Building loyalty with your clients is the surefire way to grow and develop your salon business into a thriving entity. Of course, the fantastic work carried out by your stylists or therapists is the main factor that drives clients back time and time again, but marketing approaches such as salon loyalty schemes help incentivise clients to re book their hair or beauty treatments.

In today’s article we’re examining salon loyalty card and their place within digital age.  We’re asking the question: Are salon loyalty cards still worth promoting within your salon business?

Here, we speak to Anya Dellicompagni from the Francesco Group of award winning hairdressers and the Bright Salon App team to discover their thoughts on salon loyalty cards.

Discover: How to build loyalty with your salon customers

Anya, what are your thoughts on traditional salon loyalty cards?

It’s only recently that we have made the switch to a digital loyalty system – so we don’t have a lot of data on this yet. What I will say is that it has been really well received by our clients, as it is much more reliable and easier to track than our previous ‘paper and stamp’ system.

What loyalty schemes are you running now?

Our clients receive a point for every pound spent and when they reach 400 points they receive £10 Off at their next appointment. At Francesco Group we believe in rewarding loyalty and many of our clients have been with our salons for years and years, so it’s nice to show them that we value their custom and loyalty.

We’ve been in a tough economic climate recently and clients are a lot more cost conscious, so giving something back to reward their loyalty goes a long way with them and helps keep our client retention high. Our salons have a lot of clients redeeming their loyalty discount each month, so it is a well utilised scheme.

With many clients booking and tracking their salon appointments via their smartphone, it seems alien to expect clients to still carry a little piece of paper in their purse to collect loyalty stamps.

The team at Bright Salon have created a mobile first system that allow salon owners to communicate with their clients via push apps, as well as introducing digital loyalty schemes.

What is your opinion on traditional loyalty schemes?

Paper based loyalty card schemes are costly, inflexible and disposable. Clients often forget them, throw them away or lose them, becoming frustrated they have no proof of the already accrued stamps.

So how does the Bright App work?

The Bright Salon digital loyalty card scheme provides salon owners with the control, freedom and risk-free ability to update their loyalty scheme. The digital card enables salon owners to run multiple loyalty cards i.e. new clients, existing clients and VIP clients with various stamp/reward combinations… that benefits the salon in creating a client journey.

Implementing the digital loyalty card is quick and easy, with any change instantly applied to everyone’s loyalty scheme such as reducing the total number of stamps. Owners can therefore adapt the bespoke loyalty card to fit perfectly around their business, refining and improving it over time… something you are unable to do with paper-based schemes.

How does salon loyalty work?

One significant mistake companies from many industries make is in giving away services for free as the loyalty reward. Salons are better off financially in either cross-selling a service a client wouldn’t normally receive or discounting a product, again that the client wouldn’t normally buy. This allows the salon to then encourage the client to receive the reward next time at full price.

The Bright Salon Loyalty Card Scheme allows users to decide whether the loyalty card is on-going or time-based. The latter encourages a client who visits the salon 6 times in a year, to visit 7 times in order to complete the card and receive the loyalty. The salon benefits from the additional booking they otherwise wouldn’t have received and additional income.

The purpose of a loyalty system is to improve client retention. The next step for digital loyalty is to enhance client retention through automatic bespoke reminder messages. Salon owners will soon have the ability to customise the number of days since the loyalty scheme was last used and for an automatic reminder to be sent to the client using the Bright Salon App.

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