Results Matter: Why Your Beauty Biz Needs a Performance-Based Marketing Model

Here are 5 key performance-based marketing metrics to target

Building your beauty business is a mixture of art and science. The art is created and renewed every day by your stylists, estheticians, and technicians: Happy clients who leave your business looking and feeling better than they did before — and eager to spread the word to their family, friends, and social media followers. The science often comes clad in less familiar terms, building “lead generation” among your key “buyer personas” while minimizing “churn rate” and so on.

Fortunately, performance-based marketing makes sense for just about every beauty brand, whether you’re the kind of business owner who loves wading deep into key metrics and performance rates or the kind who prefers to spend as little time staring at spreadsheets as possible. Here’s why.

What is performance-based marketing for beauty businesses?

Performance-based marketing for beauty businesses is marketing that is focused on delivering certain key results. Also sometimes referred to simply as “performance marketing,” it’s a data-driven field in which marketers charge clients based on results that have a measurable impact on the business’ bottom line rather than more abstract concepts such as building brand awareness. That said, performance marketing can target any metric — the important thing is that those metrics are measurable and well-defined ahead of time.

Here are some of the advantages of performance-based marketing for beauty businesses, whether you’re running a hair salon, massage parlor, Medspa, or beyond:

• It saves money by only charging based on successful conversions for certain metrics that you’ve decided are important for your business, rather than leaving you on the hook for marketing campaigns that may barely move the needle.

• It encourages results by tying your marketer or marketing solution’s paycheck to key conversions. Your success is literally their success.

• It puts you in control by empowering you to adjust your marketing as needed: If you have a surplus one month (because you’re only paying for results) you can invest it into expanding your campaigns, and if you need to save money the next month you can rein your targets in. Just don’t forget that tougher economic times are an especially impactful time to focus on marketing.

5 KPIs to watch for performance-based beauty marketing

As we said before, performance-based marketing means prioritizing certain important data points. These are referred to as key performance indicators (KPIs), and each type of business will have different ones to monitor for its success: a campaign for a mobile app may prioritize how many people install the app, while a campaign for a bakery could measure dozens of cookies sold.

Here are some of the KPIs a beauty business could focus its performance marketing campaigns on.

Appointments made

The most fundamental measure of any beauty business’ success is how many clients it sees; therefore, choosing appointments as a KPI is an easy choice. When combined with an easy-to-use self-booking solution, it’s trivial for a marketing solution to track how many clients sign up for appointments via email blast and then only charge once the appointment is completed — meaning you only pay after your bottom line has benefited.

No-shows rescheduled

The strengths of performance marketing become more apparent when you drill down into even deeper metrics. For instance, no-shows are a frustrating drain on resources that can feel downright disrespectful to your business’ time — but many people simply forget they made an appointment until it’s too late. By sending out automated appointment reminders with a built-in option to reschedule, marketing software helps clients feel empowered and employees stay busy; each time one of those reschedule links is followed, it means a chance for more revenue instead of just frustration.

Lost clients rescued

Regular clients provide a reliable revenue stream for beauty businesses and they also show the potential beauty businesses have to be community cornerstones: a place to connect with other people that transcends the usual lines of personal background and career choices. But schedules change, routines are disrupted, and old sources of stability fall by the wayside. Bringing back lapsed clients can be a boon for your business both in terms of the immediate revenue boost and for maintaining a healthy micro-community. All it takes to track is a marketing solution that helps you automatically reach out to those clients who may otherwise be forgotten with an invitation to schedule their next appointment.

Products sold

Healthy retail sales are an essential part of many beauty businesses' revenue stream, especially as more and more have their selection of products pull double duty online. Walking customers past walls of products as stylists make helpful buying suggestions is a proven sales method, but how do you replicate that kind of success in an online format? Thankfully, many ecommerce solutions make it easy to tell when clients make purchases by following certain links, so you can double down on the solutions that work and steer away from those that don’t.

Newsletter subscriptions

Email is one of the most profitable ways to market your business — in fact, it’s an ideal way to kickstart all of the performance-based marketing targets we’ve talked about so far. The more people who stay engaged with your business and brand via an update in their inbox every few days or couple of weeks, the more potential business you have to gain. Even if the newsletter itself doesn’t bring in a cent of profit, the marketing possibilities it opens up shouldn’t be overlooked.