Digital & traditional marketing tips for hair & beauty salons

Marketing ideas and websites features for hair dressers and beauty salons looking to expand business

Each week, E-creation targets a different business sector providing website design and marketing advice, especially for smaller local businesses. This week, we are focusing on hair dressers and beauty salons.

This is a market that traditionally would appear not to benefit from online marketing, given the importance of word of mouth. However, as the general population has become more and more web literate, customers have come to expect more from businesses in terms of the information they make available online.

For hair dressers and beauty salons, E-creation as developed a set of low cost, high impact online marketing tools:

• Facebook - creating a Facebook fan group that enables your customers to upload their own photos of events they've attended after their brilliant haircut, share information with Facebook friends and interact with each other (as well helping to drive traffic to your website and improve search engine rankings).
• Online bookings - a simple online booking system allows customers to make their appointments online (and for the salon to manage appointments using a simple online system) and even pay for it online ahead of time.
• Printable gift vouchers - online personalised, printable gift vouchers enable 'loved ones' to purchase a hair cut or beauty appointment as a gift or surprise. These can be marketed through different channels (such as www.lastminute.com) to open up a completely new market.
• Call back technology for instant sales - web technology enables website visitors to enter their phone number and instantly receive a call back from the salon, which is created automatically by 3rd party software and connects the salon as a received call. This instant communication means better conversion rates into new customers.
• E-commerce facilities for products - online shops can be easily built and represent a valuable revenue stream for salons who might otherwise see the business go to chains such as Boots or large retailers like Tesco. Hair and beauty products have large margins and can often be more profitable sources of income than haircuts or treatments.
• Twitter - instant communication of special offers sent directly to subscribing Twitter accounts lets you fill quiet periods of business rapidly, increasing overall profitability.

Of course, cost is always a key factor for smaller businesses but at E-creation we prove to our clients time and time again that a website is a business investment, the same as creating a leaflet for your reception or attractive signage for the front of the business. The only difference is that a website can be seen by a much larger audience and provides the chance to create new revenue.

Hair and beauty salon website design templates means E-creation can produce websites for as little as £300 for smaller, salons who are looking to see a low-cost avenue to test the impact of having a website on business revenue.

For more established businesses, an investment of £1,500 enables E-creation to create an online shop, Facebook account and put Twitter into a website for a revenue producing tool that can add £10,000's to a hair or beauty salon's bottom line.