Creating client affinity is the secret to a succesful salon business

To have a successful salon, you have to have loyal clients who receive real value from your services and feel an affinity to your brand and ethos, says Elena Lavagni, director, of Neville Hair & Beauty. Today’s consumers want to feel a connection with the products and services that they use. Great companies like Apple, Disney, and Coca-Cola have mastered this art and our own salons can too. Rather than providing our client with a short service that enhances their beauty until their next visit, we need to develop a program of care for their beauty that begins with the service and then is maintained and enhanced by the use of products over time, followed up by return visits to your chair. Don’t sell them products, they don’t want or need to be sold anything. However, recommend a path for them to achieve their beauty and wellness goals and offer professional yet personalised guidance down that path. Think more holistic and pampering rather than service and cosmetic to find a point of difference from what everybody else is doing. This sort of personalised expert advice and consultation is exactly what the modern salon client is yearning for and providing them that invaluable service will develop a relationship of loyalty in a very deep and meaningful way. Long-term progress will be absolutely noticeable and be a strong reinforcement for their loyalty. We have all heard it thousands of times before; a salon is all about image. For today’s modern salon, nothing could be further from the truth. Today’s “Starbucks” and “Whole Foods” consumers are loyal to a salon for what it represents rather than what it looks like. Long gone are the days when laser lights, loud pop music, and rhinestone-studded hairbrushes are attracting new clients like ants to a picnic. In today’s salon industry, the concept of “building an image” has been replaced by “building client affinity”. Client affinity is defined as a client having an inherent similarity, feeling of kinship, or natural attraction to a business and in the modern salon industry, client affinity equals loyalty. The most effective way to build affinity with clients is to develop a strong ethos (a set of salon values, goals, culture, and mission), which your target audience is likely to share. Take some time and assess what your target clientele values and build your salon’s culture around those in order to ensure client affinity and long lasting loyalty. One of the most common misconceptions of the salon industry is that if salons raise their prices; they might scare new clients away. While this is normally true in most industries, savvy salon owners have realized that higher prices on their services menu allows them to provide more attractive discounts in their promotional programs. For example, if you increase the prices on your services menu by 20%, but offer a 20% discount for friends and family of current clients, you have increased the perceived value of your services, increased client loyalty from your referral network, and allowed for higher prices from potential new clients whose perception of higher value in your services has been driven by the positive remarks of your loyal clients. While I do not recommend increasing your service prices to some unreasonable amount, I have found that we have benefited from adopting this approach to some extent so long as the service price increases are reasonable.