When done right, presenting your customers with an up-sell opportunity creates increased satisfaction, improved retention, and (somewhat obviously) drives higher revenue. Up-selling builds stronger relationships with your customers – they feel catered to when you accommodate their needs by pitching the perfect service or recommending an exemplary product – assuming that you do this effectively.
Let’s try to apply this concept to an industry that is ripe with opportunity for increasing the average check of their customers – the personal care industry. Salon owners generally depend on their stylists to upsell customers. Whether it is a discount on a new product line, or a decrease in price to incent the trial of an uncommonly used service; stylists are the ones interacting with guests every single day, and are therefore able to offer solutions and tips on how to best care for their skin and hair (all while helping to drive your bottom line). The stylists on your front-line may be in the practice of suggesting products to help guests maintain their new do, but they may not usually suggest additional services – such as facials, manicures, or waxing – which are commonly some of your most profitable services. Frequently, stylists forget to upsell at all. How can technology help you take advantage of this missed opportunity?
In a perfect world, every guest should be presented with an opportunity to purchase additional services – bonus points if all of those offers are personalized to their needs. In lieu of chasing down your stylists to remind them to upsell, we may have the solution for you.
By using data gathered through your business’ POS system, you can become better acquainted with your customers by tracking their actions and purchase behavior so we can present them with offers that are personalized to their wants and needs. If a stylist has already spoken to a guest about a product or service, a printed offer on their receipt for that same product or service can reinforce that customer care point. If stylists simply forget to make a suggestion, every guest is still leaving your salon with an incentive try a new product or service the next time they walk in the door.
The trick to sustainably increasing the average spend by your customers – without offering so many coupons that you decrease your bottom line – is automating this type of incentive-based offer creation. By measuring every transaction that goes through your POS system, you are given a unique opportunity to more efficiently market to your customers. Data and analytics models can be designed to measure which influences and events can drive your customers to take a specific action – in this case, maybe that’s adding a shampoo service, or scheduling a future color treatment. But once you start tracking and predicting customer behavior, the possibilities are endless, and you will begin to have a much clearer picture of what it takes keep your customers satisfied and coming back through your doors.