The 5 fatal mistakes made by small businesses

1.     Not communicating with your existing customers

 

Your best immediate sources of additional profits and increased business are your existing customers. These are the people who you’ve already invested time, energy and money with you to create a relationship. They know you, they trust you, hopefully they’ve enjoyed doing business with you. Because of this it is normally five to ten times easier to get an existing customer to buy from you again, than it is to get someone to buy from you for the first time. A salon software system can help you with this by simplifying the process of capturing, storing and organising client data. This information can lay the foundations for your promotion campaigning.

Key questions you should ask yourself are: how often do you communicate with your existing customers? What do you have to offer your existing customers? What are you not offering existing customers that you could be offering them? When did you last send a letter to your customers? When did you last email them? Did you measure the response? When did you last call them? What would happen if you doubled your contact with them this year? When you do communicate with them, what more could you be doing to clearly explain the specific benefits that they will experience?

 

Relying on just one or two main forms of marketing

 

Most small businesses rely on one or two familiar, tried and tested forms of marketing. However, if you want to see your business grow you should be using a number of different approaches. In order to maximise the effectiveness of these approaches you should test a number of different methods on a small scale, this will allow to you assess what works and what doesn’t. For example, you could implement a recommend a friend campaign and a friends and family promotional late-night opening and compare which is most effective at attracting new customers by asking them to quote a promotional code upon booking. Again, it is a good idea to have a software system in place to track each campaigning and this will also enable you to send out information via SMS, which is direct, fast and relatively cheap.

Running ineffective advertising

 

It is essential that you measure the response to all of your advertising in order to evaluate whether or not it represented a viable investment and to shape your future investment decisions. It is worth asking how many people responded to your ad, how many of those were converted to a sale, what’s that worth to you? Some practical advice: an attention grabbing headline is essential, one change in headline can produce a 50-100% increase in response, the ad itself needs to appeal directly to the interests of your target audience.

Failing to focus on the benefits that your product or service offers

 

People don’t buy your product or service. They buy the benefits that your product or service offers them. In the beauty industry these benefits are largely hedonic, meaning they relate to pleasure. So spend some time getting clear on what exactly your benefits are – and then make sure that you articulate them precisely in all of your communications.

 

5.  Not using Email Marketing effectively
Many businesses still do not collect the email addresses of everyone who contacts them. Every time a business fails to capture someone’s email address they’re turning down the opportunity to contact them for FREE, for weeks, months and years ahead. Once you have Email Addresses – use them!
You can use email to thank people for their business, make them a special offer, give them a free article or report, send a newsletter, recommend a product or service they may be interested in, ask for referrals, share some news that may be interested in, ask why they’ve not done business with you.
 

 

Studio Tracker is a salon management software package which allows you to store, track and communicate with customers in one easy-to-use integrated system.  Campaign templates are built into the system, which allow you to send out personalised messages, such as promotional offers or birthday messages, to customers via SMS. It can show you the purchase history of your clients allowing you target promotional material more effectively, as well as making cross and up selling easier. You can configure the system to offer loyalty rewards to your regular customer s. In addition, Studio Tracker monitors stock levels, enabling you to re-stock your bestselling products more quickly and preventing lost sales.  Prices start from just £9 a week.