Business, Hair Salon, Salon Memo
Five Best Practices to Run Your Salon Promos in 2025
Jan
New Year, New Opportunities! The clock starts now fight to keep that ledger well in the green and keep your client base walking in the door and leave your happier than when they sat in your chair. If you haven’t started planning your marketing and campaign calendar for the year yet – START NOW! Creating a steady stream of special offers and promotions on services and products can be an excellent way to keep clients returning to see what’s new or even to TRY something new. It is important, however, to monitor how your specials and promotions are performing to decide whether to continue with them. That said, there are good ideas and bad ideas when it comes to promotions and special offers.
Here are five great strategies to create and run promotions that will get results:
1. MAKE IT SPECIAL
Running the same promotion or discount all year long makes things predictable and ultimately makes the promotion less special and more ordinary. Having the promotion running for a limited time -a month or so at strategic times throughout the year- will make the offer truly seem special and limited. When the promotion rolls around be sure to highlight it and make it look like a wonderful opportunity that shouldn’t be passed up.
2. INCENTIVIZE SPENDING A BIT MORE
Take note of how much the average client spends on gift bundles, services, or gift cards and create an incentive for them to spend just a little more. Consider the average sale on a gift card or bundle and offer a bonus on a larger purchase ($20 extra if someone buys a larger gift card than the average purchase, or example.)
This can both potentially raise the average amount spent on these promotions but also get clients accustomed to spending just a little bit more in the future.
3. FOCUS ON NEW/RECURRING SERVICES
Offering a special on a product that’s rarely purchased or seldom used may seem like a great idea to get it to move and boost sales in the short term, but running specials on items and services that clients need on a recurring basis is more likely to be noticed and bring in more revenue in the long run.
Products like hair extensions, color services, and texture treatments that require maintenance can be bundled together at a discounted rate to offer clients an incentive to keep coming back. Just be sure that such a bundle deal doesn’t eat into actual profits.
4. OFFER SPECIALS STRATEGICALLY
Running the wrong kind of promotion at the wrong time or for the wrong client base makes it doomed to fail. Consider your client base and what they most often purchase or want and offer specials at strategic times for special events or holidays such as Valentine’s Day, back-to-school, or the holiday season. This makes such promotions feel special and targeted to your client base.
Testing out a few ideas to see what works will make later promotions more successful.
5. MARKETING
Your salon can have the absolute best promotion possible that would blow the socks off anyone but if no one knows about it then it will fail. Hype up your specials and promotions on social media, through email, in text messages, and in signage. Make sure that people know what you’re offering and why it’s special. BUT, most importantly take the time to personalize your messaging to your client’s interests and tastes. We respond to emails that “get us” and ignore mass broadcasts that don’t.
In the long run you will want to monitor how these promotions perform to know what works and what doesn’t. If you simply throw ideas at the wall to see what sticks but don’t analyze the sales and profit data, then it will be hard to know what is working and what doesn’t. Following these guidelines and ideas can help you to create promotions that work.
