5 ways to stay productive during the coronavirus
Karen Davis, a specialist in digital PR for the beauty industry, shares her tips to stay productive during the coronavirus pandemic.
Now is the perfect time to revisit your online presence and ramp it up so that when you’re back in the salon this asset is working full time for you, with the work having been done now.
1. Get to know your client base
Think you know who your customers are? Let’s just make sure. Now is the time to go through all your customer records and make a spreadsheet. Extract the following data:
- Age
- how many times they come in a year
- which treatment/s they have
- how much they spend in a year; do they buy products?
Now put it into age groups, then into treatment types so you can see any potential trends. Spend some time looking at it yourself and see if there are any stand out results. What is this data telling you and how you can improve?
What’s the average spend per client, per visit? How many buy products? How many have only been once – any thoughts on why? What’s your most popular treatments? Can you improve these? Really think about what the data is showing.
2. Build a client profile
From the data, are you able to profile different clients? Could you say that your 18-20-year-old clients mainly come for waxing? Do your 40-year-old clients come mainly for facials? Make a note of who buys products.
Are you able to split them into different databases so that when you’re back in business, you can email them with relevant offers? This means they are more likely to respond to messaging you put out and you won’t clutter their inbox with stuff that’s of no interest to them.
3. Update your website
Next, clean up your website. Go through each page and look at what you’ve said.
Did you know that if you use certain words you’re more likely to come up in Google searches when potential clients are looking for salons ot spas?
Use websites like audiense to profile your audience, then you can find out which words they search for. Try wordstream as well to look at words people search for – you can get free trials on most sites.
4. Showcase your expertise
Why pay someone else to promote your salon or spa? The good news is that you already are an influencer. Your clients choose to come to you regularly for their treatments, why? Because they trust your expertise. An influencer is just that, someone who’s opinion is trusted and that’s you, so let’s start to put you as an influencer to work.
lookfantastic has launched a social initiative to help support self-employed beauty professionals. The beauty retailer is expanding its influencer programme to independent salon owners, hairdressers and nail technicians.
The influencer program offers beauty professionals the opportunity to create relevant content on their social channels around topics relevant to lookfantastic customers. You then receive both a link and a code to include in each post. Every sale made on lookfantastic that comes directly from either the link or the code will give a commission to you. Contact them to get involved.
5. Focus on online retail
If you haven't already, try to get an online shop going and direct your customers to it. I recommend Shopify as it's pretty easy and you can get a one-month free trial to play around with it.
We know your clients see you as an influencer and come to you for expertise, so why would they not buy what you recommend for them at your shop?
Karen Davis is a specialist in digital PR for the beauty industry with over 25 years of experience. She is also a best-selling author, podcaster and award-winning beauty blogger.