Why You Can’t Ignore Email for Even One More Second if You Want a “100K+ Salon”

Top Salons that use killer email campaigns to connect with and inspire their guests create message content that is as different as night and day from one salon to another; but there is one absolute BRONZ-EN rule they all follow, and it jumps out and smacks you in the face when you read enough of their emails.

They’ve trained their guests to open their emails by gaining their trust. They do not bombard them with sales offers in every email and they GIVE away their most valuable knowledge, info and tools that enrich the guest’s salon experience … FOR FREE! A salon owner once told me that if she “sends an email that contains a secret so good that it makes her feel kinda sick and a little guilty about giving it for FREE”, then she knows that it’s great content. BTW she emails 3,000 plus people, has an open rate of over 75 percent and has doubled her revenue with her email campaigns.

Here are three email-writing habits you may think are great, but actually hurt your open rates:

Okay, you should make sure the recipient knows the message is from your salon because the customer loves your salon and doesn’t tan anywhere else. (People love people, not businesses.) The first mistake of a bad email campaign: emails from a business get opened about 99 percent less frequently than person-to-person emails. No one likes getting email with ads and product offerings from a business – message deleted before it’s even opened.

Okay, you need to remember to not offend anyone and to create a message that appeals to everyone who reads it. Simple. The more appealing you make it for your entire email audience, the more response you’ll get – common sense, right? WRONG! When you try to appeal to everyone, something weird happens and you end up appealing to no one, because now your message feels generic and impersonal. Figure out who your ultimate customer is or whose eyes you want to read your emails. A great way to do this is to come up with an avatar (computer persona) that represents the customer. Think of everything about them: gender, interests, age, relationship status, income. Are they parents? Students? Even name the avatar and every time you write an email, write to that one person.

Okay, you’ve spent crazy time and money designing and marketing your salon, from the logo to the cool graphics you put on your ads. So, you should definitely put those very same cool graphics and logos into your emails to make them look amazing, right? NO! Why? Two reasons:

1. As soon as one of the many spam filters picks up images embedded in the email, it will send the message to the spam bin. (I know what I do with emails in the spam folder: Delete.)

2. Person-to-person emails don’t usually contain graphics and logos, so when most people see a “pretty” email with logos and graphics they think, “What are they trying to sell me now? Email deleted and never even read.

Next month, you get three true life examples of great email content – for FREE.