Dangerous New Online Services for Salons & Spas

Keeping with the theme of yesterday's blog, let's look a little closer at additional dangers Salon & Spa professionals need to avoid in Online Services.

Here's our Top 5 Dangers we educate and warn professionals about daily:
1. Client Stealing. YOUR CLIENT contact information should remain your client contact information. Online Service providers should not be promoting their own site, their own reward points or your competitors services to your client list. You will allow them to cannibalize your client list and your business revenue from the inside out if you participate in these online services.
2. Don't get into a coupon battle. While the idea of participating in a Salon or Spa search site can seem like a good idea for your business, be careful not to be devaluing your services or getting into "coupon or discount wars" with other businesses listed on these sites. Know your value and find creative ways to reward and incentivize your existing clients rather than always trying to make a low-cost offer to new clients.
3. Posting service offers on "discount" sites for days and weeks ahead will devalue your services. Our features are moving toward making real-time offers an easy way for Salon and Spa professionals to fill open time in their books. We also have many built in features to help you pre-book clients and build the book without discounting.
4. Don't get sucked into online pay-per-click campaigns where you cannot impose daily cost limits. AND if you are really going to see value from a pay-per-click placement online, you will start to see activity and results (meaning clients in the door) from it fairly immediatley. If you aren't getting calls or clients within a couple of weeks you should be shutting down this expense.
5. Shopping Carts can get you into trouble. Although the idea of true e-commerce and selling online can be appealing, many Professional Product lines have strict rules about NOT selling online or you will be in conflict with the manufacturer's distribution policies. If you choose to ignore these rules, you may lose the opportunity to represent the product line.