Stop Discounting! 5 Groupon-Free Marketing Ideas for Salons and Spas

In this guest post I wrote for Kabbage Inc., I talk about the inherent risks salon owners take when they cut prices – and profits – sometimes by more than 50 percent – just to get a new client in the door.  Find out why trying to jump-start growth with a strategy that reduces profits could be a risky proposition.

From coupons and social media offers to deep-discount programs like Groupon, many salon owners automatically revert to offering discounts when it comes to attracting the new clients they need to grow; but discounting presents risks, and could even backfire. Offering discounts of 50 percent (or even more) in order to bring new prospective clients in the door can help you reach new clients, but you’ll need an awful lot of these clients to convert to repeat buyers in order to compensate for the profit losses you incurred to bring them in. Plus, there’s evidence to suggest that the vast majority of people who visit your salon to redeem a big discount won’t come back, and probably aren’t the type of clients that you would describe as your salon’s “ideal client type” in the first place.

No question about it, daily deal sites can bring new clients in to your salon. However, there’s also no question that leveraging deep discounts for client attraction means… [Read the rest on the Kabbage blog, including 5 Ways to Attract New Salon Clients without Discounting]

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Elizabeth Kraus is the author of the 2015 Salon Marketing Calendar  called “Making the Cut.”

Written just for Independent Beauty Professionals, Making the Cut has hundreds of low-cost and no-cost marketing ideas which can help booth renters, salon suite owners, salon owners and salon managers engage, motivate and retain more clients in 2015!