If you’ve owned a salon for more than 5 minutes, you’ll already know about the highly profitable strategy of client re-booking and pre-booking (that’s where you book your clients for several appointments in advance).
This one strategy alone, if done well, can bring in an extra $200 to $300 per client per year.
You’re going to be shocked when you see what this means in real revenue.
Are you ready for it? Then let’s look at the figures:
• Let’s say your salon has 400 active clients.
• And the average amount spent by each client is $50. That’s pretty do-able.
• Next, we’ll assume your clients are coming once every 4 weeks (13 times per year), which is how often they should be if you’re re-booking them before they leave your salon.
So that means you have 400 clients x $50 x 13 visits each per year = $260,000 revenue in one year.
Now, let’s take a look at what happens when you don’t re-book your clients, and they drag their appointment times out to 6 weeks (which is exactly what they’ll do if not re-booked). That means that instead of visiting 13 times per year, they visit 8.67 times instead.
Our new calculation looks like this:
• 400 clients x $50 x 8.67 visits each per year = $173,400.
Holy smoke; that’s a whopping reduction in revenue of $86,600, and all because you let your clients decide when they wanted to return to your salon, instead of actively re-booking them every 4 weeks.
Now that figure is going to go up or down depending on the size of your salon, your price point and how good your team members are at re-booking, but I think you’ll agree, it could make a huge and positive impact on your revenue.
So, how can you make this happen in your salon?
It’s not really all that difficult, but of course, you’ll need to make some change to the way you do things currently.
First, your team members must know that there is an expectation (by you) that they will re-book all clients.
It must be part of their conditions of employment. No exceptions.
It’s your job to set monthly goals around the re-booking rates for each team member, monitor those figures closely, and then discuss the outcome with each team member, each month.
If the figures are good, then a pat on the back is necessary (perhaps even a small gift or bonus payment).
If the figures are not up to standard, then a discussion as to how they can be improved should follow.
Remember, teach better techniques, don’t just chastise.
Help your team members grow professionally.
One thing’s certain; if your team members think you don’t care about their re-booking rates, then neither will they.
It is you who must be diligent and consistent when it comes to making this improvement happen.
What to say to your clients.
The next step is you must give your team members the training they need to re-book their clients easily.
During their time with the clients, team members should mention the client’s next visit and what will happen then.
“Grace, your skin is responding really well to this treatment, and so I think we might do a gentle peel next time”.
This sets up the expectation of the next visit in the client’s mind. Half the battle has now been won.
They must also begin the re-booking conversation before the client reaches the reception area, so that a re-booking naturally follows on.
Get the re-booking done prior to the payment being accepted.
During the re-booking, it’s critically important for the employee to determine the re-booking date.
Under no circumstance should they leave that up to the client.
Your employees are the professionals, and therefore it should be up to them to determine the right time frame around their client’s next visit.
It will generally always be sooner than the client would have made it.
A simple but effective script that can be used goes like this “Grace, I’m very happy with the way your skin responded to today’s treatment, and I suggest we re-book you for 4 weeks time so that we can get continue to get even greater improvements. How does 9 am on Wednesday 12th sound to you?”
At this point, the client will either say yes to the suggested day and time or tell the team member that the time doesn’t suit. If this happens, the team member can ask which day that week will be better and go from there to determine a suitable appointment time.
Now, naturally you’re never going to achieve a 100% re-booking rate, but if you aim for 75-80% and achieve it, you’ll notice a BIG difference in your figures pretty quickly.
How do you encourage salon clients to re-book and pre-book their appointments?
In one word – SCARCITY.
Your clients need to know with absolute certainty that if they don’t re-book each appointment in advance, then they’re going to have a difficult job getting their next appointment scheduled at a time convenient to them.
SCARCITY is a major key to successful re-booking.
It’s just so important that your clients never hear an employee say that the salon has been quiet, or that there’s no need to re-book because it will be easy for them to ‘get in’ later on.
This tells the client that your salon is not very busy (which is definitely not the impression you want to give to a client) and that re-booking isn’t necessary for her to secure a good date and time at the drop of a hat.
If you ever hear staff members say this to clients, you must take them aside and correct them immediately. Tell them what they must say instead with all future clients and tell them why.
So to summarise your easy salon re-booking strategy:
1. Set re-booking expectations and goals for your employees. Follow up each month with each team member regarding their performance.
2. Offer advice and strategies to assist poor performers but be consistent and don’t drop your expectations.
3. Develop a simple natural sounding script that your employees will be happy to use. Better still, ask them to develop their own scripts using the outline you give them.
4. Role-play these scripts at training sessions until they feel and sound natural.
5. Never allow your clients to know if your salon is a little quiet. In their eyes, your salon should always be busy (this makes you much more desirable also) and hard to get an appointment with at short notice.
4. Ensure your team members always re-book the clients using the correct time frame for optimal results.
5. Watch your profits sky-rocket 🙂