Owning a hair salon is by no means easy. Your competition is often just a few steps away from your front door, clients are very territorial about their choice of stylists and it takes a LOT of work to get a new client. And....you are not a marketing expert (nor do you likely want to be :) ).
For The Hair Mansion, they are focused on delivering a unique experience that is flawless. Combined with services devoted to beautiful clients, they are thinking differently about how they stand out in a very over-populated market.
A Bit of Background
The Hair Mansion had an email subscriber list and were sending emails on an adhoc basis using MailChimp. Engagement rates were almost non-existent and the look and feel of the emails were not on brand. They were emailing because they could but there wasn't any strategy behind it.
Client Assessment
During our initial call, we wanted to focus on who The Hair Mansion was as a brand. We asked questions like,
1. How do you see yourselves today vs. where you want to be?
2. Who is the target clientele?
3. Where do you feel there is an opportunity to grow?
4. Why do you want to run email campaigns and have a newsletter?
5. What do you hope having a newsletter will do for your business?
The answers allowed us to step back and think through the approach we were going to take and prioritize everything we wanted to do based on our goals.
Strategy and Planning
We started by putting a freeze on email campaigns for the short term. It was hurting the image of the brand more than helping and we felt that pausing outbound emails was not going to have any repercussions when it came to starting back up again. We needed to first define the email strategy that we could stick to and assign goals to it.
We learned that The Hair Mansion wanted to increase referrals from existing clients and promote new offerings such as their Online Booking tool and Online Store. What they didn't know is whether a newsletter was the way to do it or if it helped support other channels.
We conducted market research to unveil what competitors were doing, where their target clientele went to get information and preferred communication methods. Using this data combined with the goals of our client, we decided that a monthly newsletter was the best approach to move forward.
The Work
Using MailChimp, we built a new template for The Hair Mansion that was easy for them to use on their own (if they wanted to). But more importantly, we worked closely with them to develop the content strategy for the newsletter. How could The Hair Mansion stand out in the inbox? What value was there in the newsletter that a client would get excited about?
We defined a few key areas we would update monthly included a Product of the Month, Special of the Month and a Before/After Makeover story. This made it easier for them to keep to the monthly cadence and also set expectations for their clients who were receiving the content.
Results
The Hair Mansion is now delivering a monthly newsletter and seeing an average open rate of 49.75% and average click rate of 7.72%. Referrals have increased 100% and they are seeing about 20% of clients booking online using their new tool.
In addition, their clients have given them positive feedback and expressed how much they enjoy the content.
Now THAT is what I call beautiful!
TIP: Just because you have an email subscriber list, it doesn't mean that email is the best way to communicate with your audience. Before you spend time and energy on any type of campaign, research your market and define a purpose for doing the work.