I reckon you should be sending a number of emails every month to customers who aren’t returning and spending their lovely money with you, but just when IS customer is “lost”?

This is a tricky one and where to draw the line varies a lot between salons, but I can share some loose guidelines that will help you to decide.

What is a “lost client”?

A client who isn’t current – somewhere along the line they haven’t rebooked.  The tricky thing is knowing when they are “lost” and when they are “infrequent” – we all have those customers who think an annual trim is all they need.

Why do I need to know?

So that we can market to them, bring them back into the fold and make them “current” again. These are people who have responded to your marketing in the past and are familiar with your brand – assuming you didn’t really piss them off, getting them back should be easier than trying to market to a cold prospect.

What, say, after a year?

I think that’s waaaay too long.  If you have a client visiting every 8 weeks, she’ll have been to another salon 6 times in a year.  It’s safe to assume the salon she chose isn’t completely useless, so she will have started building loyalty to that salon and getting her back will be really tough.

So shall we say 7 weeks then?

That’s probably too soon for a hair salon, though it might suit, say, a nail salon where you’d expect a customer to return frequently for fill-ins.  If you email discounts to hair customers after 7 weeks, you’ll be discounting services for all those lovely loyal clients who happen to leave it 8, 9 or 10 weeks between cuts.  That will hurt your profitability really quickly.

Stop dicking about – how long then?

It really depends on how long your clients tend to leave it between visits.  If your average is, say 6 weeks you can probably assume clients are wandering off after about 12 weeks.  If your average is 8 weeks you could consider making the cutoff later.  I wouldn’t go much higher than about 15 or 16 weeks though.

You’ll need to monitor and tweak this a couple of times a year, and definitely if it feels like you’re discounting a lot of visits that would have happened anyway.

What do I need to ask my reception system?

  1. Your average return visit period in weeks – you should be monitoring this as one of your salon KPIs anyway.  If you can’t find it, call support.
  2. A list of customers with email addresses who haven’t returned for approximately double your average return visit period.  DON’T just extract it and send the first few times – cast your eye over it and see if there are names of customers you KNOW aren’t “lost” – it probably means you’ve set the criteria a little too low.

So I know who is “lost”, what now?

Now you need to come up with a cracking offer to win them back.  Nobody is truly lost forever until they’ve unsubscribed from your “lost” list and don’t want to hear from you again.

Or they died.

Got an amazing response on a “lost” client offer?  Send it over – I’d love to share it!

Phil