Customer loyalty advice from sarah cross
Published
07th Jan 2011
by rachael
Customer loyalty expert Sarah Cross offers her advice and tips to ensure your clients keep coming back for more throughout the new year - and how to make sure you make the most out of their visits. With over 12 years experience, Sarah has worked with a wide variety of brands over the years, helping them develop and deliver a marketing and customer loyalty strategy.
Get personal
Personalisation is the Holy Grail in building a relationship with your customer, which results in maximising revenue through visit frequency and spend. In January, focus on making sure all salon staff take responsibility for 'getting to know their clients' - ensure mobile and email details are up to date on your system.
Keep things interesting by setting clients and staff a little challenge. For staff, give a prize for updating clients' details during January to the staff member or team that manages to capture/update the most amount of client data per visit. Then take that one step further with a two-tiered approach: tell clients if they update their contact details with you during January, not only will they get the latest salon news, but they could also win, for example, £150-worth of shopping vouchers.
It might sound like the most boring part of the job to make sure data is up to date, but it's one of the most important if you want to maximise revenue and build a loyal client base. It's not just something you should do in January, either: make it part of every visit as data erodes 30% year on year, so keep it current.
Make software work harder
Make the most out of your system by segmenting customers based on visit frequency and spend and send out personalised messages based on their behaviour. Make your software system work for you, by knowing what kind of reports you need to create to learn more about individuals' frequency of visit and spend patterns; this will allow you to market effectively.
Engage with staff
Start as you mean to go on with weekly sit-downs and clear KPIs (key performance indictors) for every member of staff. Salon owners and managers can't expect staff to represent the brand in the right way and provide the desired customer experience if they have no targets or measurement criteria in place.
Appeal on an emotional level
Remember that clients make emotional, not rational, decisions about their loyalty and therefore you have to appeal to their emotional decision-making process. That means keeping the client experience slick, professional and representative of your brand at every touch point, from reception greeting through to the backwash and, of course, their time in the chair and the conversation with their stylist.
Your customers are your most precious assets; looking after them means keeping them for longer.
Personalisation is the Holy Grail in building a relationship with your customer, which results in maximising revenue through visit frequency and spend. In January, focus on making sure all salon staff take responsibility for 'getting to know their clients' - ensure mobile and email details are up to date on your system.
Keep things interesting by setting clients and staff a little challenge. For staff, give a prize for updating clients' details during January to the staff member or team that manages to capture/update the most amount of client data per visit. Then take that one step further with a two-tiered approach: tell clients if they update their contact details with you during January, not only will they get the latest salon news, but they could also win, for example, £150-worth of shopping vouchers.
It might sound like the most boring part of the job to make sure data is up to date, but it's one of the most important if you want to maximise revenue and build a loyal client base. It's not just something you should do in January, either: make it part of every visit as data erodes 30% year on year, so keep it current.
Make software work harder
Make the most out of your system by segmenting customers based on visit frequency and spend and send out personalised messages based on their behaviour. Make your software system work for you, by knowing what kind of reports you need to create to learn more about individuals' frequency of visit and spend patterns; this will allow you to market effectively.
Engage with staff
Start as you mean to go on with weekly sit-downs and clear KPIs (key performance indictors) for every member of staff. Salon owners and managers can't expect staff to represent the brand in the right way and provide the desired customer experience if they have no targets or measurement criteria in place.
Appeal on an emotional level
Remember that clients make emotional, not rational, decisions about their loyalty and therefore you have to appeal to their emotional decision-making process. That means keeping the client experience slick, professional and representative of your brand at every touch point, from reception greeting through to the backwash and, of course, their time in the chair and the conversation with their stylist.
Your customers are your most precious assets; looking after them means keeping them for longer.
