Salon Business Ideas – Encouraging Greater Loyalty from Customers

The nail industry is not the same as the hair industry. In the hair industry, clients tend to be loyal not just to salons but to hairdressers too – they return time and time again for further haircuts, re-styles or colouring. However in the nail industry clients are less loyal, often frequenting a number of different salons and returning due to convenience and appointment times available. In can be difficult to transform these clients into loyal ones but one way of doing so is to operate a customer loyalty programme.

Before we look at how they can be used in your salon or on your customers, let’s first address what a customer loyalty programme is. Customer loyalty programmes can be conveyed in a number of different ways but they all rely on the same mechanism – rewarding customers for repeat custom.

In order to make this work for your salon, you have a number of choices. The first is to issue your clients with a loyalty card. Every time the customer visits your salon for a treatment or makes a purchase, they are rewarded with a stamp or sticker of some kind. Once they have a certain number of stamps they can trade these in for a something like a free treatment or a free product. For example when a customer comes in six times for a manicure, they get their next one free.

Another way you might want to run your loyalty programme is have a membership scheme. Clients pay a fixed price for a month, six months or a year and they get a set number of treatments for this fee. In order for this to work, you have to ensure that the membership fee covers the cost of your services but looks like a reduced price for your clients. After all they need to be rewarded for their loyalty.

Obviously different loyalty schemes work in different ways so do a little research into what other loyalty schemes are around, who uses them and whether they’ll work for you and your services. Gain inspiration from gyms, coffee shops, hair salons and other places. Once implemented, a loyalty scheme can ensure that you have repeat customers which translate to a better income.