#21 Maximizing Salon Revenue: 3 Strategies for Front Desk Teams
Hi all, Mallory here, the owner of The Gilded Lily in Chicago and Rich Life CEO Professor :)
Typically when we think about ways to increase revenue in the salon, our focus is on our service providers. We tend to forget that our front desk team has the potential to be a revenue-generating powerhouse too.
I’m going to share 3 creative strategies to boost revenue that my front desk team uses weekly.
Strategy #1: Appointment Filling Spreadsheet
Every single week one of my leaders runs a recall report in our salon software. We use Meevo but I think most salon software will have something of that kind.
She downloads that report and pops it into a spreadsheet where it includes:
The client's name
The last service they had in the salon
The date of the last service, and which stylist
Their contact information
And then at the beginning of the week, we go through the spreadsheet and we contact every single guest individually by text or by phone, and we have a script that we use that we copy and paste into the texting platform that we use on our computer.
The text message says,
“Hi, this is Mel at the Gilded Lily. We noticed it's been six weeks since your last appointment. We have a haircut available on Tuesday at 6 pm. Does this work for you? I can also check other availabilities this week and next week, if that would be better for you.”
This helps to catch any of those clients who maybe forgot to pre-book their appointment or needed to wait to get their schedule and needed to get back to you.
It’s been really good for us because a lot of times we have clients respond back and say something like…
‘Oh my gosh, I was just thinking that I wanted to come into the salon and get my color touched up’
or
‘Yes! I need my bangs trimmed but haven’t had the time to reach out.’
This has helped us a lot because we are reaching out to them individually. It does take a little bit of back-end time to set up the spreadsheet but our front desk team does this consistently and it helps fill in additional time on the books.
Strategy #2: We Miss You Email
Once a month we send out an email to guests who are overdue for an appointment.
We run another report that gives us a list of overdue clients and we send out a general email template that we created.
We include a link in the email where they can access our online booking directly and a link where they can email our front desk directly.
Having both of those links in the email has been really helpful because it gives them instant access to both options and they can take care of rebooking on their own.
Strategy #3: White Space Competition
Every once in a while, depending on how our books are looking, we’ll do a competition for our front desk to get white space filled.
The way it worked was we basically said for anybody already on the books that a front desk team member added an add-on service to, would get a cash incentive.
And omg it is always so fun to see how creative they get with finding opportunities to make the offer.
They would be booking an appointment over the phone and offer an add-on in addition to the service the guest requested.
They’d also offer add-ons to guests while they were making confirmation calls for upcoming appointments.
And they did so well!
We had one of our girls that sold about 18 to 20 add-ons just in a 3 to 4-week period!
This obviously helped increase revenue coming in but even more than that, it helped get them in the habit of offering the add-ons and getting comfortable with it.
And this is so important! Especially if you have someone new in the industry or someone new, that you're training at your front desk, you may have someone that is just scared to get told no.
So this was a fun way to create the habit of regularly offering those add-ons and helped them become comfortable with being told no because they learned that you’re never going to get a yes if you don’t ask.
Want to hear more about how your front desk can contribute to the salon’s revenue?
Check out the podcast episode below!
