Clients evaluate salon and spa experiences partly on your hair, nail, face, and/or body services. Driving salon sales is based on memorable impressions your employees make on customers during interactions and influences the potential for return visits. Providing clients an all-star salon experience keeps them happy and your salon successful.
How to Create a 5 Star Salon Experience
Send Appointment Reminders
Use a system to automate appointment reminders via text and email, turning no-shows into grateful regulars who enter when you expect them. Every client’s time is as precious as yours. Should unforeseen delays arise, contact patrons with revised arrival times. If that’s not possible, discount their visits 15 percent, or compensate their inconveniences with free hair or skin care products.
Smile While Working
When the brain receives positive messages from grins, it releases mood-elevating enzymes and serotonin. Greet customers with eye contact, handshakes, and warm genuine smiles. Friendly facial expressions are so contagious, it makes them feel happier and more comfortable with their salon experience. Treat visitors like invited guests. Conduct tours so they’ll sense they belong in your salon. After clients and staffers enjoy their time together, wishing everyone a great day or weekend sends them off with cheerful outlooks.
Hand out Beverage Menus
Pampering guests include serving refreshments. But instead of asking them if they’d like sparkling water, tempt them to browse beverage menus. Give them time to contemplate various offerings, and they’ll be more inclined to place orders and enjoy their salon experience.
Personalize New Client Consultations
Aligning guests’ complexion and hair upkeep with their lifestyles are crucial for client satisfaction. Ask about their routines. Convey your reasoning with recommendations like: “Since your morning schedule doesn’t allow much skin care time, you’ll appreciate this quick regimen.” “Because you’re not a blow-dryer fan, I suggest this easy look.”
Prepare for Recurring Visits
Before repeat clients arrive, you can review their past histories first. Look over previous appointment notes and refresh your memory on each client’s color and length preferences. Pull up the photos gallery to examine former hairdos or shades together when clients arrive. Reflect on what they thought about your past creations. When they want to try new cuts or different hair or nail tones, use look books, sample strands, or polish testers to facilitate selection.
Offer Mini Service Tryouts
Giving printed service menus to customers encourages them to choose higher-priced options. Let hesitant patrons try out a few face-framing highlights or gold nail art on one finger. Those mini test drives boost ticket sales.
Mention Guests’ Names
Leaders like politicians, business executives, and teachers know addressing people by their names makes them feel special. So they remember others’ names and use them often. Something so simple is a great way to forge strong relationships. It reflects your comfortable, caring culture and inspires friendly exchanges.
Choose Words Carefully
Your crew’s comments paint pictures in guests’ minds. Some enhance or detract from client experiences. Replace negative “I can’t,” “That’s not our policy,” and “I don’t” messages conveying what’s impossible with affirmative alternatives. Speaking positively is the key to making visitors happy. They’ll appreciate helpful professionalism.
Collect Personal Information
To retain clients and increase salon sales, gather information including email and home addresses, phone numbers, and birthdays. When customers skip typical intervals, send “We miss you!” messages with sea salt scrub discounts to lure them back. Reward loyal regulars with gift cards for free services and products. Ongoing marketing communications helps solidify relationships and make your shop a standout.
Remember Clients’ Details
Recalling customers’ shared facts will impress them. To make them feel special, mention their new jobs, promotions, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and recent vacations. Connecting with guests on a personal level inspires repeat visits.
Compliment Your Clients
Everyone loves receiving compliments. Praise makes them feel good while creating positive experiences. So admire their punctuality, clothes, personalities, or talents sincerely. After makeovers, rave about their new looks.
Stay Knowledgeable
Market leaders in various professions earn more money by prioritizing knowledge. Informed personnel provide better quality work, higher salon sales, and gain extra respect. Offer frequent training classes so all of your staffers can be experts on all current services, colors, styles, treatments, and techniques.
Add Value
Salon days are pampering breaks for clients. So make them memorable treats by offering little extras. During consultations, knead clients’ shoulders briefly. Indulge visitors with scalp massages and treatments before shampoos. Hair salon guests’ top complaint is that they can’t recreate their stylists’ fabulous looks at home. So they’ll appreciate learning assorted blowout, curling iron, and finishing spray tricks. Extend other delights like makeup touch-ups that enhance customer experiences by adding value beyond standard services.
Guarantee Everything
Rather than complaining, most unhappy clients just don’t return. You can’t afford to forfeit salon sales. So guarantee all services and merchandise. Be sure that your clients feel comfortable enough voicing their opinions. Otherwise, you could lose clients and never understand why. Approach any challenges calmly without being defensive. Listen to customers’ perspectives. Ask appropriate questions to address their issues, and offer empathetic solutions.
Offer a Loyalty Program
There’s a secret retailer have known for a long time: 20 percent of their customers generate 80 percent of their sales. Investing in that core group of customers is the key to keeping your salon business booming.
It’s much easier and less expensive to retain a current customer than to earn a new one, and returning customers tend to spend more than new customers. Your job is to create a beauty salon loyalty program that gives customers what they want while keeping your costs reasonable.
Give 100 Percent Always
Even when employees’ spirits are low, they should give their all to customers and teammates. Some focus just on what they get at work when considering what they contribute is better and uplifting.
Look for good, not bad. Concentrate on right over wrong. Emphasize contentment and spread joy.
When optimistic, positives are obvious. Encourage everyone to form successful habits, develop faith in personal abilities, promise to pursue excellence, and pledge to keep on giving so all clients have a 5 star salon experience.
Once you have created a 5-star salon experience for your clients, you should work on persuading those clients to leave you 5-star reviews. This will ultimately result in a scalable loyal customer base over time that continue to visit your business.