February Valentine’s Day Promotions for the Uncoupled

Most of us have been there at one time or another – facing the prospect of getting through a holiday season or a Valentine’s Day as a “single” rather than a couple.   With Valentine’s Day just over a month away, there is still time for you to do something special and fun for the un-couples among your clients and prospects. 

Here are some promotions and events you can create for singles (adapted from Volume I of 12 Months of Marketing for Salon and Spa):

LOVE YOURSELF
Why should couples have all the fun? Whether you celebrate Valentine’s Day singly or as a couple, love yourself! Create special “Love Yourself” promotions around your most pampering services and retail products, or gift free, salon-branded chocolates or aromatherapy products with retail purchases to clients. 

This is a great time for you to expand your retail offerings beyond haircare, skin and other professional products to make it a true gift center.  Purchase aromatherapy products such as candles and room sprays.  Purchase boutique-quality, unique gift and greeting cards and gift bags.  Make it easy for your customers to envision your products and gift certificates as “gifts” by pre-packaging gift baskets and displaying them along with gift certificates or gift cards for your salon or spa. 

Hold a contest in February and have a drawing to award one aromatherapy gift basket plus gift card to a winner.  Utilize entries to help build your email marketing contact database, and extend a special offer in March to all participants. 

Examples of contests you could hold would be a simple fishbowl-entry in the salon or spa, and/or solicit entries on your website and on your Facebook page. 

Or ask clients to be creative and submit an acryonym based on the word “LOVE” (for example, an entry might be something like, “Lifelong Obsession with Valuing Everyone”) or another word.  Or ask clients to really get creative and submit a short poem as a contest entry (the poems can be cynical, for your ‘Singles’ sake!)  

Or ask clients to nominate another person in the community who most deserves an aromatherapy relaxing treat!

INSIGNIFICANT OTHERS
An ‘Insignificant Other’ Event will take some work, marketing partners, and some creativity to execute.

Partner with a local restaurant, wine shop or bar to host an “insignificant other” or “best-guy-I-never-dated” mixer. Just what it sounds like, this is a chance for clients to bring a non-date but great guy or girl out to a mixer at a local destination so they can both meet other great singles in the area. Collect contact information from all attendees with an at-the-door entry form which will also serve as an entry form in a drawing for a prize package to be awarded at the end of the evening.

Before the mixer, collect entries from your clients and hold a drawing for one lucky guy and one lucky gal to receive a pre-mixer makeover (remember, it’s really all about the entries and gathering contact information for permission-based marketing).

Create promotional offers for pre-event makeover bookings and a bounce back offer. Take bookings at the event and make salon-branded items (like shot glasses, event t-shirts, tumblers or mugs, etc.) or professional products available for sale. 

After the event, send a bounce back offer via mail or e-mail to all participants (you collected their contact information before the event for pre-mixer makeovers and at the event for all attendees, and hopefully you ensured that your marketing partners did the same.

YOUR REALLY INSIGNIFICANT OHER
February 8-14th is ‘Dump Your Significant Jerk Week’— the perfect week to hold your ‘Insignificant Other’ mixer.   If this event proves popular with participants, plan to repeat this formula during June’s wedding season as a ‘best-person- I-never-married’ social event.

Want more?

With 2011 underway, the utility of the 2011 Salon and Spa Marketing Calendar is now limited by time itself! This publication will be removed from publication by the end of January, 2011 so if you have been thinking about buying one, now is the time!

But there’s good news, too: I’m in the stages of final editing for the next volume of 12 Months of Marketing for Salon and Spa. Volume 2 of this series will take you on another 12 month journey, with instruction for completely making over your marketing, customer service, employee culture and the client experience as well as a host of new promotion ideas for each month.  

And one more bit of good news, through the end of January, use code FQSFWH3Y at checkout and you can save $2.50 off the list price of the 2011 Salon and Spa Marketing Calendar when you purchase this publication via my website (the code doesn’t work on amazon).

It’s going to be a great year!