The success of your salon depends on your ability to interact with and retain clients. One of the best ways to maintain good client connections, improve bookings, and increase your income is through email marketing for salons.
You have complete control over your message because emails arrive in your clients’ inboxes directly, unlike social media, where algorithms may restrict the reach of your content. A well-designed email marketing campaign can keep your salon at the forefront of your clients’ minds and foster client loyalty, whether you’re promoting a special deal, reminding them of their future appointments, or just keeping in touch.
According to research, 99% of people check their emails daily, making email marketing one of the most powerful marketing tools today. Read on as we walk you through everything you need to know about acing your salon’s email marketing – from growing your email list to sending engaging emails that get clients to keep coming back.
Why is Email Marketing Important for Salons
Email marketing often gets a bad rap because people think it is outdated and ineffective. Most people don’t consider email to be the most accurate indicator of their salon’s popularity or use it to measure how you compare to other salons in your area. Rather, you are more likely to check and compare followers on social media and the kind of interactions you receive on your posts.
However, email is by far the best method for developing genuine relationships with individuals, getting them to listen to you, and motivating them to take action. Here are a few statistics to back that up:
The average open rate for emails is 22% while the average engagement rate on Instagram is less than 5%.
The average return on investment (ROI) for your salon’s email marketing is $32 for every $1 spent.
And if you still think email is irrelevant, most Americans check their email more than 10 times a day!
In short, email marketing is a cost-effective and efficient way to stay connected with your clients and improve client retention.
Get Started With Crafting Effective Campaigns
Email marketing provides you with the opportunity to showcase your expertise, provide valuable insights to clients, and incentivize them to book an appointment with your salon. Few steps you can take to create email marketing campaigns that resonate with your clients:
1. Building an Email List
The success of any email marketing campaign hinges greatly on building a strong, permission-based email list. Here’s how you can get started:
- Website sign-ups: Make sure your website has a clear sign-up button. You can include a ‘sign-up for our mailing list” CTA in different sections of your website.
- In-person sign-ups: When clients visit your salon, you can ask them for their email address. You will also need to ask them for consent and let them know you will be adding them to your email marketing campaigns.
- Social media: You can promote links to your sign-up form across social media channels. Organize giveaways or contests where participants must sign up for your email list.
2. Segment Your Email List
Once you’ve built your list, segmenting it allows you to send relevant emails to a specific target audience. By segmenting your email list, you can send relevant and tailored emails to particular client groups according to their demographics, booking history, or preferences.
Every client is different. While some might visit your salon for an occasional pampering, others may be frequent visitors. You can customize your salon’s email marketing campaigns to cater to the unique needs of each group by dividing their list into groups like “frequent visitors,” “occasional clients,” “new sign-ups,” and “dormant clients.”
For example, you can create different segments for clients who come in for skincare, manicure, or hair services. Segmenting by age, gender, or visitation frequency is another option. You have a better chance of grabbing clients’ attention and motivating them to book an appointment with your salon if you provide them with information that is specifically tailored to their needs.
3. Email Frequency and Timing
Your emails’ timing is as important as your content. To keep your clients interested and prevent overwhelming them, it’s essential to figure out the ideal email frequency and time for your salon’s marketing emails. So, what is the best time to send an email? Well, it depends. Each subscriber list is unique, and what suits one salon the best may not suit another. However, based on our experience, we’ve found that 8 AM when everyone is just getting ready for the day and are checking their inbox is to be a great time to send emails. Your marketing email sits right on the top of the list. Similarly, 4 PM is also a great time to send across that email. People are winding up their work-day and are looking for the pending emails in their inbox. That’s when they see your email and may be enticed to book a haircut, facial or a massage.
Weekdays have the highest open and click-through rates, according to a recent study. Friday saw somewhat higher rates for both, though the day doesn’t matter as much as the timing does. The study also goes on to state that emails sent early in the morning tend to have higher open rates. However, you do need to keep experimenting with different times and days to see which works best for your client list.
4. Types of Emails to Send
Creativity, a personal touch, and keeping up with the current trends are key components of your salon’s email marketing. There are several emails you can send your clients to interact with them and keep them engaged. Here are a few top ones:
Welcome Emails
First impressions count! Introduce your salon, staff, and services in a friendly welcome email to new subscribers. You could also offer an exclusive discount for their first visit to your salon.
Appointment Reminders
Send an email a day in advance, reminding your clients of their upcoming appointment. You might also want to provide an option to allow them to reschedule or cancel their appointment if they can’t make it.
Post-Appointment Follow-Up
Thank clients via email for their visit around the day following their visit. Make use of this chance to ask for feedback and make sure they are happy with the service they received. You could also encourage them to share their experience on social media and gently nudge them to book a follow-up appointment soon.
Anniversary or Birthday Discounts
Offer your client something extra on their special day, such as a free product sample, a discount, or a free service. Send them a customized email to help them feel appreciated and loved.
Seasonal Promotions
Make use of holiday and seasonal themes to send emails that will encourage clients to book appointments. For example, for spring, you could promote new hairstyles and colors or relaxing skin care procedures. During summer, you could provide discounts on services like pedicures, sun-kissed highlights, and beach-ready waxing.
As the year draws to a close, you should take the opportunity to promote gift cards for the holiday season (Christmas and New Year) or even provide special party-ready hairstyles.
Introduce Star Employees
Clients are more likely to book an appointment if they feel like they already know your staff before even visiting your salon. Send an email introducing your employees and provide some tit-bits about them.
You can highlight their background and expertise, talk about how long they’ve been a part of your salon’s family, and even include some of their hobbies to make them seem more relatable to your clients.
Re-engagement Emails
In case a client has not booked an appointment with your salon in a while, you should send them an email reminding them of your services. Send them personalized messages like, “We Miss You!” or “<First Name>, It’s Been 60 Days Since Your Last Haircut.” Use these emails to remind your clients why they visited your salon in the first place and what services they availed. You might also want to entice them with a special discount.
Client Spotlight Emails
These can be a great tool to showcase the services other clients have received at your salon. Remember to ask permission to share a client’s pictures with your email list. You could use this to share before and after pictures, especially if your client has a complete makeover, a major haircut, or a bridal makeover.
Tips & Tricks
Imagine getting some kickass haircare or makeup tips from industry experts every week. Some people would pay good money for that because they know the advice they’re receiving is top-notch.
You can create a series of emails on topics that are sure to engage your audience and position your salon as a trustworthy source. You can even take this one step further and segment your emails. For example, you can send specific hair care tips to clients with curly hair or someone who recently colored their hair.
Every email you send should add some value for your client. The more personalized your email is, the more likely a client will be interested in engaging with your salon.
5. How to Craft a Perfect Email
Your salon’s email marketing strategy is more than just sending emails to your clients. It’s a representation of your brand and a way for your clients to get to know you better. Here’s how to get it right:
Compelling Subject Line
Your email’s subject line has the power to make or break it. Your client should be curious enough to open the email by the attention-grabbing subject line. You should be creative but not misleading. Stay away from using common spam words like “free”, “free gift”, “prize”, etc. Don’t write more than four or seven words. Particularly on mobile devices, your subject line will probably be cut off at seven words.
Engaging Content
Your client needs to find value in the emails you send. You can share hair and skincare how-to guides, beauty advice, or even industry news. Your emails are a great way to send information about a new service or if you’re running promotions at your salon. Pay attention to how your salon’s services help the customer. Steer clear of jargon and maintain a professional yet approachable tone.
High-Quality Images
Content is king but images help drive more action. Attractive and eye-catching images grab the attention of your readers and motivates them to respond to your email. Use high-quality images of your salon, services offered, products used, your staff, as well as pictures of satisfied customers. This way, you can convey the quality your email subscribers will receive at your salon.
Focus on Design
An attractive email design will grab your reader’s attention and encourage them to engage with your email. Your email should be visually appealing and easy to read. Stick with a single font throughout and use a bold font for your headline. To avoid triggering spam filters, your text-to-image ratio should be 80% text and 20% imagery. Use brand colors to increase brand recall. Every email you send should have a clearly defined call to action (CTA). Whether you want your readers to visit your website, interact with your social media posts, or book an appointment.
Mobile-Friendly Emails
Research has shown that nearly 41.6% of people check their emails on their phone and 42.3% of people immediately delete emails that don’t open properly on their smartphone. Make sure your email is responsive on different smartphones and looks good, whether viewed on a desktop, phone, or tablet. Keep your subject lines short, include a pre-header text that provides context to a reader before they open your email, don’t use heavy images that won’t load or will take too long to load, and make sure your CTA is at the front and center of your email.
Unsubscribe Button
Every email you send needs to include an opt-out button. It might hurt to lose a few readers, but it might help you more than you think. For one, unsubscribe links are important to protect your email delivery rate and are required by many spam laws. Secondly, it prevents emails getting put into spam/junk when a subscriber is not interested in receiving your emails anymore. When a bunch of people start marking your emails as spam, emails for other active subscribers will land in spam as well. It’s better to let them leave than to have the email deliverability go to trash for your entire list.
6. Measuring the Success of Your Salon’s Email Marketing Campaigns
It’s important to monitor and evaluate specific metrics to assess the effectiveness of your email campaigns. You may modify your strategy for better results by using analytics, which gives you insight into the behavior of your readers. You must monitor Key Performance Indicators to improve your email marketing strategy like:
Open Rate
Your open rate tells you how many people actually opened your email. This could help you decide on the ideal day and time for future emails. This is important because it helps in determining how well your subject lines work and how appealing your emails are to subscribers as a whole. Try experimenting with different subject lines or mailing times if the open rate is below average. So what is the “average” open rate? Research says about 20%.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR measures the number of readers who click on a link within your email. For example, if you included a link to a promotion in your email, the CTR calculates the percentage of subscribers that clicked on your link. There are several strategies to improve click-through rates while writing emails. For example, add a prominent and eye-catching call-to-action button that subscribers may click to redeem your offer, and include links throughout the email in the right locations. CTRs are usually lower than open rates, with the industry average around 8%.
Conversion Rate
The number of people who clicked on your link is measured by your click-through rate, and the number of people who clicked on the link and then performed a specified action is measured by your conversion rate. For example, if you send out an email with a link inviting your clients to participate in a special holiday promotion (free haircut, discounts on hair spas, hair coloring, etc.), your conversion rate would indicate the number of people who booked an appointment with your salon.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate tracks the number of emails that could not be delivered to your email list. This could be due to various reasons, including fake email addresses, old and inactive email addresses, or email addresses that have a typo. Soft bounces deal with temporary problems like mailbox full, domain name system (DNS) failure which typically happens when there are DNS issues at the receiver’s end, or spam filters, in which case you will need to tweak your email and remove spammy words. On the other hand, hard bounces can be quite damaging to your email sender’s reputation. In order to avoid these issues, remember to regularly clean your email list and remove invalid addresses.
Unsubscribe Rate
It’s pretty easy to measure unsubscribes. Any email provider will let you know how many readers unsubscribed. You can typically find this email metric in your metrics dashboard or your main dashboard. Having a lot of unsubscribes might be frustrating. It could mean that your content isn’t connecting with customers or that you’re sending out too many emails.
List Growth Rate
This metric tracks how quickly your salon’s email marketing list is growing and takes into account new sign-ups, bounces, and unsubscribes. One way to figure this out is to divide the total number of email addresses on your list by the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes, and then multiply the result by 100. Since some attrition is normal, concentrate on strategies to keep expanding your list, interacting with existing members, and acquiring new, devoted subscribers.
Spam Complaints
Having your emails flagged as spam may be rather unpleasant. Even though you might want to overlook these situations, it’s essential to take spam concerns seriously. Email service companies aim to monitor spam complaints and guarantee quality. Your email service provider may take action against you and block your account if this rate becomes excessive.
Overall ROI
One of the most important metrics to track is your overall ROI. It provides you with the overall return on investment for your salon’s email marketing campaigns. This can be calculated by deducting the campaign’s execution costs from the campaign’s sales revenue, dividing that amount by the campaign’s investment, and then multiplying the result by 100. Although it can be costly, email marketing offers the best ROI of any digital marketing tactic. Optimize spend, improve targeting, and polish your email content to increase return on investment.
7. Recommended Email Templates
Topical Email Template
National Hair Day (Use this as an opportunity to provide hair care tips to your clients)
Seasonal Emails
New Year. New You. (Use this as an opportunity to encourage your clients to get a fresh new look for the New Year. You can even provide a discount for their first haircut of the year).
Product Promotion
Get It Before It’s Gone! (Use this as an opportunity to promote products sold by your salon. You can offer free shipping or a special discount code in your email to encourage purchase).
Birthday Discount
It’s All About You! (Use this as an opportunity to celebrate your client. You could offer them a special birthday discount or something as simple as a personalized greeting card on behalf of everyone at your salon. Nintendo does a great job of making their customers feel special with their birthday greetings).
8. How to get non-clients to join your email list
The ultimate goal for any business is to drive more sales. And while you already have a list of existing clients, you shouldn’t stop there. Email marketing for salons is a continuous process and one of the great ways to turn non-paying clients into paying ones.
The easiest way to do this is by offering non-clients a freebie. This could be in the form of an educational series of emails or something as outright as running a contest or giveaway. You should promote this free but extremely valuable piece of content on your website and social media, and anyone who wants to access it will need to sign up and give you their email address.
Here are a few examples of freebies you can offer:
- Hair stylists: Top haircuts and colors for the upcoming 2024 wedding season.
- Makeup art: Hear from experts about what needs to go into your makeup bag.
- Beauticians: How to choose the perfect spray tan for the 2025 summer.
This might seem like a lot of effort just for an email address. But remember, you need to provide value to people in exchange for their trust, and eventually, get them to book an appointment with your salon. If someone signs up and accesses the wedding season guide, it could very well mean that they are interested in booking an appointment with you to see what services you can offer them.
You should also keep reminding non-clients of subscriber-only benefits, like access to tips and tricks each week, expert advice from your talented staff, and exclusive promotions and discounts given to existing clients.
Conclusion
Email marketing could prove to be a very rewarding solution if you are looking to spread the word about your business locally. By creating and offering content that resonates with your readers and provides value to them, you’re already halfway there. The second step is to turn your email list into a loyal customer base by providing them with engaging newsletters they enjoy reading.
Your salon’s email marketing strategy can also be helpful with client retention which ultimately impacts your bottom line. Regular emails will help your salon stay relevant in your client’s minds, whether you’re sending them weekly updates, monthly newsletters, appointment reminders, or feedback surveys.
To help you get started, we, at The Salon Marketing provide email marketing for salons and help you create winning strategies that will keep your business thriving. Get in touch today to see how we can make your salon’s email marketing a smooth journey and improve client retention, more bookings, and higher ROI.
Hey, I'm Anshul and I'm a 2-comma club award winner with over a decade of experience in the digital marketing industry. I specialize in helping salon and spa businesses scale their business using proven digital marketing strategies.
Throughout my career, I've had the privilege of working with a diverse range of clients, from world-renowned motivational speaker Tony Robbins to marketing guru Russell Brunson, as well as internet sensations like Julius Dein and Dan Henry.