A leading salon with nearly 30 locations had a problem: more than half of their guests only visit once a year — and of those guests, 75 percent never come back.  

Like most salons, the majority of their revenue comes from frequent guests. In fact, even though only 25 percent of guests visit their salons at least twice per year, they account for almost 50 percent of their revenue. The company needed to convert more guests into frequent guests to increase their revenue.

The Problem

The salon previously  ran “miss you” marketing campaigns using third-party software. Since they ran  these campaigns with a marketing system that wasn’t integrated with their  appointment book, there was no alignment between the volume of emails it sent  on a given day and the salon’s availability. This resulted in thousands of emails being sent out by a third-party system at same time in a given month. This was frustrating for customers who received an offer, only to discover there were no appointments available when they tried to book.

Even when appointments  were available, the offer wasn’t automatically reflected online and customers had to painstakingly enter in a code to redeem it. Customer drop-off rates were high and overall campaign effectiveness was low.

The salon’s previous marketing campaigns relied on rules and target customer segments to determine which customers to include and how often to send them offers. Fine-tuning  campaigns on a daily basis — which required personalizing offers and emails based on open rates and conversion rates — was a manual process that was impractical for a busy salon.

The Solution

Using the same campaign  creative as their previous “miss you” campaigns, the salon launched Smart Marketing campaigns in all of their locations.

Since Smart Marketing is integrated with the point-of-sale system, it automatically matches the volume of emails to the number of open appointments. For instance, when the  salon’s appointment book is low, it sends more emails to customers. This helps  the salon fill slow days, while ensuring customers aren’t frustrated by lack of availability when they attempt to book on full days. Smart Marketing also ensures that enough emails are sent throughout the month to create a steady supply of new bookings, rather than sending large blasts on a single day.

Smart Marketing also makes it easy to redeem offers by embedding the offer code directly in the email link. When the salon’s customers click the link to book online, the discount is automatically applied without requiring customers to enter in a code. Campaign drop-off rates are low, and conversion rates are high.

Unlike the salon’s previous marketing tool, Smart Marketing goes beyond rules and customer segments to automatically predict which content will appeal to each customer and adapt the offer over time. This means the salon’s customers are led through a marketing campaign funnel that begins with a reminder to come in and slowly increases the offer in response to the customer’s behavior.

All of this runs seamlessly and automatically in the background, freeing up the salon to focus on other aspects of their business.

The Results

Zenoti worked with the salon to move their existing “miss you” campaigns to Smart Marketing.

In the first 30 days, the results were significant:

1. Three percent of all lost guests returned for a service
2. Total revenue increased  by 5 percent
3. Smart Marketing campaigns drove five times higher revenue than their previous approach
4. Campaign open rates were 60 percent higher than the industry average, and click rates were nearly three times the industry average

Smart Marketing also enabled the salon to go beyond open rates and click rates and surface meaningful insights about their campaign performance. The Smart Marketing dashboard, shown in the example below, helped the salon understand exactly how well their campaigns were converting into bookings and driving revenue.

Discover more inspiring Zenoti customer stories here.

1 Based on industry average open rates of 17 percent and click rates of 1.8 percent.