Speaker in the Spotlight: Sarah Cross
Name: Sarah Cross
Career: Managing Director of Loyalty Marketing Consultancy Company, uber and Co-Founder of urban Tokyo brand CODE Beautiful.
Session: How to create customers for life: How to win the hearts, minds and wallets of your clients.
Date: Sunday 13 October at 2.45pm.
Tell Professional Beauty a bit about yourself and your business?
I set up uber in 2008, a specialist loyalty and communications consultancy and now work with likeminded control freaks and workaholics. We all have a few things in common, but mainly we deliver customer relationship management and loyalty innovation to our clients, giving them a reason to keep coming back and to recommend their social circle to do the same. uber works with manufacturers, retailers and cool brands to develop their loyalty and customer relationship management strategy and CRM programmes, mainly in retail, fashion, hair and beauty and the luxury market.
Can you name one or two successful marketing strategies that businesses in the beauty industry can adopt in today’s saturated market place?
Focus on customer loyalty and data collection, but in a cool and compelling way. This allows salons to get personal with customers and treat them as individuals, which is the best way to increase profitability.
How easily do marketing strategy successes in other industries translate into ours?
Our industry can learn from lifestyle, luxury and fashion industries and the women who are engaged in all things beautiful. It’s all intrinsically linked; today’s consumer is super savvy and, with the power of social media and the knowledge open to us on the Internet, we have to see beyond our industry and have dialogue with clients that relate to them and their lifestyle.
What would you say is the most important maxim for retaining customer loyalty?
Your customers are your most precious assets. Looking after them means keeping them for longer. Collect their data, use the insight gained to deliver a great service, and go above and beyond to communicate with them on a personal level.
What’s the biggest, or most common, shortcoming you find when you start to work with new clients?
They think it’s easy to just have a loyalty programme and believe it will fix all their problems. On top of this they make the mistake of doing the same thing as everyone else, which is usually some kind of points based programme, or a free gift after so many visits. It’s just giving away margin unnecessarily and following the crowd. You’ve got to dare to be different.
What will delegates gain from attending your session?
They’ll gain practical tips and knowledge about which techniques to use in their businesses that will ensure them results. They will be able to retain customers, get them to visit more, spend more and recommend their friends to do the same. I’m also going to give one lucky person in the audience a free license for my Loyalty Toolkit! They will get tops tips, templates and video tutorials on how to create an amazing loyalty strategy in their salon. It retails at £995 + VAT.
Fantastic! And finally, can you give Professional Beauty an exclusive tip for delegates to implement in their salons?
In some research about how brands engage with businesses today, 93% of them indicated that they would be likely to spend more with a particular business if it had a great loyalty programme, and 85% said they would visit one business over another if it had a valuable programme to join. My talk will teach people how to create a programme that has great value and will stand out from the crowd.
Join Sarah Cross alongside some of the top beauty and spa industry experts this October at Professional Beauty North’s Seminar Programme.
See the full programme and book book your delegate place here.
