How To Manage a Successful Salon Email Marketing Campaign

Posted: July 12, 2023 - By Health Dev

Email marketing isn’t dead, after all. According to a survey, almost 99% of people check their emails daily! So if your marketing strategy is solely focused on social media marketing, you’re surely missing out on a significant group of people. 

Email marketing is one of the oldest yet most effective methods of establishing strong client relationships. If you’re a salon owner, you probably have a social media presence to showcase your amazing work. But did you know emails have 10x more visibility than social media posts? 

Global business owners send emails to know their customers, offer them what they like, and retain them for the long term. If you want to manage your client base, salon email marketing can help you interact with people directly. This way, you can offer personalized experiences to your target audience. 

Want to know how to develop an effective salon email marketing campaign? Read on to learn some tips and tricks to get started. 

What Is a Salon Email Marketing Campaign?

A salon email marketing campaign includes the strategies to create an email list, curate content for emails, schedule and send them to potential and existing customers. Email marketing aims to attract new clients, increase website traffic, get more sales, and retain clients for the long term. 

With an effective salon email marketing campaign, you can share information with your clients about your brands and recent offers. Not only that, but you can also remind them about their appointments and collect their feedback about their experiences at your salon. 

What’s the best part about a salon email marketing campaign? It’s basically free and has a higher return on investment (ROI) than any other form of marketing. A survey estimated email ROI to be around $36 for every dollar spent. That’s impressive!

Since a salon business is customer-centric, email marketing ensures customers stay interested in your services, even when they’re not in your salon. Emails also allow you to add a personal touch, increasing their chances of being opened by the recipient. 

And because it makes sense to design a salon email marketing campaign to expand or retain your clientele, your email list must include both loyal and potential customers.

The Benefits of a Salon Email Campaign

A salon email marketing campaign is about staying connected to existing and potential customers. But what else? Below are three more benefits of adopting email marketing for your salon.

Builds Unique Brand Voice

With so many salons today, making your brand recognizable in the market can take a lot of work. While social media marketing can help establish your brand voice, it can go unnoticed by most of your audience. 

On the other hand, emails allow you to curate unique and personalized content that resonates with your audience’s needs and wants. An example of this personalized user experience is done for users by Spotify. The music platform sends perfectly-designed and relevant emails to its customers, making it identifiable among thousands of competitors. 

By staying in your customers’ email inboxes, you can share valuable content with them and develop your unique brand voice. Doing so will give you an upper hand over your competitors. 

Attracts New Clients Through a Familiar Format

Email marketing is believed to be an excellent trigger for impulse buying. When a business includes a tempting call to action (CTA) button and a checkout link within the email, it’s just a matter of two clicks to buy the product. So it’s no wonder salon email marketing is an easy way to attract new clients! 

However, to convince your email recipients to take action, you must stay consistent with the format of your email body. When people keep seeing a familiar email, they will likely visit, navigate, and check out different content on your website. This can lead to more sales and, eventually, more clients. 

For example, you can email potential clients about a hair color discount. Customers and potential leads who missed this opportunity earlier can now easily avail themselves of this discount. They won’t have to keep checking your social media account or website to learn about special offers; a single click on the email will do the job!

Allows More Control Over Graphic Design and Links

Emails allow you to add individualized, attention-grabbing graphics to the content that instantly grabs the recipient’s attention. You also have enhanced control over the email’s design, links, and content, letting you strategize your salon email marketing campaigns effectively.

With salon email marketing, you can create unique emails for different audience segments to target the right customers at the right time with the right content. This includes varying images, graphics, links, and subject lines for different types of customers. 

For instance, you can send different emails to your returning customers than to one-timers. Thus, salon email marketing campaigns empower you to manage and control your marketing efforts.

How To Create an Email Marketing Strategy for Your Salon

Creating a salon email marketing strategy involves a few crucial steps you must follow when planning, scheduling, and executing your emails. Below are some salon email marketing ideas to help you develop an effective campaign.

Start With Developing a Contact List

First, you must list the customers you want to receive your emails. Your client list needs to be comprehensive, meaning you should prioritize email collection from your customers. 

A salon business can collect email addresses in multiple ways. The most straightforward way is to ask for them at the time of appointment booking. However, not all appointments are booked online; some are scheduled via phone or in person. Therefore, you must require your staff to ask for every client’s email address at the time of appointment booking.

You can also collect the email addresses of your potential clients, but that is trickier. These people don’t know about your salon, so why would they provide you with their email?

Your potential clients need a reason to trust and give you their email addresses. You can offer them a special deal in exchange for their contact info — for example, a “how to take care of your dyed hair” guide.

Establishing a contact list is the first step in developing a results-driven salon email marketing campaign. 

Create an Email Schedule and Template

After preparing the contact list, you can create an email template and schedule. If you have an appointment booking software, you can easily set up automated emails for appointment reminders. These emails should include the client’s personal information, directions to your salon, and details about parking. 

You should also schedule a post-appointment email for two days after a client visits your salon. This email will include a feedback and review link about the service the client benefitted from at your salon. The best practice for salon email marketing frequency can be weekly, biweekly, or monthly, depending on your goals. 

Determine the Different Types of Emails To Send Out

Before clicking the “Send” button, you must ensure you have chosen the right type of email. Many kinds of emails can help your salon grow and retain its clientele for years to come. The most significant ones include the following:

• Update emails. These emails are an engaging, informative, and fun version of salon newsletters. Update emails shouldn’t be promotional or sales-y. Instead, they have a personal touch that helps salons establish long-term customer relationships. Update emails are meant to be sent weekly or monthly.
• Special event emails. These are emails sent to clients on their birthdays or your salon’s anniversaries. Birthday emails offer special discounts to recipients if they sign up with their email addresses.
• Follow-up emails. These are feedback or review emails sent to clients after they visit your salon. With follow-up emails, you can ask your customers whether they liked your service and if they have any suggestions they want to share. You can also include a link to your Facebook or Google page for reviews.
• Special offer for first-time clients. To convince potential clients to visit your website, you can send them a special offer email. You can also add a website pop-up asking first-time visitors to provide their emails to get the discount. 
• Sales emails. These emails build up excitement about upcoming promotions you rarely offer. Remember, don’t overdo these emails, or you might appear as boring to your email recipients. This could even make them unsubscribe. 
• Retargeting emails. These emails are ideal for those customers who haven’t checked in for a long time. You can offer them a special discount, update them about anything new, or invite them to try a new service.

Add Plenty of Unique Branding to Emails

You can tailor your salon email marketing campaign with unique branding elements, such as color schemes, fonts, graphics, topography, etc., to make your emails more engaging. It will set a tone for how you will communicate with your customers later. 

Branding gives your emails an exciting and distinctive personality your target audiences can relate to. You can add the following things in your emails to set up your unique branding design:

• Typography is the type of logo you choose for your salon. Generally, Serif, Italic Text, Screen, and Sans Serif fonts suit a salon’s theme. However, you can also opt for other options if these don’t portray your brand’s message properly.
• A color theme makes a significant impact on people’s psychology. For example, red and orange are friendly and fun, while black and white illustrate a classic brand message. Purple, pink, and orange work wonders for female-specific salons, as they create a feminine and carefree aura. 
• A logo and its shape need to portray your brand’s vision. For instance, a logo with sharp edges will resonate differently with your audience than one with smooth borders. A logo with straight horizontal and vertical lines is ideal for a male-specific salon. 

Integrate Appointment Booking, Website, and Social Links

Whether you’re sending a sales or an update email, it must have the right product links and an engaging CTA button. For example, if you want to promote your “hair color treatment guide,” you must include the direct link to the guide in the email. 

Similarly, you should integrate the direct link to the scheduling page to make it easier for people to book appointments. Finally, incorporate links to your social pages to collect reviews on your social media accounts.

And remember to make the process as smooth as possible for the email recipients. Doing so will allow them to take action in just one to two clicks, leading to a high conversion rate. 

Make Sure Your Emails Are Visually Appealing With Beautiful Email Graphics

Emails need to be catchy enough to make the recipient click. While adding different graphics and images sounds tempting, you shouldn’t go overboard. That’s because simple, well-structured emails often have better engagement than heavily-branded ones. 

Emails with too many images are usually perceived as spam and too sales-y. So, ensure your emails are visually appealing with the right quantity and types of graphics.

Incorporate Seasonal or Salon Promotions as a Selling Point

Depending on your target audience’s past interest in your website, you can also send promotional emails. This will add a personal touch to your sales emails and excite customers about upcoming seasonal sales. 

Focusing on seasonal events can help your salon promote its retail products, services, and gift cards. It will keep your salon relevant all year. For example, you can offer a dry hair treatment package when winter is around the corner. Promotional emails can be a selling point for your business, provided they don’t sound too sales-y. 

Analyze Email Marketing Metrics on a Regular Basis

Your salon email marketing campaign shouldn’t end once you hit send. Instead, it requires consistent work to become successful even after you send the emails. 

You must pay close attention to the important email marketing metrics to evaluate how each performs for your goals. Alternatively, you can use an automated campaign monitor to track metrics.

Here are essential metrics to analyze for your salon email marketing campaign:

• Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who clicked on one or more CTAs included in an email. 
• Conversion rate is the percentage of people who clicked on the link and fulfilled the desired action (purchase, form submission, etc.) integrated into an email.
• Bounce rate is the percentage of emails that didn’t deliver to the recipient.
• List growth rate is the growth rate of your email list.
• Email sharing/forwarding rate is the percentage of people who clicked on the “Share” or “Forward to a Friend” button to post an email to a social account.
• Overall ROI is the total revenue your email campaigns generate on your total spending. 

Create Compelling Emails for Your Salon With Demandforce

Including salon email marketing in your campaigns is a great way to move your business forward. However, creating and sending emails to hundreds of customers takes time and effort. That’s when automated booking software like Demandforce comes into play.