Director of Sales have teamed up to talk about how drive your holiday revenue to the max.
With a combined 30 years’ experience, Marie and Denise share the trends, tips, and ideas that will have your salon set up for success this holiday season.
Shopping Trends
M-Commerce
M-commerce, short for mobile commerce, refers to any commercial transaction that takes place on mobile devices. More people are shopping on their mobile devices rather than their desktop or laptop. About 40% of shopping that is done online is via Mobile.
M-Commerce was up 15% last year over the year previous. And it’s predicted to grow 20% this year over last year.
At top of your holiday success to-do list should be making sure your website is optimized for mobile. You want to ensure the customer experience is smooth and seamless.
Online Gift Cards
Many people want to support local business. But they also don’t want to sit in traffic to do it. Help them support locally from home with online gift cards.
Here’s a fun fact: SalonBiz customers that sell online gift cards bring in on average an additional $30k in revenue a year. If you aren’t set up with this optimized feature, you need to be. Especially going into the holidays.
Buy Online, Pick Up in Store
Buy online, pick up in store services became popular during the pandemic for safety reasons. But with almost 90% of shoppers choosing a retailer based on convenience, it may be here to stay. And about 42% of the sales just before Christmas are for pickup.
That means it’s time to optimize your pickup processes for the holiday rush. Offer a gift card drive-through. Pocket Salon lets your guests skip the checkout line and purchase gift cards from their phone and skip. Customers can pull right up, stay in their car, and purchase a gift card.
You can also offer retail pick up. Customers can shop online with Pocket Salon and then call or text when they arrive to pick up their purchases. If you prefer not to use Pocket Salon, guest could use other features like text, email, or call in to place their pickup order.
Work From Home Purchases
Even as the pandemic subsides and things return to normal, many people continue to work from home. And they are buying things and services that improve their work from home life.
Whether it’s something to spruce up a desk, a new set of joggers, or a self-care service, people are investing in their work from home life. So, how does a salon lean into this trend?
Think about promoting wellness and self-care. The work from home environment can be isolating, which can impact mental health. Many customers are looking for solutions to protect their mental and physical health.
Memberships
You can do this by creating wellness maintenance memberships. You can include monthly facials, massages, waxing, you can even include product discounts and set recurring billing.
Product + Service Packages
Target that “experience” shopper with a package deal. Create packages that pair a service with a product. For example, you can package a facial with a skin care regimen.
Service Series
Offering a service series for spas and salons is a great idea. A service series works like a virtual punch card. You can build a series that has a group of services that can used over time, without restriction. For example, you can offer a series of three massages and facials.
If you offer Salon Only services, you can build a series of blow-outs, extensions, or treatments. Think about what undiscovered treatments and services you can promote with a series.
Holiday Shopping Starts Sooner
Almost 22% of shoppers start their holiday shopping in October. Getting a head start on holiday shopping helps consumers combat some of the financial strain many might be experiencing. They can spread their holiday spending out over months.
Even with talk of an economic downturn, Deloitte’s annual holiday retail forecast, Holiday retail sales are likely to increase between 4% and 6% in 2022. So, it’s important that you’re ready for all those early shoppers!
Tips to Rock Your Retail Sales
Check your flow
Check the flow of traffic through your salon. Your retail area is likely designed for service guests. But what about people walking in to buy a gift?
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Is your best merchandise at the front of the store? Shoppers’ interests start to diminish the further they go in the store unless they are delighted, surprised, and stimulated.
- Are you spelling it out for them? Signage like “great gifts” and “stocking stuffers” will really help the consumer move around your retail area more confidently
- Do gifts scream affordable? Keep price point deals front and center with signage like “$50 and under” or “$25 and under”.
- Is checkout causing friction to the retail flow? Shoppers tend to shop counterclockwise. People standing in line waiting to checkout in your retail area can disrupt the flow. A greeter with an iPad can help with congestion by checking people and direct traffic.
Impulse buys
An easy way to increase retail is capitalize on impulse by getting people to buy more than what they came in for. Sprinkle smaller priced items around your retail area and in the displays.
Put related products next to one another, like blow dryers and round brushes or styling spray.
Create something new for guest to experience. Use disruptors like a display table to force guests to walk around to get to the service area. It will force them to pause and look at the display. Change up the candles and lotions in the bathroom with something new and different.
Bundles and Custom Gift Sets
Retail bundles or custom gift sets are a great for driving retail purchases because it gives multiple gifts in one. If you’re looking to package products together Marie has some great tips to go about figuring out what to bundle together.
The Average Product Movement Report can you tell you a lot about your customer’s behaviors. Find out what was most popular last year and what didn’t move during the holiday. Pair a hot product with a not-hot product to move those items.
In the Stylist app, you can add these premade gift sets as a “product” so your staff can easily recommend gift sets through recommendations.
These recommendations live right on the ticket. No need for the front desk staff to hunt down a stylist before they can assist guests with their gift set recommendation purchases. And it frees the front desk from all the clutter.
Gift with purchase
Another way to drive retail is to give them something for free for shopping with you! Gift-with-purchase provides more value to your customer. You can show your customers you care while also moving product.
Use your discontinued items as your free gifts. Then make the give away experience fun. Customers can spin a wheel or reach in a stocking to grab a surprise gift. Customers can pick an ornament from the tree with the ornament determining which gift they’ll get.
Maximize Gift Card Sales
Bounce Back
Set up a gift card bounce-back promotion like “Purchase $500 gift card and receive a $100 bounce back card”. Customers appreciate these types of promotions because it’s like getting a gift with their purchase. They get little something for themselves to use later in the salon.
Your bounce back promotion would run throughout the holiday season. Then you would introduce additional promotions like “10% off of gift cards” on those key shopping dates to help accelerate your gift card sales.
You can see the example given is a high dollar. And that’s because when you go big, you get big results. Here’s one of our favorite bounce back success stories from one of our SalonBiz users:
Tonya Jones from Birmingham, AL, ran a gift card salon and spa bounce back promotion for Mother’s Day. Her bounce back of “Buy $300 and get $100” earned her over $90K in just Mother’s Day gift cards.
Packaging
Have your gift card packaging preassembled so you can get those gift cards packaged supersonic fast! Get your team together and put together gift card packages so they’re ready to go for the busy shopping season.
Get creative and deck your tree with gift cards, too. It will promote gift cards to your guests and show off the pretty packaging they come wrapped in.
Gift Card Drive Thru
Your customers are running low on fuel so amp up the energy with that gift card drive-through!! Customers can pull right up, stay in their car, and purchase a gift card.
Make it fun and hand out warm tea or hot chocolate! A new service provider can recruit new clients by providing a hand massage to buyers while waiting for their gift card
It’s a great time to bring out some of your retail bundles. Shoppers may be out looking for last-minute gifts or may have forgotten to include someone on their list. Do the thinking for them and make it easy for them to grab a gift while picking up their gift cards.
Gift Guide
A great way to help drive holiday sales is the good old gift guide. It’s like your north star for all holiday promotions.
This is your go-to holiday page. Include all your specials, packages, memberships, and special dates this gift guide to your website. Promote it everywhere you can: you email templates, QR codes, social media, and texts!
Big Holiday Promotion Ideas
Mark your calendars with these popular shopping dates and get a game plan together. We’ve added some promotional ideas just in case you need a little inspiration.
Black Friday
Most people will be taking advantage of in store deals with major retailers on Black Friday. So this is the perfect time to run an online gift card promotion.
Small Business Saturday
People intentionally go out to support their local businesses on Small Business Saturday.
So, make sure you’re ready to make the most of the foot traffic. Showcase your retail bundles and custom gift sets. Have your impulse buys strategically placed around your retail areas
Cyber Monday
No brainer that this is the time to promote online gift cards. This is a great time to introduce a one-day-only save 10% on gift cards promotion.
And Cyber Monday isn’t only for that one day. Some retailers spread this out over the entire black Friday weekend or for that entire week.
Super Saturday (Saturday before Christmas)
It’s the last Saturday before the holiday starts. It’s also when a lot of people are just starting their shopping. Make it easy for them by doing the thinking for them. Rearrange the shopping area to highlight inventory you want to highlight and promote.
Put together ready-to-go gift ideas for everyone on their list. Create packages for personas:
• Beauty Buff
• On the Go Guy or Gal
• WFH Survival Kit
• Boss Babe
• The Teacher or Babysitter
Target those last-minute shoppers with the convenience of curbside and instore pick up.
Remember 42% of sales right before Christmas are for pick up. Promote gift card drive-thru and other pick-up services two weeks prior.
Promote Your Holiday Happenings
By now your wheels are turning with some ideas on how to make your holidays a success.
Once you have a game plan mapped out, you can use the Marketing Suite to:
- Create your marketing content now—Create your content now before you get even busier. Don’t wait until the week before your gift card promotion to make the content.
- Schedule out one-time-sends– Schedule out your one-time sends before the big holiday shopping days.
- Set-and-Forget—Set your sends to go out automatically you can focus on other things to drive the holiday success.
- Measure the success— You don’t want to forget it completely. You need to go back and measure success of your campaign using the analytic function.
Team Tips
We’ve spent our time talking about your customers. But let’s take a moment to talk about your staff. How are you going to keep them engaged through the hectic holiday season? Here are some ways to support and engage your staff:
Set Goals
Look at last year’s numbers for each service provider and set a goal to increase that by a particular percentage. Break that goal down so that they have a goal to target each day.
Protect Revenue
Protect forecasted revenue by comparing your future revenue forecast to your goal. This will show you where you need to adjust. Some ways to meet that goal are:
- Fill the empty spaces
- Run an add-on contest
- Check your waitlist
- Ensure guests are booked for the proper times
- Cancellation Policy- best time to roll out cancellation policy
- Card on file
Help Keep Staff Stress Free Staff
Barter with a local restaurant to provide lunch so they don’t have to spend their breaks in holiday traffic. Have local jewelry or boutique stores come in for a pop-up shop for your customer and your staff can enjoy.
Invite more fun into the salon. Play group games and have dress up days. Host a holiday potluck where everyone brings their favorite holiday treat.
Nothing relieves stress quite like cash. So why not create cash incentives for your team? Encourage gift card sales by offering a cash incentive. Cash incentives helped Tonya Jones to earn over $90k in Mother’s Day gift card sales.
Post-Holiday Game Plan
The holiday craziness is over. The New Year Celebration confetti has been swept up. Now let’s get some butts in those seats!
Pull the Open Gift Card Report and create email campaigns to remind those gift card recipients gold they’ve received and to come on in to use it.
Get Started with Online Gift Cards
Online gift cards are one of the best ways to attract new business to your salon. If you haven’t already, you should add online gift cards to your website and start selling.
If you’re interested in getting set up with online gift cards or want to learn more about optimizing the process, SalonBiz will make sure you set up for success this holiday season.
