19 January, 2022

Planning for the year

January is often a quieter period in Salons after the mad rush of Christmas, so there is no better time than now to plan for the year ahead. At Salon Tracker, we believe that the best way to approach marketing for the year is to plan around the different holidays and target these periods specifically.

The first few months of the year are always the cold ones, and there’s no better time to visit the salon. Often this can be a quieter time for tanning salons so why not offer some special courses during this time and build your client base ready for the summer. For beauty and hair salons, you may have seen an increase in gift voucher purchases over the Christmas period, so why not encourage your customers to use these now. Also, customers will be trying to fulfil their new year’s resolutions, so what better way to have a ‘new year, new me’ moment that by getting a new hairstyle or having a pamper.

Other major events to center your promotion around during this time are Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. Before you start advertising around these days, why not look at previous years and see which of your treatments are most commonly purchased around these periods, and create special packages featuring a few of these at a reduced price. Also, why not create some hampers featuring some of your retail products as well as a gift voucher. You may even want to do a little complimentary fizz with all services booked in the week leading up to, and week after Mother’s Day, to make the client’s service seem a little more luxury!

The next period is filled with bank holidays (1th April, 18^th April, 2^nd May, 2^nd June, 3^rd June) which means customers will be going out and need to be booked in for their pre-outing pampers. This is prime-time for salons, so now may be a good time to push your service packages, for example; if you are a hair and beauty salon you may want to do an ‘Bank Holiday Bundle’ consisting of a couple of mini beauty treatments and maybe a hair style? This year we’ve gained an extra bank holiday due to the Queen’s Jubilee. It’s a great marketing technique to promote the extra Bank Holiday date, as believe it or not there will be a lot of your clients who are still unaware of the Bank Holiday change, so make sure you get in there first to get your calendars booked up.

Going from Spring to Summer, Wedding season will be approaching, as well as proms and graduations. All of these events will drive customers into your salons, whether it be for a fresh tan (spray or real), or for a makeover. Targeting your audience is essential to ensure that your diary is filled to the brim, so why not try something new. Maybe offer a raffle entry for every treatment purchased with the winning prize being a free makeover for their special day. Alternatively, you could offer a trial day at a reduced cost so customers can see how they’ll look at on the big day and minimise the stress on the actual day. This would mean they’re visiting the salon more often and may be more inclined to do so again in the future.

Also, during the summer period, people will be jetting away on holidays after being limited so much over the past two years. What better way to get their tans started than by offering special courses to encourage them into the salon before they go away. Soon enough we will be back around to the autumn/winter period and then it will be time to start looking at Halloween makeovers and Christmas party prep.

Hope this has given you a few pointers to think about, and of course as always if you want to chat to a member of our sales and marketing team for a few extra tips, we are always on hand to help you with any marketing tools, or simply to offer further advice on using our software functions!

Salon Tracker x