How Personal Care Businesses Can Reconnect and Retain Clients
- Prioritize Client Experience: Deliver exceptional service, track client history, and personalize outreach with emails, texts, and promotions.
- Engage Consistently Online: Use social media, content marketing, and referral programs to stay top-of-mind with past and current clients.
- Incentivize Returns: Offer loyalty programs, return-client promotions, and new services to encourage repeat bookings and referrals.
When you run a personal care business, whether it’s a salon, day spa, chiropractic clinic, or fitness center, your business relies on having a steady flow of customers. While marketing for personal care businesses can, and should, focus on bringing in new clients, you’ll also want to ensure you retain your current clients and reconnect with past clients.
Why Retention and Reconnection Are So Vital for Personal Care Marketing
Why is it so important to reconnect with and retain beauty and wellness clients? Statistically, keeping past clients connected to your business brings in a higher ROI than bringing in new ones.
How much more? Consider these statistics:
- If you increase your client retention by 5%, you’ll see more than a 25% increase in profits.
- You’ll spend 5x as much bringing in a new customer compared to retaining a current one.
- If you’re selling a product, you have a 60 to 70% chance of success with existing customers. That drops to 5 to 20% for new customers.
Simply put, it makes financial sense to invest in drawing back your past clients.
Strategies To Reconnect and Retain Your Past Clients
So how can you improve client retention? Building a marketing plan around client retention and reconnection strategies can help. Here are some effective marketing strategies for personal care businesses to use to keep a strong connection with those clients.
1. Ensure Your Customer Service is Spot-On
Before you can focus on your marketing goals, you must make sure that you’re delivering what they expect. Is there an area where your practice is neglecting customer service? Are your clients or patients welcomed warmly? Do they feel safe and comfortable in your location?
Do some client surveys and identify areas where you may be lacking in customer service. Then, adjust these areas. Satisfied clients will stick with your business better than dissatisfied ones.
2. Stay Solid on Social Media Marketing
The heart of your reconnection strategy needs to be your social media marketing efforts. Even if you don’t have a solid presence on social media, your clients, both past and present, do. If you can connect with them on there, you’ll keep your services at the front of their mind.
As you develop your social media strategy, ensure you stay actively engaged. Interacting with the people who engage with your posts will solidify your business in their minds as the right choice when they need beauty, personal care, and wellness services. It also humanizes your business in their minds.
Posting regularly on social media is challenging when you’re running a business. You can help make it easier by investing in small business marketing software that automates some of your social media tasks. For example, with the right platform, you can plan your posts at the start of every month, and then the software will post them for you.
Surefire Local takes this process one step further. In addition to automating your posts, our local marketing software lets you engage with commenters and followers from our platform. You can see all of your social media posts in one place, which allows you to quickly respond and keep the conversation going.
2. Keep Client Records
Have a way to keep records about your clients that tracks when they had a service. If you can quickly see which clients are inactive, you can plan a strategy to reach out to those.
Segment your client list to organize them based on how long ago they booked a service. You can also review appointment history to pinpoint clients who have stopped booking.
Once you see a pattern, adjust your marketing efforts to reach out to those who haven’t booked in a while. Sometimes, people who were satisfied with your service just need a little nudge to make a book.
3. Send Personalized Messages to Reconnect
Once you’ve identified clients who have stopped booking, you’re ready to reach out. Create email and SMS campaigns that feel personal. You can send emails that use their name or refer to the last product or service they purchased. You can send a text on their birthday to wish them well and remind them of your promotions. You can even send articles that align with their health and wellness goals.
To make these messages effective, they need to both feel personal and not feel too marketing-heavy. Delivering something of value will remind them of your services and make them curious about booking again.
Crafting individual SMS or email messages is time-consuming, but Surefire Local makes it easier. You can send clients through specific marketing pipelines depending on their booking history. Our lead management platform makes it simple to see where each client is at a glance, so you can funnel them through to the next step as you work to reconnect. We also have automated tools that help you send personalized emails and marketing text messages automatically, so you don’t have to spend time messaging individual clients.
4. Create a Return Customer Promotion
Another way to reconnect with past clients or patients is to offer some incentive for them to come back to your practice with a “return client” promotion. This can be a complementary service or a discount for booking a new service with your business.
The return customer promotion should be good enough to provide an incentive, but small enough that you don’t lose money on it. Here are some options to consider:
- A discount of up to 20% off a service
- Free product added to a service
- Free upgrade to a better service
Make these discounts limited in time and scope. They can be exclusive to specific customers and have an expiration date to encourage fast action.
If you don’t want to offer a one-time promotion, consider a loyalty program card that rewards your clients after a certain number of visits. This type of incentive wouldn’t apply to all types of personal care service businesses, but could work well for some. For instance, a salon could offer a punch card for visits that would lead to a free manicure or free shampoo product. This type of incentive keeps people coming back to earn more rewards.
5. Add a Referral Program
Technically, referral programs are designed to draw in new customers when your existing customers talk about your business. However, they have the added effect of keeping your existing clients returning to your business.
Most referral programs offer an incentive to both the referrer and the person who receives the referral. Thus, the discount encourages the existing client to keep coming back.
In addition, referrals keep your business on the mind of your clients as they look for people to refer. They’re going to remember your company when they offer the referral to their friend.
6. Invest in Something New
Everyone likes the novelty of a new product or service. If you haven’t had a new product or service offering, and you’re seeing your clients slip away, then it’s time to add something new.
Once you choose the right product or service, send a blast communication via email or text to your past clients. Then, post about it on social media. Create a discount incentive to get people to book quickly after you add it.
This combination of novelty and marketing communication may be the key to drawing back some old clients.
7. Have Solid Content Marketing
Finally, provide valuable content to your clients, even if they aren’t booking services. Content marketing will brand you as a thought leader and will provide helpful information to your past clients. When they know they can trust you for helpful information, they’ll be more likely to come to you for services.
Streamline Your Client Retention Strategy with Surefire Local
Reconnecting with past clients or retaining existing clients can take a lot of time and effort, but not when you work with Surefire Local. Our local marketing platform was designed specifically for small businesses like yours. We have all of the small business marketing software you need in one location, and that means you can launch and monitor campaigns from one platform.
In addition, we have the marketing tools you need to keep your clients connected, including:
- Tools to post and manage social media content
- Email and text marketing campaign funnel software
- Lead tracking systems
- Promotion creation and sending tools
- Multi-channel marketing in one location
- Content marketing tools
With Surefire Local, you can connect with your clients, see which clients haven’t come in a while, send promotional material and special offers, and ensure you’re delivering personalized messages in a timely manner across multiple platforms.
Are you curious to see how Surefire Local can help you with your client retention strategy for your personal care service business? We’d love to show you. Make plans to attend a demo to see our small business marketing platform for yourself.