The email marketing cheat sheet of your dreams
Imagine you were asked to list the most powerful marketing channels. What would you put at the top?
If you said — or thought — “email marketing” just now, you’d be right. With an ROI of 42 to one, this classic promotional tactic delivers enormous value to the beauty businesses that master it.
From building your email list to how to craft the perfect subject line, this article breaks down everything you need to know to successfully launch a salon email marketing strategy.
5 salon email marketing best practices
How to collect ALL the email addresses
The foundation of any email marketing strategy is your email database. No matter how good your emails are, they can only do so much for your business if you're only sending them to ten people. To ensure you spread your salon’s gospel as far as possible, here are a few tried and true tactics for collecting email addresses:
Events: Anytime you throw an event or community gathering at your salon, ask your guests to give you their email to join the festivities. After all, you're going through all the trouble of hosting the cool event — the least they could do is share a bit of contact info.
Giveaways: Do you regularly run promotional giveaways on your social media channels, website, or in your salon? Make sure when you do that an email address is a required part of the signup process.
Customer processing: Remember to ask for email addresses whenever your clients book online, over the phone, or in person.
It’s important to note that you should include the proper disclosures so people understand what they are signing up for. This step is a wise legal move — and just the right thing to do.
How to write emails like Hemingway (if he was a marketer)
Whole books have been written about writing effective emails, but excellence in this endeavor comes down to crafting snappy subject lines, bulletproof bodies, and killer CTAs.
Snappy subject lines: So much depends on the subject line. If this 50-characters-or-less bombshell doesn’t wow your audience, then the rest of the undoubtedly glorious email might as well not exist. To increase your odds of getting someone to actually open your email, consider focusing on the value the rest of the email will provide, deleting unnecessary words, and avoiding all the telltale signs of spam.
Bulletproof body: When it comes to the meat of the email, you want to tell a compelling and compact story. Grab your audience’s attention immediately with an interesting opener, keep the middle lean and useful, and close with one more CTAs — which we’ll cover below. While you're writing the body of the email, it’s crucial to remember that this is not a novel. Consider breaking paragraphs into standalone lines and then cutting those down as much out as possible. Brevity is as much the soul of effective email marketing for salons as it is of wit.
Killer CTAs: Despite what ancient digital marketing wisdom says, the truth is effective emails can have one or multiple calls to action (CTAs). Recent studies have shown that the use of multiple CTAs significantly boosts performance. But regardless of how many CTAs you use, you want to make sure that each one explains that the person will get some valuable thing (ex: “for five more tips”) if they take the next step (ex: “Click here”).
How to channel your inner email artist
Killer wording is just one half of the email equation: You want something that looks good, too. Just like writing emails, there are a few tips that can set you up for fabulous correspondence.
Get inspired: The first step in almost any creative project is to get inspired. Consider searching Pinterest and Google for hair salon newsletter examples or signing up to receive emails from salons in other areas that you admire. While browsing, make sure to keep notes about what you like.
Create your vision: Sketch out a rough design for your standard email on paper and share it with some of your team for feedback. During this process, keep referencing examples of your salon’s branding, as you want to make sure the final design matches the look and feel your salon is known for. Keep in mind that your email will likely be read on the phone!
Invest in a toolkit: There are many easy-to-use design platforms, like Canva, that enable anyone to design beautiful emails. These tools feature templates, media libraries, and intuitive editing capabilities that will allow you to create just about anything you want.
How to send emails like a seasoned digital marketer
Now that you’ve crafted your emails, it’s time to share them with your audience. Here are three things you need to do to start sending emails like a pro.
Find an integrated email platform: To ensure your salon email marketing campaigns are successful, you’ll want the right email marketing software. Boulevard’s Marketing Suite is an integrated email marketing platform that helps salon owners and managers execute these beautiful, branded email campaigns with ease.
Figure out timing: When you send your emails can significantly impact engagement. While you’ll need to go through trial and error to discover what works best for your audience, WordStream’s data shows that the best time to send emails is Thursday between 8 and 9 am.
How to make your next email better than your last
Improving your email marketing results has everything to do with the last thing most people want to do: measurement. Key performance indicators (KPI) vary by business, but it’s always good to keep track of your email deliverability, open rate, and click-through rate (CTR).
Email deliverability: This metric doesn’t tell you if people got your email in their inbox. But it does tell you if it was bounced. If email deliverability is low, you will probably have to fix some errors, typos, or outdated info in your email address database.
Email open rate: This metric tells you what percentage of recipients opened your email. If this is low, you need to test some new subject lines. For some perspective, the average email open rate for health and beauty is just under 24%.
Email CTR: This metric tells you what percentage of recipients clicked on the CTA. If this is low, you probably need to go back to the drawing board on your body or your CTAs. But only experiment on one of those at a time — otherwise, you won’t know what went wrong or what works now. To help you know what to shoot for, keep in mind that the average email CTR for the health and beauty industry is 2.7%.
The recipe for salon email marketing success
We hope these best practices have made the prospect of salon email marketing more manageable. It doesn’t take years of experience or certifications to win using this tried and true strategy. You only need determination (which you have), a plan (this blog), and a good tech partner. For more salon marketing advice, check out our full guide: Salon Marketing: (Literally) Everything You Need to Know to Nail It.
Streamline and simplify your email marketing strategy with beautifully branded email campaigns at your fingertips. Meet your new marketing BFF
