Deals and promotions: two ways to discount on purpose

Discounts have a bad reputation among salon owners, and mostly they have earned it. A blanket twenty percent off fills the book with people who will never pay full price, and it quietly takes money from regulars who would have come anyway.

But a quiet Tuesday is also real, and so is a new service that nobody has tried yet. The trick is to discount on purpose: for a reason, for a limited group, for a limited time, and with a number at the end that tells you whether it worked.

SalonRadar has two tools for this. They look similar and do different jobs, so it is worth knowing which to reach for.

	Promotion	Deal
How the client gets it	Automatically. The price is simply lower.	By typing a promo code at booking.
Who sees it	Everyone looking at your services	Only people who have the code
Good for	Seasonal pricing, quiet days, launching a service	New-client offers, partnerships, flyers, win-backs
Limits	Start and end date	Dates, minimum spend, total uses, uses per client, new clients only

Promotions: a lower price, in public

A promotion lowers the price of the services you choose for as long as you choose. Clients see the reduced price with the regular one struck through, so the saving is obvious and so is the fact that it is temporary.

You pick a percentage or a fixed amount, select individual services or whole categories, and optionally set a start and end date. Leave the dates empty and it runs until you pause it. A promotion with a future start date sits as "scheduled" and switches itself on, which means you can set up December in November and forget about it.

When to use one

• Launching something new. Ten percent off a new treatment for its first month gives people a reason to try it and gives you early feedback.
• Seasonal services. Autumn colour refresh, pre-summer waxing. The struck-through price does the marketing for you.
• Clearing a category. If you are phasing out a product line and the services that use it, a category-wide promotion moves it along.

Because everybody gets a promotion, keep it narrow. One category, a few weeks. A permanent promotion is just a lower price with extra steps.

Deals: a code for a particular group

A deal is a coupon campaign. You give it a name for yourself ("Spring new-client offer"), a code for the client ("SPRING25"), and a discount. The client types the code while booking and the total updates.

The useful part is the fine control:

• New clients only. The code works only for people with no previous bookings at your salon. This is the single most valuable switch on the page. It lets you advertise an introductory offer without handing it to every regular who sees the post.
• Total uses and uses per client. Cap a campaign at fifty redemptions, or one per person.
• Minimum spend. Five euros off, but only on bookings over forty.
• Specific services or categories. A code that only applies to colour, or only to the new facial.
• Valid from and until. After the end date the code stops working by itself.

As you fill in the form, a live preview runs the numbers on an example booking, so you can see what the client will pay before you publish anything. If a fixed discount is larger than the eligible total, it is capped so that a booking never goes below zero.

When to use one

• Anything you print or post. A different code on the flyer, the Instagram story and the partner gym's noticeboard tells you which one brought people in.
• Win-backs. Email clients you have not seen in six months a personal-feeling code with one use per client.
• Saying sorry. Something went wrong, you want to make it right. A single-use code is cleaner than a note in the diary.

Did it work?

The Deals page opens with four figures: active deals, redemptions, discounts given, and net revenue from the discounted bookings. Each code shows its own usage against its limit and its own revenue impact.

That last pair is the one to look at. Discounts in SalonRadar are recorded as a deduction from gross revenue, so reports always reconcile: gross minus discount equals net. If a campaign gave away two hundred euros and the bookings it produced brought in nine hundred from people you had never seen before, that is a good trade. If it gave away two hundred to people who were coming anyway, you will see that too.

When a campaign is over, archive it. Its history stays visible and the code is freed up to use again next year. If it worked, duplicate it and change the dates.

Three rules we would follow ourselves

1. Every discount needs an end date before it goes live, even if you extend it later.
2. Public offers for services, private codes for people. If the goal is to move a service, use a promotion. If the goal is to reach a group, use a deal.
3. Look at net, not redemptions. A code used ninety times is not a success by itself.