How much should salon owners spend on their email and text marketing?

Salon owners should spend $100 to $150 per month on email and text marketing, roughly 4-5% of a typical $2,700 monthly marketing budget. That covers a marketing platform ($30-$80/month), text messages (about $60/month for a 500-client list), and occasional photography.

Most salon owners assume email and text marketing costs more than it does, and then spend the money somewhere far less effective.

Here's the full breakdown, including what it returns.

What should a salon marketing budget be?

According to The Small Business Administration's benchmark, businesses under $5 million in revenue should spend 7-8% of their revenue on marketing. The average salon does around $459,949 per location per year. That puts a typical marketing budget for the average salon at roughly $32,000 annually, or ~$2,700 a month.

If you're newer or in a competitive metro, you'll want to be at the higher end. If you're booked out with a waitlist, then you can sit lower.

$2,700 a month is the number to hold in your head while you read the rest of this.

How should salons allocate their monthly marketing budget?

If you're starting from scratch, here's a defensible split of that $2,700 monthly budget.

• $100 to $150 for emails and texts. Non-negotiable, and the cheapest line item you have.

• $100 to $250 for photography and content. Feeds everything else.

• Flexible spend on local presence and community. Events, partnerships, sponsoring the thing your clients already attend.

• Paid ads are your final line item, and it varies. Invest in these after your first 3 are consistent. Your follow-up communications need to be solid, otherwise you'll end up like the salons with only a 35% retention rate.

The order of these allocations matters more than the amounts. Get the retention channel running before you pay to reach more clients.

What does email and text marketing cost?

Email and text marketing for salons costs between $100 and $150/month. Your total cost typically depends on three things:

1. Platform

2. Text messages

3. Photography

Platform

Your marketing platform typically costs $30-$80/month. I recommend using a booking software that has marketing built-in so you're not paying for a second tool, and your client data stays in one place. Mangomint's marketing credits start at $30/month and cover both Campaigns and Automated Flows.

Text Messages

Your salon text messages typically costs $0.01 to $0.05 each. A 500-client list getting 1 text/week is about 2,000 messages a month. At three cents each, that's $60 a month.

Photography

Your salon photography is typically a one-time payment every few months, and can cost $0-$800. A local photographer for 1-2 hours can run you $300 to $800 depending on your market. Or save your money and use your phone, and the free stock imagery most product lines will give you.

With a ~$2,700 monthly marketing budget, that's only ~4-5% for the channel that reaches every client you already have.

What's the return on salon email marketing?

Email returns roughly $36 for every dollar spent, the highest of any channel available to a small business. SMS benchmarks land between $21 and $71 per dollar, depending on how it's used.

Those are industry-wide numbers though, so here's what it looks like for salons specifically.

One client returned to a salon I work with after 2 years away, because of a single newsletter. They'd just drifted, and the email reminded them.

They now book a $225 service roughly every 6 weeks. That's about $2,000 a year. Their daughter started coming too, and both buy product.

That's $4,000 a year in bottom-line revenue from one email.

Now run that forward. If you can reactivate 10 clients like that over a year, you're looking at $20,000. Just from newsletters that cost ~$125/month.

Obviously, this isn't a promise, but it's also not unusual. It's what happens when you consistently talk to people who already like you.

Your existing clients offer more opportunity

The salon industry's new client retention rate is about 35%. Roughly 65% of first-time clients never come back for a second visit. So every dollar you spend acquiring a new client only has a 1-in-3 chance of turning into a relationship.

Meanwhile, 42% of loyal clients generate about 80% of revenue.

Most salon marketing budgets are weighted toward the harder, more expensive half of that equation. Ads and promotions chase strangers, while the people who already trust you go 11 weeks without hearing your name.

If you're deciding where the next $100 goes, the list you already own is the better bet.

FAQs

Q: How much should salons spend on email and text marketing?

Salons should budget $100 to $150 per month for email and text marketing. That's roughly 4-5% of a typical $2,700 monthly marketing budget, and it's the cheapest line item in a salon's marketing mix.

Q: What's included in that $100-$150 monthly cost?

Three things: a marketing platform ($30-$80/month), text messages (about $60/month for a 500-client list sending one text a week), and occasional photography (a one-time cost of $0-$800 every few months, or free if you use your phone).

Q: How much does a single salon text message cost?

Between $0.01 and $0.05 per message, depending on your platform and volume.

Q: What percentage of a salon's total marketing budget should go to email and text?

About 4-5%. Using the SBA's benchmark of 7-8% of revenue for marketing, the average salon's total budget is around $2,700/month, of which $100-$150 goes to email and text.

Q: What should a salon's total monthly marketing budget be?

About $2,700/month for the average salon, based on the SBA recommendation of 7-8% of revenue and average annual salon revenue of $459,949 per location.

Q: What's the ROI on salon email marketing?

Email returns roughly $36 for every $1 spent, the highest of any small business marketing channel. Text returns between $21 and $71 per $1 spent, depending on how it's used.

Q: Why do so few salons use email and text marketing consistently?

Cost isn't usually the reason. At $100/month it's the cheapest channel available. Time is the real barrier. Most salon owners who skip it say they don't have time to write it or the week gets away from them, not that it's too expensive.

Q: Should salons spend more on email/text marketing or on ads?

Email and text marketing should come first. The salon industry's new-client retention rate is only about 35%, meaning most ad spend targets people unlikely to return. Meanwhile, 42% of loyal clients generate about 80% of a salon's revenue, so the list of clients a salon already has is the higher-return investment before spending on ads to acquire new ones.