The key to successful salon and spa email marketing: Personalization
Personalization is often the one difference between successful and unsuccessful email marketing campaigns. Let’s explore 7 benefits of personalized email marketing and a guide to getting started.
Email marketing is a powerful tool to help salons and spas share promotions, book new appointments, and connect with their community. However, if your email marketing efforts are falling short, this could feel like a waste of time and money.
In many cases, failed email marketing campaigns are simply due to a lack of personalization.
You have likely experienced this in your own inbox — the clear contrast between annoying marketing emails that you delete vs. carefully crafted messages that share precisely what you need to hear. The difference between these experiences can make or break your campaign's success.
Let's explore seven vital impacts of email personalization and how even the busiest salon and spa owners can seamlessly make it happen.
1) Maintaining your customer's trust and experience
While all business owners want to boost profits, successful email campaigns are more than just a shot in the dark. Every email you send should carry the intention of being mutually beneficial.
In addition to helping you book appointments, marketing messages can help your clients find the latest deals, remember to rebook, and even come up with holiday gift ideas as you share seasonal promotions.
However, misguided and irrelevant email messages tend to inconvenience, annoy, and distract recipients.
Even if you give customers a 5-star experience every time they step through your door, thoughtless email campaigns will have your reputation carrying negative connotations. This lack of personalization could also hinder the client's sense of connection and loyalty.
Personalized email marketing can be vital in maintaining good graces with your clients and community.
2) Protecting clients from overwhelm
Between emails, social media, television commercials, and so much more, clients are constantly bombarded by advertisements inserted into their lives.
These constant distractions can quickly lead to burnout. Data shows that email fatigue can have adverse effects on an individual's mental health, including anxiety, stress, depression, executive functioning troubles, and difficulty sleeping. This strain of promotional messaging can take its toll on everyone, including your clients.
Having a client's contact information is a privilege you should not take lightly.
You can respect this privilege and protect your clients from unnecessary distractions by tightening up your email marketing practices with personalization.
3) Keeping clients engaged
Our brains combat email overwhelm by learning which messages are worth paying attention to (and tuning out the rest).
When you first send clients an email promotion, they are more likely to give you an eager click. However, after enough irrelevant emails from your business come through a client's inbox, your messages will quickly get lost in the noise. This switch can cause your clients to overlook more relevant emails that may have otherwise resulted in conversions.
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Mangomint's intelligent email marketing system is built into our #1-rated salon and spa software system, offering unique advantages to our customers.
Have you ever sent an email that went straight into the recipient's spam folder? This unfortunate filtering is caused by poor sender reputation.
Sender reputation is like a credit score for your email domain. It is built on the history of engagement and quality of your emails.
Negative reputation: Your domain takes a sender reputation hit for high bounce rates (AKA clients instantly closing or deleting emails), low-quality content, low open rates, and low click rates. Spam reports also significantly impact your reputation.
Positive reputation: You build up a positive reputation over time by sending valuable, high-quality emails that clients meaningfully engage with.
Email volume and frequency: For better or for worse, the volume and frequency of your emails can also impact your sender reputation. Platforms often flag any frequent, high-volume email blasts as suspicious email activity — especially in new domains. Conversely, email platforms read personalized, small-batch email marketing efforts as a sign of a reputable sender.
Personalized email marketing can help keep your sender reputation squeaky clean by encouraging positive and meaningful engagement.
5) Wasted salon marketing budget
Email marketing should help fill your business's bank account rather than cleaning it out. If you feel your efforts cost more than they're worth, chances are high that this money is just being overspent.
In most platforms, your business pays for every email you send — regardless of whether your recipient reads it or not. If the email is only relevant to a small portion of your audience, the rest of these credits will go to waste.
Even in systems like Mailchimp that include a fixed number of emails for a monthly payment, wasteful marketing practices quickly become costly and unsustainable as your business grows. The money you save with email segmentation can validate the extra time it takes to craft more personalized and impactful messages.
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Proper email hygiene is essential for building a robust email marketing list.
As mentioned above, clients may feel inconvenienced or annoyed when you send an email without intentional messaging. If they don't unsubscribe on the spot, they will certainly do so during their next inbox spring cleaning.
This disconnect can limit your brand's voice in the community and your outreach efforts over time. Personalized messaging is essential for building and maintaining a well-rounded email audience.
7) Staying eco-friendly
Many salons are going green to help protect our planet. However, mass email marketing efforts could undermine this element of your brand identity.
While email marketing is, in fact, an eco-friendly alternative to direct mail, it can carry a heavy carbon footprint when done frivolously. Why? The power it takes devices and servers to transmit, download, open, and save emails can contribute to your business's carbon footprint.
In fact, every nine (9) emails your business sends with an image produces the carbon equivalent of driving a mile in a standard gas vehicle, according to data from 8 Billion Trees.
While the individual impact can sound small, when we multiply this by the 444,000+ salons and spas in the US, it is easy to understand why email marketing can impact the environment.
So, if your salon is sending out daily email blasts, clients may start to read your eco-friendly efforts as performance activism. That is not to say that you shouldn't send emails. However, you should do so in a way that is intentional and conscious of the impact you can have.
How to create personalized salon and spa email marketing campaigns
To create emails designed to convert, consider the relevance, frequency, and helpfulness of your campaign.
The secret to successful campaigns? Service-based email flows.
This personalized approach uses previous service data to estimate and meet the needs of your clients.
For example, if you want to get more root touch-up appointments in your chair, filter your email list for clients who had coloring appointments more than a month ago and have no future appointments scheduled.
While this might sound like a lot of extra work, an intelligent email marketing platform can support this personalization in just a few clicks.
A guide to creating personalized email flows
Mangomint's integrated email marketing system leverages your past appointment details to filter your email list for relevant audiences. You can filter your client list by relevant metrics, including past services, location, service dates, membership status, service provider, upcoming appointment status, and so much more.
Then, explore the library of beautiful pre-designed templates. Templates created with salons and spas in mind (as opposed to those of more general platforms) offer more relevant choices and minimal need for editing the design.
Finally, use the drag-and-drop builder tool to customize and create a personalized email campaign in minutes. Mangomint also lets you send it off under a custom domain that highlights your brand.
Because these emails are tailored for success, you can expect to see a more noticeable impact on your business in the days or weeks after you hit "send."
Does writing your marketing emails feel like a chore?
Many professionals in the salon and spa industry can connect with anyone who lands in their chair — it is part of the job. However, it can be hard to create that same connection with an "audience" of clients on your email marketing list.
Rather than speaking to your entire email list, imagine you are speaking to any one of your clients.
How would you greet them? What would you say about the latest promotion from your business? How would you talk about the services they likely need since their last appointment?
Not only will this make your language feel more natural, but it can also help overcome any email marketing writer's block — making this process more efficient and effective.
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Emily Holzer is a Content Marketing Manager at Mangomint. She has a master’s degree in English and a passion for helping salons, spas, and other local beauty businesses thrive. When she is not writing, you can find her playing chess or tending to her houseplants. Fun fact: Emily has donated 8 ponytails (so far) across 5 hair loss charities in the U.S.
