Salons thrive on personal connections and timely communication, making SMS a uniquely well-suited marketing channel. Beyond simple appointment reminders, text messaging offers surprisingly diverse use cases for salons, from flash promotions to driving support for vote-based competitions.
To truly capitalize on this powerful tool, salons need strategic planning and a focus on personalization. Discover opportunities and best practices that can help your salon maximize the potential of your text message marketing campaigns.
Laying the Foundation for Salon SMS Marketing
Choosing an SMS Software That Satisfies All Salon Use Cases
Capabilities you’ll want for your salon’s SMS marketing platform are:
- Two-way text capabilities powered by AI to enable 24/7 customer service
- Audience segmentation and automated group management
- AI-powered text creation assistance
- SMS drip campaign capabilities
- SMS performance reporting specific to marketing campaign or salon location
- Multi-level admin access, especially if facilitating SMS marketing for multiple salon locations
- Easy digital asset creation to assist with acquiring new SMS subscribers—pop-ups, landing pages, QR codes, and more
Voxie offers all the above-mentioned capabilities to support your salon’s SMS. What’s more, we designed our platform to cater to the one-of-a-kind needs and challenges of marketing for a franchise or multi-location business.
Confirming Key Tech Integrations Before Finalizing Your SMS Software
- POS system – Syncing with your POS tech allows your salon’s SMS platform to gather valuable client information, categorizing them into relevant sub-groups for future marketing messages based on preferences like their favorite service or stylist.
- Booking software – Text messaging is arguably the most effective tactic for reducing no-shows. Integrating these two tools is essential to automating this process.
- CRM – Connecting to a CRM enables targeted SMS campaigns based on salon client preferences, visit history, and engagement patterns.
- Loyalty program software – SMS integration keeps clients informed about rewards, points balances, and exclusive member-only perks.
- Review management – Automated SMS review requests boost online reputation by encouraging satisfied clients to leave feedback.
The Voxie team has established integrations with a number of software platforms. More importantly, our team will build new integrations bespoke to your salon’s tech stack.
For more ideas on how to build your salon’s tech stack, check out some of our favorite franchise-friendly marketing platforms.
Proven SMS Uses and Strategies for Salons’ Marketing
Spread the Word About Promotions
Use SMS to instantly market exclusive salon promotions, from limited-time discounts to freebies with every appointment. Send personalized offers based on client preferences, like a deal on their favorite service or stylist. Announce seasonal specials and flash sales to drive bookings before spots fill up. Ultimately, SMS is the best marketing medium for promoting your salon’s upselling efforts among followers because it offers a far superior open-rate to email.
Appointment Reminders
SMS is the perfect medium for salon appointment reminders because it’s instant, direct, and practically impossible to ignore. A quick text keeps clients on schedule, reducing no-shows and last-minute cancellations without adding extra work for your team. Plus, with automated confirmations and rescheduling links, you make it easy for clients to manage their appointments while keeping your chairs full.
Example appointment reminder text from a salon
Attract More Customers During “Slow” Times
Combat lulls in business by strategically leveraging SMS to engage customers. Targeted messaging can transform slow times into valuable revenue opportunities.
Example marketing text to draw in salon customers during select times
Drum Up Support for Local Competitions
Vote-based competitions offer salons the chance to earn bragging rights and establish themselves as community leaders. SMS marketing is a fantastic tool to rally your most loyal customers: simply send them a link, and voting can be done in as little as 30 seconds.
Shine a Light on Your Referral Program
Word of mouth is the bread and butter of any salon—nothing beats a glowing recommendation from a happy client. But why wait for referrals to happen organically when you can give them a little nudge? A well-crafted referral program rewards loyal clients while attracting new ones, and SMS is the perfect way to spread the word. A quick, friendly text keeps your offer top of mind, making it effortless for clients to share the love (and for your salon to welcome even more friendly faces).
Use SMS to Collect Reviews and UGC For Your Salon’s Marketing
Quickly build a library of glowing reviews and compelling UGC by leveraging SMS. Send automated requests for feedback immediately after appointments. The convenience of responding via text—and potentially including a photo of new highlights or a fresh cut—contributes to a high response rate, providing a constant stream of fresh content for your site and social media.
Share Important Information About Your Salon’s Operations
Has your salon chosen to extend your hours or temporarily close for much-needed structural repairs? SMS is the best way to notify loyal customers about changes that could impact them, especially as text is harder to overlook than an email.
Promote New Products and Services
Use SMS to inform customers about new retail products and supplementary service enhancements available in your salon. This could include luxury treatments or specialty packages.
Personalize Your Salon’s Text Marketing as Much as Possible
While generic messages may be met with indifference, SMS personalization plays a large role in captivating your audience. What’s more, referencing the recipient’s name is only one way your salon can personalize your text message marketing. By integrating with your CRM, you can easily pull information to:
- Remind customers of when they may be due for a trim or a touch-up
- Let customers know that their favorite hairdresser has appointments available
- Inform them of new services or deals that could be of interest, based on their past requests
- Offer special deals as their birthdays approach so they can look and feel their best
What’s more, your CRM isn’t the only way you can collect valuable information about recipients’ interests. SMS tools like Voxie lets you collect customer-specific information like that shown below, automatically adding them to marketing sub-groups based on their responses.
Additional Tips to Improve Your Salon’s Text Marketing
- Only use graphics if they’re high quality and unique to you - You’ll be hard-pressed to find an industry better suited to visuals than salons, as the service itself is about aesthetic improvements! Therefore, invest in aspirational graphics and steer clear of any subpar visuals that could cheapen your brand, such as heavily airbrushed stock photos or overly cutesy holiday well-wishes. For more tips, read Leveraging MMS in Marketing (With Examples) - How & Why.
- Quality, not quantity - This turn of phrase can be applied to your Salon’s SMS marketing two different ways: the length of your texts as well as the frequency. In both scenarios, excess can turn-off recipients and dilute the value you’re trying to provide. In this spirit, keep the majority of your salon’s SMS messages to 160 characters—with exceptions—and limit yourself to no more than one text per 1-3 texts per month. As a general rule of thumb, only message your clients when you have something truly worthwhile to say!
- Vary up the contents of your salon’s marketing texts - Don’t regularly recycle old SMS marketing messages or even consider the faux pas of sending the same text back-to-back. This not only prevents you from testing the waters for new strategies, but also contributes to “ad fatigue,” in which recipients will become increasingly underwhelmed with your salon’s marketing. Repeat the same text too many times, and you can expect a spike in unsubscribes.
- Monitor campaign performance to identify top performers and discern their shared commonalities - Some of your salon’s marketing texts will naturally perform better than others. But, the real question is whether it’s obvious why. Was it the type of graphic you attached? The time of day you sent the SMS? If you have a hunch as to what leads to success, create texts to directly test your theory.
- Consider how SMS can be layered into a multi-channel marketing campaign for important promotions - We believe that if your salon had to choose just one direct marketing channel, SMS would be the most strategic option. But here’s the good news: you don’t have to choose just one. The real question is how your salon can effectively coordinate multiple channels into a unified marketing strategy. For example:
- Holiday discount promotions - To maximize Black Friday sales, consider an email campaign a few weeks prior to introduce in-store product and service promotions. Follow up with SMS reminders as Black Friday approaches, especially on the day of.
- Use your email to hook followers through education, boosting related SMS engagement rates - For example, let’s say you start offering keratin treatments; your email newsletter can explain the benefits of this procedure with a link to your blog post. Then, when you market 10% off keratin treatments via SMS, your subscribers will be better informed and eager to take advantage of the offer.
Monitor Campaign Performance to Identify Trends
Inevitably, some of your salon’s text marketing campaigns will outperform others. Gather enough data, and soon a pattern may emerge indicating what kinds of content and deals appeal most to your customer base. To flag winning strategies with greater precision, consider comparing:
- Different types of campaigns, annotating those that include or exclude images, offer discounts, or promote specific services.
- How different SMS campaigns’ performance compare across multiple franchise locations.
- The day and time you send the individual texts, as well as the frequency.
To ensure you document the correct KPIs for a thorough analysis, read SMS Marketing Analytics to Quantify Campaign Results.
Why Entrust Voxie With Your Salon SMS Marketing
Voxie is an SMS platform designed for franchises multi-location businesses like salon chains. Pairing industry-leading AI with advanced tech integrations, Voxie can help franchises maximize the ROI of SMS while overcoming many common barriers. Key capabilities include:
- Advanced audience segmentation and personalizations
- Real-time contact list management
- Two-way texting facilitated by Conversational Intelligence
- Multimedia messaging (MMS) offerings
- Detailed analytics and reporting
Learn more about how Voxie helps multi-location service businesses like salons. Alternatively, request a demo to see our SMS platform in action!