The Chinese word for "crisis" is composed of two characters: one for "danger", the other for "opportunity" John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Recently, at a round table, the owner of one of the beauty salons expressed a valuable thought that the crisis is the time when we spend three times more on advertising. What is the value of this idea, you ask, if the real costs of the business are growing for something that is much easier at normal times - attracting customers?
Let's try to figure it out.
Indeed, according to messages from our clients - users of the program from different parts of the country, prices for cosmetics increased by a third, the average check indicator (how much money a client leaves in the salon for 1 visit) almost also decreased, the rent increased or was fixed in foreign currency ... is it for a beauty salon? ..
Let's look at the situation differently. The cost of materials is from 5 to 17% of the price value of the service, depending on the class (level) of the salon. Accordingly, we note an increase in the cost of up to 6.5 - 22% in the price of the service for the client. This means that if earlier our consumables for the provision of services costing 100 UAH. cost us, for example, 5 hryvnyas, but now they began to cost 6.50 hryvnias. However, this is not a crisis for our beauty salon, because its heart is a client.
This is the value of our colleague's thought, because her statement turns to the idea that in a panic of instability or crisis, we often make rash and hasty decisions about what to invest in first.
In our opinion, the most reliable tactic of actions of a beauty salon, aimed at customer satisfaction. After all, a satisfied regular customer will come back to you and will come back again and again. A new client attracted by increased advertising requires many times more efforts to retain him than a satisfied regular client. In the conditions of albeit insignificant, but still, the satisfaction of new customers is a shaky thing, because for various reasons we cannot offer such a complete list of services and products as in a quiet time. Therefore, we would recommend returning to the origins of the salon business, remembering how the salons began in general, and who visited them. There were not many such people, but if they were lucky to find a beauty salon to their liking, then they returned there with an enviable frequency and were already so disposed to their salon that they simply turned a blind eye to many mistakes of the team. In the future, with the growing popularity of salons, among other people, these people began to be called more and more often in an increasing number of sources as "regular customers". This term has become firmly established and today is actively used in training events dedicated not only to the salon industry, but for the most part is even fundamental in the work of marketers. Every beauty salon manager knows that we receive 80% of the profits from regular customers and only 20% are brought to us by newly attracted ones.
Here is the second proof that there is no crisis in the salon industry, except for the crisis of analytics. After all, the cost has grown insignificantly, there are no fewer customers. It remains only to provide the conditions under which the existing (read - "regular") clients will feel an island of stability in the modern stormy world in our beauty salon. And the grossest mistake would be to haste with the rise in prices for services with such a slight increase in the cost price.
And about the crisis of analytics. In order not to be unfounded, here are a few questions on which you can check the level of your knowledge about your own beauty salon.
1. How many clients are there in your salon in total (customer base size)?
2. How many of this number can be called constant and who exactly?
3. Which customer has the highest average check?
4. Which of the products presented in the window is most popular with customers, which one takes place on the window?
5. How many clients have you lost in the last 3 months?
6. What is the income of the beauty salon for each month since the beginning of the year and what are the expenses? What is the profit?
7. Has the purchase of a new cosmetology apparatus paid off and how much?
8. Which supplier raises prices more often than others?
9. What kind of advertising works best ("word of mouth" is omitted - in the attention of everything else)?
10. How much does the loyalty program (discounts, bonuses, gifts) cost you monthly?
If you easily answered all 10 questions and can illustrate each of your answers with real numbers and calculations, then there have never been any crises in your salon, now there are no and never will be any crises! If at least one question has caused difficulty, the desire to resort to the help of an administrator, the need to think about which notebook contains the information necessary for calculations, then this is a real reason to change something. Namely: you need objective information about everything that is mentioned in the questions above - exactly objective - and not the one that the administrator calculated for you on the calculator and wrote down in one of the many notebooks or in some mysterious spreadsheet file. And you can get such information from the software developed by a team of professionals and honed by the practice of your colleagues - from administrators of beauty salons to owners and managers.
Our program for a beauty salon is often recommended by our clients to their acquaintances, friends, partners. And after the presentation, and sometimes without the presentation, these people buy it for their business. Why is this happening? Because we keep our word: in 2009, entering the Ukrainian market with our product, we announced the best prices, the best quality and the best service, today, while the next “crisis” is raging around, we are keeping our word. Our prices remain the best (in the midst of the turmoil in 2014, the price of the ISMIe Beauty program remains at the level of 2013 until June 11). Our quality is always the best (from practice: 7% of our existing clients switched to our software product from other analogues and were satisfied with the absence of "freezes", "crashes", "dissimilar numbers"). Our service is focused on saving your time and money - always clearly and on time, always attentive and constructive, and of course unprecedented support - right up to the implementation of your useful ideas at absolutely no cost.
All this has made it possible since 2009, practically from the very beginning of its activity in Ukraine, to remain the leader in sales. Every day we give our best for our clients, so that each owner knows exactly when, on what and in what volume it is worth investing, and when it is possible to collect the fruits of their investments. And the main mission of our company is that any crisis for your enterprise is not a danger, but a “favorable opportunity”. Therefore, an investment in the effective management of your salon during a period of seemingly unfavorable ;-) changes in the market is perhaps one of the most successful investments.
With warmth and love,
ISMI company.
ISMIe