If you have a spa or salon, one of your biggest challenges is to stay engaged with your customers and encourage them to keep returning. SMS or MMS text message marketing is one of the best ways to accomplish this. ProTexting offers many useful features to help you stay connected with your customers.
The Importance of Engaging With Clients
Spas, salons, hair stylists, and other businesses offering beauty/personal care services face some common challenges. These include:
- Lack of repeat business. Even when customers are happy, it’s not always easy to get them to come back. No matter where you’re located, you probably have dozens of competitors within a 5-mile radius. Without a way to stay in touch, your customer might just wander into one of your competitors’ salons.
- No-shows. People are so busy nowadays that they often forget about appointments. When your customers don’t show up, you lose business.
- Inconsistent business. Most businesses experience ups and downs with business. In your industry, this can be particularly difficult. When you’re busy, your staff has to struggle to keep up with all the appointments. Slow days, meanwhile, mean less revenue and your employees have nothing to do.
Text Marketing: The Best Way to Reach Today’s Busy Customers
Text marketing is a solution to many of the most common challenges faced by spas and salons. It’s a safe bet that the vast majority of your customers carry around mobile phones. This is the best way to get in touch with people today. When you get permission to text them, you have a fast way to contact them.
It’s a fact that people are far more likely to open text messages than emails. Around 98% of text messages are read, compared to only around 20% of emails. People also open texts fast, within seconds of receiving them. In fact, 90% of texts are read within three seconds of receiving them!
Once you get permission to text your clients, this is the most efficient way to stay in touch with them. Here are just a few ideas for engaging with your customers.
- Offer coupons to new clients or those you haven’t seen in a while.
- Run contests and sweepstakes. Keep your customers engaged by running contests where you give away treatments. They can enter simply by texting a keyword such as “MASSAGE” or “RELAX.”
- Send seasonal greetings for holidays and on customers’ birthdays. You might offer discount coupons for such special occasions, which is often a good way to get past clients to return.
- Create segmented lists. This simply means sending highly targeted messages to customers based on their needs and past actions. For example, you might have one list for people who typically get hair treatments and another for those who like massages. Obviously, you can tailor this to your particular services.
- Promote last-minute specials. This is one of the best ways to drum up business during slow periods.
Integrate SMS/MMS Into Your Marketing
Text message marketing is a powerful strategy that complements your other marketing platforms. In addition to promoting specific offers with your text messages, you can send traffic to your website and social media pages. If you do email marketing, you can send people to your landing page.
Increasingly, marketing is becoming omnichannel, meaning that it’s best to connect with your customers on all of the platforms they use. However, texting is often the best starting point as people always have their mobile devices handy. SMS & MMS marketing gives you a crucial advantage if you want to engage better with your clients.