8 Ideas to get your salon ready for Christmas.

Fun ways to market your salon over the festive period.

Where did the year go? How are we at the end of November?

Black Friday, Christmas then it’s the New Year

I’m personally so focussed on planning for 2020, my upcoming course launch in January, and everything I need to do for that. But the days leading up to Christmas and New Years are such an important time to focus on marketing!

Not only is everyone shopping around for gifts, there’s also a peaceful mood in the air. I think it’s a really important time to connect with clients and potential clients.

As November is not quite over, get a bit of a plan for your December marketing. It’s time for some fun ideas for promoting your beauty business around the holidays.

Here are 8 creative marketing ideas to keep your crazy holiday season organized, make more money in your business, and have a holly jolly Christmas (yep, I went there!)

Get together salon photos looking Christmas ready.

I hope you’ve got some fun promotions and marketing planned for the season - if not I am here to help. One of the best ways to make your social media, website, ads, and emails look great during the the festive season is by having great photography of your own salon and treatment rooms.

You still have time left before Christmas and New Years you could get a professional in but I am guessing you could have some fun with your team and take some great ones of your own.

Need a few ideas to get you started:

Team photos in Christmas in jumpers, with mugs of hot chocolate and twinkle lights

Photos of your gift cards, you and your team holding your gift cards and them framed in a cute way for emails, ads, social media posts.

Get together some of your best selling products and gift packs or create your own Photos of your top selling retail products and gift packs, take them in your salon and with your team. They look so much better than stock photos and company photos.

Photos of your salon with Christmas decorations and details, great to get everyone feeling a bit Christmasy.

Start a Christmas gift voucher campaign

Do you sell gift vouchers around the festive season? I recommend that you look at doing them, because they can be such a lucrative way to boost your sales while also welcoming in new clients who’ve received a gift from their friend or family (thank you for the referral!)

There are lots of ways to do this but things like creating special packages that cannot be purchased any other way work well. For example a Cinnamon spiced pedicure would be very seasonal. You could also do buy £100 of vouchers and get £20 free. The free voucher could be gifted or kept as a treat. Just think how great it would be to sell even a few of those before Christmas.

If you are not sure how to create them you can use the templates in Canva or contact someone like Verve Designs over on Facebook who can create them for you at a very reasonable price.

Promote your retail products as gifts on your social media

December is the perfect time to sell more retail products as well! You have so many clients coming in and out of your doors, why not let them do some Christmas shopping, too? And while they’re at it they might pick something up for themselves.

One fun popular thing to do is put together box sets or duos of products as a gift. People love gifting and receiving gift packs. Do you have some smaller sizes of your most popular products that you can bundle up together?

Once you have your gift sets sorted, start promoting them on Facebook and Instagram. As already mentioned put your products together with bows or wrapping paper in the background, to look more like Christmas.

A great way to promote your retail products before Christmas is by doing gift guides on social. Using your festive photos of your top products under £20 or £10 dress them up, and share them on your social media.

Don’t hide your retail products in your salon, make them shine on social media so your clients are already excited to buy when they come in! Then show them off in the salon too. They may buy as a gift or for themselves you never know.

Plan a 12-days of Christmas contest and promotions

This is a really great idea, there is so much room for creativity, it will be good for engagement on social Media too. You also get to promote your products and services.

On the 12 days leading up to Christmas, you can run a new special promotion each day, plus giveaways which get everyone excited.

Can you think of some of the awesome products and services you can promote during your Christmas countdown?

Prepare some fun festive emails to get more bookings

Emails are the perfect way to communicate with your clients over the holidays and get them excited about what you’re offering.

To make sure these email actually work, make sure that you’re consistent, that your emails are not overly salesy, and that they have a ton of value in them.

If you just pop into inboxes whenever you have something to sell, and your emails are not personal at all but stuffy and businessy, it’s very likely that they’ll get ignored.

But Christmas is the perfect time to be warm and welcoming in your emails! And trust me, when you’re intentional about what you put into them, your clients will love opening up your emails and hearing from you.

Try to send 1-4 emails over the holiday season - one per week is my personal recommend as that’s what I do!

Here are some ideas of what to include in your festive emails:

Share some photos from your team festive photo shoot, maybe some that don’t actually make your website or social media.

In your first email, tell them something big is coming to get them excited about your upcoming promotions (think of this as an early December teaser!)

Get them excited about your 12 days of Christmas contest, with photos of the contest prizes and links your your Instagram feed

Share photos of your gift cards, even just a fun random photo of you holding the gift card is great.

Tell them what your most popular services are over the holidays (Christmas style guides with photos)

Wish them Merry Christmas if they celebrate as well as Happy New Years.

You can create graphics in Canva for your emails, but personal photos tend to get the best response.

Have a plan to get reviews from all your new clients

With all of the holiday styles and makeovers, Christmas party pampering, etc, this can be a very busy time of year! Plus, you’ll have a bunch of new clients coming in end of December and beginning of January from gift cards.

Make sure that you make the most of all of these new clients coming in. It goes without saying that you need to provide them with a fabulous guest service from start to finish.

If you can you want to turn these new clients into regular clients. Get there email addresses on your mailing list, tell them where to find you on social media.

Lastly, be sure to have new clients leave you a review! Follow up with them after their appointment through email or text message (your booking software should let you do this) telling them that you were so happy to meet them, and asking them for their feedback in the form of a review.

If you have 30 new clients come in over the holidays, and half of them leave you reviews on Google, think of how much your Google or Facebook review ranking will increase! Having a bunch of new 5-star reviews will help you get found online, and it will bring in even more clients in the future.

Facebook adverts get more eyes on your offers

Facebook adverts can work great at this time of the year too. But I will leave that for another blog.

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