Email campaigns for salons: winning back clients who drifted away

Somewhere in your client list there are a few hundred people who liked you, came three or four times, and then stopped. Nothing went wrong. They moved flat, changed jobs, tried the place nearer the office, or simply fell out of the habit. Most of them would come back if something reminded them you exist.

That is what email is for. Not a weekly newsletter nobody asked for. A short, well-aimed message a few times a year to people who said they would like to hear from you.

Start with who you are allowed to write to

Under EU rules, a client giving you their email address to confirm a booking has not agreed to receive marketing. They need to have opted in, and they need to be able to opt out again easily. It is the law, and it is also good manners: people who did not ask for your emails do not read them, and a few will mark them as spam, which hurts delivery for everyone else.

SalonRadar handles this by design. Clients are offered an optional marketing tick-box when they book. Campaigns can only ever reach people who ticked it. The audience count you see while building a campaign is the number of consented clients who match, and every email carries an unsubscribe link that takes effect at once. There is no setting to override any of that.

Aim before you write

The audience builder is where most of the value is. You can filter by:

• Last visit. Everyone who has not been in for four months.
• Client type. New or returning.
• Lifetime spend. Your top fifty clients deserve a different message from someone who came once.
• Service history. People who have had a service, or who have not, within a number of days. "Returning clients who have not had a colour in the last ten weeks" is a list of people whose roots are showing.
• Preferred language.
• Pet species and size, if you groom.

A live count shows how many consented clients match as you adjust the filters. If the answer is eleven, write to eleven. An email that is obviously relevant to the person reading it outperforms a clever email sent to everyone.

Four campaigns worth sending

The win-back

Audience: returning clients, last visit more than five months ago. Message: two sentences and a booking button. "It has been a while. We would love to see you." If you add an incentive, make it a promo code limited to one use per client, so that you can see exactly who came back because of it.

The "you are due"

Audience: returning clients who have not had a particular service in the last ten weeks. This is not really marketing. It is a service, and clients tend to read it as one.

The introduction

Audience: clients who have had service A but never service B. Facial regulars who have never tried the peel. Cut clients who have never had a treatment. One short paragraph on what it is and who it suits.

The quiet-week filler

Audience: your regulars. Message: "We have unexpected space next week." Use this sparingly. It works because it is rare.

Writing it

The editor builds an email from simple blocks: heading, text, image, button. It is wrapped in your salon's branding, and you can preview it before anything goes out. Merge fields such as the client's first name are filled in for each recipient. The button points at your booking page unless you change it.

If your clients speak more than one language, write a version for each. Every recipient gets the one that matches their preferred language, from the same campaign.

A few habits that help:

• One email, one point, one button. If you want to say two things, send two emails a month apart.
• Write the subject line like a text to a friend. "Your roots called" will be opened. "Autumn Newsletter, Issue 4" will not.
• Sound like your salon. If you are chatty at the chair, be chatty in the email.
• Save what works as a template. Next season's win-back should take five minutes.

You can send straight away or schedule for later. A scheduled campaign works out its audience at the moment of sending, so someone who books in the meantime drops out of your win-back list without you doing anything.

Did it work?

After sending, the campaign page shows delivery and how recipients interacted with it, split by language. The figure that matters is further down: bookings generated and revenue attributed to the campaign. Opens are vanity. Bookings are the point.

Do not expect miracles. If a win-back email to two hundred lapsed clients brings ten of them back, that is ten people who were gone, returned for the price of twenty minutes' work, and some of them will stay for years.

One technical thing worth doing

By default, campaigns go out from a shared SalonRadar address. You can instead send from your own domain, so that the email comes from [email protected]. You enter the domain, SalonRadar gives you a few DNS records to add at your domain provider, and once they verify, campaigns switch over by themselves. It looks more professional and it helps your emails reach the inbox. If DNS is not your idea of a good time, whoever set up your website can do it in ten minutes.

How often?

Less than you think. Four to six campaigns a year to any one person is plenty. Every email you send spends a little of the goodwill that made them tick the box. Spend it on something they will be glad to have received.