Every beauty business that’s already thriving or has plans to succeed must prioritise building a strong client base. In the process, you and your team must engage customers extensively. 

Customer engagement describes building relationships with customers through meaningful interactions using avenues like social media campaigns, loyalty programs, product recommendations, email marketing, etc. 

It lets you build business credibility, ensure customer satisfaction, and ultimately inspire customer loyalty. If you’re reading this, it means you’re already engaging your customers to an extent.  

In this article, I’ll explain what a customer engagement strategy means and how to use it to improve customer engagement in your salon or spa. 

What is a customer engagement strategy?

A customer engagement strategy is an effort to get the attention of potential and existing customers through carefully curated interactions. The whole point of a strategy like this is to ensure your customers have a positive experience with your salon or spa before, during, and after they patronise you. 

Why should salons or spas adopt customer engagement strategies?

Customer engagement strategies should form a major part of a salon or spa’s marketing plan for the following reasons: 

Reason 1: Improved customer retention

Engaged clients are less likely to leave a beauty business. No one likes to leave a salon or spa that they feel a part of, and that’s what customer engagement helps you achieve. And more customers means more stable revenue streams.

Reason 2: Increased customer loyalty

Clients don’t only stay with businesses they feel engaged with, they soon become loyal customers. Building strong customer relationships where you consistently offer value enables you to inspire loyalty in more customers. And loyal customers are the best brand evangelists.  

Reason 3: Encourage word-of-mouth marketing

Engaged clients are loyal and are more likely to recommend your beauty products and services to their loved ones. Provide exceptional customer experiences and focus on building strong relationships, your engaged customers will spread the word for you. 

Now, let’s see how you can engage your customers better. 

How to improve customer engagement in your salon or spa

Now that you know what customer engagement strategies are and why you need them for your business, let’s see how you can use them to improve your salon or spa’s customer engagement.  

What can you do better and how should you approach it? 

Strategy 1: Listen to your customers

No matter the amount of ideal customer personnel you’ve drawn up or the market research you’ve conducted, your customers know what they want better than you. Find out what they want and give it to them. 

The following are two approaches to achieving this: 

1. Practice active listening. Active listening entails paying attention to what your customers say across channels like social media platforms, websites, and Google Business Profile. Besides helping you serve your customers better, it gives you insight into how your salon or spa is perceived.
2. Ask for feedback. Ask customers for feedback to gather valuable insights into what they prefer and want to see more of. It’ll enable you to create relevant content, ultimately helping you engage customers better. 

The more you know about your customers and their needs, the better you can engage them. 

Strategy 2: Respond promptly 

Customers prefer not to wait. Do your best not to keep them waiting. 

Create a culture of responding quickly to customers’ messages across all the channels you use to engage them. It can be the difference between turning prospects into lifelong customers and losing potential clients.  

Here are a few ways to ensure prompt responses: 

1. Educate your team. Let your team know how important it is for the salon or spa to attend to each customer on time.  
2. Assign a social media manager. Have someone on standby who responds to direct messages (DMs), replies to comments, and keeps customers engaged across your social media. 
3. Use a chatbot. Consider installing a chatbot on your website to keep customers engaged.
4. Get an appointment booking software. A tool like Splice will allow customers to book appointments from anywhere, anytime. This way, they won’t experience the drawn-out process of manual booking and your business will fill its slots easily and quickly. 

Strategy 3: Share only useful content

Offering relevant content across channels like social media and websites will help to keep potential and existing customers engaged with your salon or spa. The strategy is a low-pressure way to engage customers without demanding them to spend money. 

But here’s the thing, engaged customers tend to return for more, increasing the odds of mere followers becoming paying customers and existing clients patronising you even more. 

Do the following to get more out of your content strategy: 

1. Post regularly: Out of sight is often out of mind on social media, website blogs, and other online channels. Posting often is an effective way to stay on top of mind with your customer base. 
2. Attach your booking link: Put your booking link across your marketing channels to make it easy for customers to book your service. Showcase your booking link in your social media profile and add it to blog posts or landing pages. See the image below: 

3. Add a CTA: Ending every post with a call to action clarifies for your customers what they should do next. Encourage them to take desired actions using CTAs like “Follow for more,” “Book an appointment,” and “Share with loved ones.”
4. Use user-generated content (UGC): Share customer reviews, pictures, and videos, with your followers. It’s an effective way to get customers involved and engaged. Your followers will get interested when they see your customers talking about and patronising your business. 
5. Share more videos on social media: Video content has quickly become popular for captivating followers and keeping people engaged. Moreover, 8 out of 10 users prefer video over other types of content.

Strategy 4: Launch a customer loyalty program

A loyalty program rewards your customers to incentivise them to keep doing business with you.

When you reward your customers, they feel valued, which will help strengthen your relationship. They’ll be encouraged to patronise you, turning them into loyal customers. It’s an effective way to keep them engaged. 

Your customers will spread the word about your salon or spa, leading to more customers and ultimately more money. 

There are different customer loyalty programs, from point-based systems to referral systems. See our comprehensive guide on loyalty programs for beauty businesses to learn more. 

No matter the type of loyalty program you settle for, Splice can help you create and automate it to reduce errors and save you time so you can focus on serving your customers. 

Strategy 5: Personalise salon & spa experience

People like to be treated as special. Your customers aren’t different. They’ll stick with your salon or spa if it gives them this feeling. 

Take advantage of this to engage your customers through personalised experiences. But first, you need to know your customers and everything they expect and dislike. 

You can achieve this by relying on customer data. An example is recommending products or services based on their purchase history or sending them a personalised birthday card or message. 

Splice’s reporting and insight feature will help you present all the customer information you need to personalise their experience. See the image below: 

Conclusion

The benefits of engaging customers are immense for your salon or spa, from increasing customer retention to encouraging loyal customers to refer their loved ones. 

That’s why this article provides practical strategies to help you improve customer engagement in your salon or spa business. 

Let Splice tool make customer engagement seamless with its appointment booking and insight features.