Your digital marketing agency is sitting on a goldmine. A quick search of area salons will likely yield dozens of prospective clients—business owners who could benefit greatly from WiFi marketing service.
Your agency can leverage the salons’ guest WiFi to improve customer communications and execute targeted marketing campaigns. The benefits of WiFi marketing are easy to explain to salon owners—by using the WiFi network to collect contact information and gain insight into customer behavior, you can refine customer outreach to better achieve marketing objectives. Your agency can provide WiFi marketing services with a turn-key or DIY plan, with two price points that let you target large and small salon businesses.
When selling WiFi marketing to salons, it helps if you understand salon owners, and to do that, you have to understand salon customers. In this article, we’ll start with a look at what makes salon customers unique and explain why they’re prime targets for WiFi marketing. Then we’ll explore how guest WiFi fits into the salon owner’s world, and we’ll wrap up with a discussion about the incredible customer engagement opportunities that WiFi marketing makes possible.
A Profile of Salon Customers
When deciding to visit a beauty salon for the first time, customers aren’t usually willing to just roll the dice and hope for the best. After all, this is their hair we’re talking about!
Salon prospects need to see good reviews. Feedback from existing customers will carry a lot of weight when a prospect is searching for a new salon. By asking every salon customer to post a review, your clients can gather an impressive collection of positive reviews and give prospects the proof of quality service they need to see. Through WiFi marketing, your agency can solicit reviews and encourage social sharing that will bring in new prospects.
From the perspective of an existing salon customer, access to free, fast, and secure internet service has inherent value.
A few salon customers will leave their uncharged flip phone in the car while they’re getting a blue rinse. Everyone else will walk in holding their smartphone, and they won’t put it away for the entire duration of their visit. Most will greatly appreciate a guest WiFi service. Their carrier-provided data plan may not be up to the job, too expensive, or too slow.
Free guest WiFi is an amenity that creates goodwill between the salon owner and the customer. That’s an important relationship and the burden of maintaining it falls on the salon owner, as we’ll discuss in the next section.
A Profile of Salon Owners
A successful salon owner, often an owner-operator, is an agile entrepreneur seeking to engage their customers and prospects with personalized outreach. They attract and retain clients by providing a consistently high level of service and offering perks that differentiate them from competitors.
WiFi marketing enables customer outreach that converts prospects and regularly reminds existing salon customers why they should keep coming to the salon.
It’s not difficult for a proficient salon owner to minimize customer churn, but it requires regular communication with the customer. If a salon owner actively maintains their relationship with every customer, those people will not stray. They won’t even look for another salon, much less switch to a competitor.
By using WiFi marketing to drive automated loyalty marketing campaigns, your agency can address beauty salon owners’ most pressing concerns: retaining customers and growing their business.
With a firm understanding of salon owners and their patrons, let’s move on to examine how your agency can use WiFi marketing to help salon owners meet their business goals.
Salon Guest WiFi Marketing in Action
WiFi marketing opens channels for customer engagement, allowing your agency to exploit email, text, and social media to optimize communication.
Leveraging the salon’s guest WiFi network, your agency can collect all forms of customer contact info. Furthermore, while POS data is useful in tracking customer behavior, the presence analytics used in WiFi marketing makes it easier to collect, consolidate, and analyze customer data. Metrics like Date of Last Visit, Number of Visits, and such enable marketers to fine-tune messages based on customers’ history with the salon.
In the next two sections, we’ll delve into the ways your agency can use a salon’s guest WiFi service for improved customer engagement.
On-Site Engagement Opportunities
While salon patrons are on the premises, marketers have an opportunity to promote services, foster loyalty, request reviews, and prompt social media shares. You can also gather the customer contact info needed to achieve those marketing objectives.
The WiFi splash screen is where you can present your most important marketing messages, which will change over time.
If your customer database is lacking data, use this valuable marketing real estate to gather email addresses, perhaps by getting people to subscribe to your client’s email newsletter. When you turn your attention to increasing social media engagement, use the WiFi splash screen to encourage customers to check in on Facebook during their stay.
If gaining positive reviews becomes your top priority, the WiFi splash screen is a good place to direct the customer toward Yelp and let them know how much a review would be appreciated. The only better way to solicit a review is via an email or text that’s sent right after the visit.
When a customer leaves your client’s salon, they’ll be walking on air—loving how they look, and feeling great about your client’s business. That’s the perfect time to ask for a review and it’s a valuable onsite marketing opportunity. (In the parking lot counts as “on-site” engagement.)
Two minutes after the customer disconnects from guest WiFi, they should receive an automatically sent message requesting that they post a review. That’s how you seize the moment when the customer is most receptive to your request.
Off-Site Engagement Opportunities
Customer contact data, collected through WiFi marketing tactics, can be used for ongoing customer engagement. For example, a next-day “thank you” email can be used to spotlight new products and services, offer discounts, and generally strengthen the customer relationship. Social media can also be instrumental in meeting a salon’s marketing objectives. For portions of the customer base, social media may get far more attention than other communication channels.
For that reason, your off-site outreach should not be restricted to email or social media, rather, your agency should take advantage of both channels, aligning campaign goals with the most effective channel.
WiFi marketing’s use of presence analytics simplifies the application of key customer behavior metrics in your marketing strategies. Basic metrics like a customer’s Date of Last Visit and their Number of Visits can help you send messages that are tailored based on the customer’s current relationship with the salon. This data can ensure that you promote customer loyalty programs to the right people and improve how you reach out to long-absent salon customers.
Beauty Salons—The Perfect Arena for WiFi Marketing
Providing consistently great service is imperative for salon owners who want to grow their business, but creative marketing is also required. With WiFi marketing, your agency can help salon owners succeed.
During a salon visit, the customer experience involves a lot of waiting, first in the waiting area, then in the stylist’s chair. With that much waiting going on, phones come out fast and stay out!
By providing free guest WiFi, you’ll be giving the salon’s customers a service they really appreciate and simultaneously enabling access to amazing marketing opportunities.
Your agency can collect customer contact details that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. You can send customized, personalized marketing outreach, all targeted and timed with precision. With WiFi marketing tactics, you can more effectively promote your client’s services, foster customer loyalty, encourage social sharing, and solicit reviews.
When you work with clients who own salons, WiFi marketing should be a key part of your customer engagement strategy.