Email and SMS marketing are essential tools for salons, spas and clinics to connect with clients, encourage bookings, and promote products and services. Each one has its benefits and limitations so read on to learn what channel will best help you meet your goals.
Email or SMS… what should you choose?
SMS marketing
SMS messages are a great way to grab your client’s attention. They work well for short messages and messages that require a reply, for example, appointment reminders. 55% of people prefer to receive appointment reminders by SMS over email, and 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes. While the open rate for SMS is incredibly high at 98%, what’s stopping you from messaging your clients?
They are great if you have a big promotion, or want your clients to return if you haven’t seen them in a while. To make sure your SMS messages are effective it is important that they are short and sweet – With a character limit of 160 characters you can do just that.
Here are two examples of great SMS messages you can use that get the message across and are within 160 characters:
Hi <name>, see you tomorrow at <salon name> for your <time> appointment! Reply “yes” to confirm or call <phone number> if you can’t make it.
Is there anything better than a fresh haircut? Book today and receive <%>off for this week only, limited spots call <salon name>, <phone number> to book now.
Email marketing
Emails are great for communicating longer messages or sharing imagery with your clientele. Even though open rates are lower on email than for SMS, you can improve the likelihood of your clients engaging with your emails by ensuring the content is relevant and targeted. In fact, recipients are 75% more likely to click on emails from segmented campaigns than non-segmented campaigns.
Segmentation means dividing your clients into groups and determining who you’re going to send your communication to. The most important thing you need to ask yourself when doing this is who would be interested in receiving this information. For example, one of your segments can be clients that had a colour service in the last six months but haven’t come back yet.
Here’s an example of an email reminder:
Hi Tai,
It’s been a while since we’ve seen you and we’d love to welcome you back with a free nourishing treatment – just book an appointment with us this month to enjoy this free treatment.
Book online at https://bit.ly/3MXugKT or phone 1800 161 101 today.
Love from,
Salon Beautiful
Essential checklists for text and email marketing
Now that you know the benefits of each channel and have some great examples to use, pick one today to try out! Here is a checklist to ensure your next campaign includes everything they need to be effective.
Checklist for your client emails
Keep your subject line short and sweet
Use an attention-grabbing subject line that explains what your clients can expect in your email. Try to keep it to no more than 9 words or 60 characters.
Provide a call to action
Including a clear direction to readers of what you want them to do is super important. For example, book an appointment or leave a review. Try to stick to one call-to-action per email and if you have a link you want them to click, draw attention to it using a button.
Set up a trigger and target audiences
Set up your audience or trigger for when your automatic email will be sent. For example, schedule an after-care message two days after a client had a specific service to check in and see if how they are going and whether they’d want to make it a repeat appointment.
Add personalisation
Check what personalisation functionality is available in your software. For example, the client’s name and next appointment time, and use it to make your email more relevant to recipients.
Test your links
Send yourself a test email to make sure your email looks good both on a desktop computer and mobile device. Click the links to make sure they work.
Check spelling and grammar
Correct spelling and grammar will make your message clear and easy to understand. It also shows you care enough to take the time to check!
Checklist for your SMS marketing messages
Be mindful of the character limit
Stick to 160 characters or less to ensure your message is sent in full. Try to aim for 155 characters, just in case someone has a long first name so your message doesn’t get cut off.
Add personalisation
Make your message more relevant by inserting personalisation information such as the name, appointment details or staff member they’re seeing.
Provide a call to action
If you want results from your emails or SMS, you must provide a clear, direct call to action. Whether it’s “Reply with YES to confirm your appointment” or “Book now!” and providing a link to your online booking site; you want to make it clear to the client what you want them to do.
Use a shortened link
Use a link shortener like bitly.com to ensure your link takes up fewer characters. That means you can spend more characters adding in their name and personalising it!
Check spelling and grammar
It can be tempting to shorten and substitute words in an SMS but whatever you do, make sure your message is still readable! Shortened words like appt for appointment are pretty standard to do, but the more shortened words you use, the less professional it looks.
Automatic marketing: take your email and text marketing to a next level
For salons, spas and clinics in the hair and beauty industry, email and text message marketing are powerful ways to engage your clients, reduce no-shows, encourage repeat product purchases and provide a better client experience.
However, sending these messages can be time-consuming if you don’t use reliable software for marketing automation. Take a look at your salon management software to check if it has marketing automation for email and SMS marketing and what triggers are available to you. A trigger is a setting within your software that kicks off the automatic sending of an email or SMS to your clients, for instance, when they sign up for their first appointment. There may be a few default types already set up and you may also be able to create your own.
To learn automatic marketing fundamentals for salon marketing, download our free guide.
Sources for statistics as they appear in the article:
- Laura Kate Shokuhi, Salon Business Specialist, Frog Coaching
- Campaign Monitor, 2019
- Hubspot, 2020
- Campaign Monitor, 2019
- Spark Conejo, 2021
- Spark Conejo, 2021
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