While the lockdown period has been incredibly tough, one positive to come from it is that most of us have improved our digital skills. Karen Davis reveals five digital tips salon owners can carry through into reopening

Many salon and spa owners have taken the opportunity during this enforced closure period to revisit their online presence and ramp it up so that this asset is working full time for them when their business is up and running again. Here are five pieces of digital advice to see your salon through coronavirus lockdown and out the other side.

1. Get to know your client base

Do you think you know who your customers are? Let’s just make sure. Go through all your customer records and make a spreadsheet. Extract the following data:

• Age

• How many times they come to your salon in a year

• Which treatment(s) they have

• How much they spend in a year; do they buy products?

Now put it into age groups, then into treatment types so you can see any potential trends. Spend time looking at it yourself and see if there are any standout results. What is this data telling you and what can you improve?

What’s the average spend per client, per visit? How many buy products? How many clients have only been once – any thoughts on why? What are your most popular treatments? Can you improve these? Really think about what the data is showing.

2. Build a client profile

From the data, are you able to profile different clients? Could you say that your 18 to 20-year-old clients mainly come for waxing whereas your 40-year-old clients tend to visit you for facials, for example? Make a note of who buys products.

Are you able to split them into different databases so that once you’re fully operational again, you can email them with relevant offers? This means they are more likely to respond to the messaging you put out and you won’t clutter their inbox with stuff that’s of no interest to them.

3. Master the basics of SEO

Next, clean up your website. Go through each page and look at what you’ve said with search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind: if you use certain keywords you’re more likely to come up in Google searches when potential clients are looking for salons or spas.

Use websites like audiense to profile your audience; then you can find out which words they search for. Try wordstream as well to look at words people search for – you can get free trials on most sites.

4. Showcase your expertise

Why pay someone else to promote your salon? The good news is that you are already an influencer. Your clients choose to come to you regularly for their treatments. Why? Because they trust your expertise. An influencer is just that, someone whose opinion is trusted, and that’s you so let’s start to put you as an influencer to work.

Lookfantastic has launched a social initiative to help support self-employed beauty professionals. The beauty retailer is expanding its influencer programme to independent salon owners, therapists and nail techs, offering them the opportunity to create content on their social channels around topics relevant to lookfantastic customers. You then receive a link and a code to include in each post, with every sale that comes via the link or the code earning you commission.

5. Focus on online retail

If you haven’t already, get an online shop going and direct your customers to it. I recommend Shopify as it’s pretty easy and you can get a one-month free trial. Your clients come to you for your expertise, so why would they not buy what you recommend for them at your shop?

Karen Davis is a specialist in digital PR for the beauty industry with more than 25 years’ experience. She is also an author, podcaster and beauty blogger