6 ways beauty salons can generate revenue during Covid-19 lockdown

Your beauty salon or spa may be temporarily closed due to coronavirus but you still have the opportunity to support your clients, maintain your brand and earn revenue during this difficult time. 

Retailing products and services online is one way you can do this, providing that essential element of what you do best – helping clients look good and feel good, wherever they may be.

Six ways to up your beauty salon’s retail sales during Covid-19 lockdown:

1. Reach out to your VIPs

Your first priority should be focusing on your existing clients before working on attracting a new audience because your current database are the ones you already have a relationship with.

Keep in touch with them in the most direct way possible – email, SMS or WhatsApp – and tell them about your virtual services during this period of closure, as well as letting them know you’re still there for them.  

Seeing as selling retail in salons always starts with a consultation, it makes sense that this should continue to be your approach during virtual services. For those clients who were due to come in for an appointment, offer them a one-to-one virtual session instead via a video app such as Zoom. 

Use this as an opportunity to help restock the skincare products they’ve run out of and to give them advice on how they can treat a particular skincare problem, such as dry hands, while at home.

2. Help them with their homecare

Send out a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter to your database filled with beauty and wellbeing tips to help them maintain their salon results at home.

The email should include a link to a specific “at-home products” section which they can click to treat themselves to items to use until they can see you. Include a different hero product offer each time to help boost retail sales.

3. Collaborate with suppliers

Talk to your product suppliers and find out what they’re doing to support accounts during this difficult time. Some brands have created short step-by-step tutorial videos using their products which you could post on your website and social channels to boost online sales, linking to an offer to purchase.

4. Host weekly beauty classes

With everyone looking for new activities to keep them busy while stuck at home, consider putting together a weekly group beauty class for clients – hosting it at the same time every week.   

Invite customers to purchase a set of products in advance, which you would post to their home, and then ask them to join the class where you will talk through how to use them for the best results.

Each class could have a different theme focusing on a specific beauty concern.

5. Create stress-relieving kits clients can gift

Create self-care home packs which clients can gift to loved ones, friends and colleagues who are finding lockdown tough.

Are there any new products you could add in which would be more appreciated at this time? For example, crystals or soothing herbal teas to help with stress and anxiety or to aid good quality sleep. 

6. Get clients excited to see you when you re-open

Sell vouchers for future treatments with you once lockdown is over, with an incentive such as an uplift in the voucher’s value. Be sensitive in the way you do this and make sure you extend the use by date to allow for the closure period.

Most of all, remember that people are feeling very alone at this time so will be generally grateful for human interaction, particularly if you personalise your approach to them. As a salon owner or beauty therapist, you are in an ideal place to help them. 

Clare Anderson is founder of Shared Beauty Secrets and new wellbeing brand Sensory Retreats. She was announced as one of Professional Beauty’s Top 100 Industry Influencers for 2020.

Check out PB's coronavirus (Covid-19): support guide for beauty salons, spas and self-employed therapists.