Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host Britt Seva, and today, we are going to talk about how to win back lost clients.
Let me explain what a lost client is. Let’s say there was somebody who was a regular part of your clientele and all of a sudden you notice, wow, it’s been like such a long time since I’ve seen Elise. I wonder what the heck happened. You go and you look and it’s not just been a long time, it’s been like six months, and you’re like, “I don’t understand. She was such a loyal part of my clientele. We got along great. She had sent me referrals often.” It’s a client where it’s like, really? You checked all the boxes. What the heck happened?
Now sometimes it’s not that. Sometimes it’s somebody who only came in to see you twice and then never showed back up again.
I don’t know about you, but for me, I always took it a little bit personally, like, what the heck happened? We know we’re not right for everybody, nobody is. But sometimes you lose someone and you’re like, “I really feel like we had a good thing going for you,” so I wanted to dedicate an episode to how to gain back guests who have chosen to leave your business.
This is not an episode I made up by myself. We got a really great question that came through from NicLoia, I believe that’s how you say it. The question was, “Do you recommend or have a strategy on how to reach out to clients that have left you over the years? There are some I feel like I really connected with. Obviously I missed the mark on some others along the way. I miss some of these people and I wish they were back in my chair.”
I think that’s so relatable. Thank you for submitting this question. If anybody listening to this has a specific question you hope I hit, please leave a rating or review on iTunes and ask your question there. I skim through there every single month and choose my upcoming episodes.
To Nic, thank you so much for submitting this one and I’m excited to dive back in.
When I was at the salon, which would’ve been 2008 to 2016, we ran something called a winback campaign. Now, ever since then I have coached stylists and salon owners to do a whole series and slew of different concepts to connect with clients who have left their stylists to regain that business back, to learn more about why they left.
Today, I want to dig into exactly what you can do, what you can implement into your business to get some of these strategies off the ground.
Before we dig in, we need to do some deep dive prep work questions. I’m going to ask you four questions and then your answers to these four questions are going to help us to decide what we take as next action steps together.
Number one, when is your lost client churn point? “Churn” is a word that’s used in mainstream business and it essentially means lost client. The “churn point” is when somebody leaves your universe, they are no longer investing in your business, in your brand. That’s called the churn point.
Now for businesses that have one-off transactions, I’m trying to think, okay, when you look at Google phones or Apple phones, the churn point for them, what I guess be when somebody switches from a iPhone to a Google Pixel, that would be the churn point for Apple customers. However, when you look at a business like that, it’s very one-off transactional or they’re trying to win loyalty over, absolutely. But when you’re in more of a service-based business or like me, I’m an educator, the loyalty of those who come in to see us really, really matters. If you have a veterinarian’s office or you’re a doctor, you’re trying to build up a base and as people leave, it’s called churn when you look at mainstream business.
So what is your lost client churn point? Every business has one. If you mostly specialize in root touchups or extension clients or something that requires pretty frequent touchup maintenance, your churn point is probably somewhere around the three to four-month mark. If you had somebody that you were doing gray coverage on and they have not come in to see you in four months, you can probably bet that they’re going somewhere else.
Now that’s not a hard-and-fast rule for everybody, right? Some people do gray blending and it takes longer. I got it. But what I’m saying is you want to find an overall go-to based on your market, what is your average churn point. If you are somebody who specializes in lived-in blondes, your churn point could be nine months, a year, way longer because maybe you have some blondes who truly only come in to see you once a year. So then at the 13 month mark, we consider them a lost client. That would be the churn point. If you’re a barber, your churn point might be more like six weeks. If most of your clients come in every four to five, your churn point is going to be much shorter, right? Maybe it’s eight weeks or something like that.
But what you need to do is find the point in which you can safely assume that if a guest has not been in to see you in that range of frequency, they’ve likely chosen to go somewhere else.
First, find your average client churn point.
Second, when we decide to put these efforts into place, recency really counts. Meaning reaching out to those who left your business not so long ago will, generally speaking, be more effective than reaching out to clients who haven’t seen you in five years. So recency counts.
Whenever we put these efforts into place, which we will get to the efforts, I promise, what you want to do is start with a guest who have stopped seeing you within the last year and then extend your range out from there.
I had no qualms about—I would do a lost guest campaign or a win-back campaign with the clients who hadn’t been to the salon in five years. I would totally do that, but I would always start with the clients who hadn’t been to see us in six months, eight months, a year, 18 months, and then I’d work my way out because the recency really counts with these efforts.
Number three, what services are your priority? Let’s say I specialize in textured hair, I work with curl, I’m a curl cutting specialist. I do a lot of styling services, and two years ago, I was doing a bit more broad of a range. I was doing cuts, color, couple extension clients here or there. I would do weddings from time to time. I probably don’t have to reach out to the clients who were root touchups who had short bobs. If that’s not what my clientele looks like today, I might skip them over.
The reason why I share that is when you do a win-back campaign, A, it’s very time consuming, so you don’t want to be wasting your time, energy, or efforts. And B, the way to win in the industry today is to be special and have a specialty. Specialists are deeply winning in the beauty industry.
Now, if you’re brand new to the industry, I’m not saying specialize on day one, but when you’re at the place of growing and scaling and you’re really building out your clientele and building out your brand, being a specialist really helps. It’s the fuel to the fire. If a client, you love them, you adored them, but they no longer want what you offer as a specialist, probably a good thing that they left, so we skip over them.
And number four, has your target market changed and does your branding reflect that? Does your branding reflect that?
One of the things I noticed, I was a combing through the Thrivers Society community last weekend I think it was, and I noticed that there were so many rebrands going on, so many people, and it’s not because the brand that they had before didn’t work. It did work. But now their business has elevated and because their business has elevated, they’re doing a rebrand again. Some of these people are on their second, third, fourth rebrand, which is exactly what business should look like. I have been coaching online since 2015, so nine years now, and we’re on our sixth rebrand because the business has grown so much that that has to happen. This is all very normal.
You have to ask yourself, has the business changed and does the brand reflect that before I put these efforts into place?
There’s three types of efforts we can take with lost guests or clients who have moved on. The first is going to be at-risk client efforts. We have at-risk clients, then we have lost clients, and then we have our recovery efforts. Three totally different things.
Let’s look at each. We’ll start with the at-risk efforts. This starts at the churn point. Let’s say you decided your churn point. You’re a barber and your churn point is seven weeks or eight weeks, okay? Maybe your client has gone to see somebody for just one other haircut, they chose to go somewhere. It wasn’t with you. There’s a pretty good chance of you winning them back if you do it correctly versus that they haven’t seen you in 18 months. They’ve likely deeply moved on to somebody else, right?
If you hit them right at the churn point, they’re considered at risk. They’re not lost just yet.
Let’s say it’s somebody who’s a root touchup client. They haven’t been in to see you for three months. They used to be in every eight weeks or something like that. At that three-month mark, you drop a line and when you do, you assume that they just got busy. Life happened. Looks like it’s time to get you back on my books. You make the assumption that they’re still very much a part of your clientele. You don’t say things like, “Did you get sick of me and go somewhere else?” You don’t even make it funny and do it tongue in cheek. You fully make the expectation of, “Hey, I know life’s been busy. It’s summer,” or whatever you want to say. “Looks like it’s been a little bit, let’s get you on my books. I do have time available on June 22nd or whatever.” Maybe suggest an appointment time, but you assume that they want to come in to see you.
If they respond saying, “Hey, thanks, I actually have moved on and now I’m seeing somebody else,” then you shift forward and move on to lost client efforts, which I’m going to talk about in a second.
But if they don’t respond at your next cancellation, you reach out to them again and you reach out to them very first thing and say, “Hey, I checked in with you a couple weeks back. I didn’t hear. I happen to have an opening tomorrow. I know you love those Thursday night spots. I have tomorrow at 5:00 PM. Does that work for you?”
Again, assuming that they want to be a part of your business, but now you’re doing them a solid, you’re being proactive, you’re trying to get them in. If after those two points of contact they do not respond, you can assume that they’ve moved on and do not want to be in contact with you, at least in that one-to-one fashion at this point.
Now we’re going to come back to those people in a moment, but I want to switch to lost client efforts.
Assuming that you did that at the churn point, you reached out and somebody said, “Hey Britt, thanks for reaching out. I’ve actually moved on.” Okay, so we know that they’ve left us, or maybe that doesn’t even happen yet. Maybe you didn’t hit them at the churn point. Maybe they’ve been gone for six months, that’s totally fine, but at the point where you’re 99% certain a client has moved on from you, you switch forward to these efforts.
We call it like it is at this point. We don’t pretend like they’re still a part of our business. I like to start with an email or a text, not a phone call. Too aggressive. Email marketing is becoming less and less effective as years. Go on, trust me. I know lots of people are still coaching too and promoting email marketing. I totally get it.
My opposition to it is how many of you check and read every single email that hits your inbox? Can I be honest with you? I’m not even in the habit of checking my email every day anymore and I used to check my email several times a day. My inbox is cluttered, I’m distracted, I’m doing other things. It’s falling out of habit for me and I don’t think I’m a one-off in that. Email is just a little bit less effective than it used to be.
So email or text, don’t do a phone call, too aggressive, and you call it like it is. You say, “Hey, I noticed that we’re no longer working together. I’ve really missed our time spent. Is there anything I could have done differently that would’ve made you stay?”
Call it like it was. Ask for a little bit of feedback. If they do not respond, then you drop a handwritten card and you put it in the USPS, United States Postal Service, mailbox and you send it to them because I don’t know about you, I miss a lot of emails. If you know me personally, your girl also misses a lot of text messages, I’m pretty bad, but if you send me something in the mail, I’m not going to miss it. I’m going to catch it every time.
Most of you are wired the same. If something actually hits you in the physical mail, you’re going to read it. If at that point they do not respond and or share constructive feedback, you thank them so much, say you’re always here if they need anything, and then that’s it.
This is not a—let’s say they respond and they’re like, “Yeah, I’ve got to be honest. You always ran late. You always ran long. I got tired of it.” You don’t respond and say, “Oh my gosh, I’ll be so much better. Please come back in to see me.” It’s almost like go back to high school when you broke up with your high school boyfriend or girlfriend and they’re like, listen, I’m just not that into you anymore. And then you’re like, no, please, I’ll be better. It gives that energy where it’s like, oh my gosh, no. Just accept it for what it is.
You want to still appear confident and strong, so just say thank you so much for your feedback. I really appreciate it and literally do not even get into it. Don’t say, “This is something I’ve been aware of or I was really only late for you two times. Don’t get offensive. Then you start to look unprofessional. Just say, “Thank you so much for your feedback. Please just know I’m always here for you. Always appreciated our time together. Best to you and your family.”
Take the high road no matter what the feedback is, trust me on this one. You getting defensive or you trying to explain yourself is only going to make it messier. There is no point or purpose, so then you let it go.
Then there’s the client recovery efforts. This is for clients who have been gone one year or more, okay? Remember I said that recency counts. Hitting at the churn point is the best thing we can do. And then there’s gaining back the lost clients who are in that gap between churn point in one year where we’re looking for information or oh, I should have mentioned this too. Sometimes you’ll do that, what I said, and you’ll send out the text or the email and it will say, “Hey, it looks like you’ve moved on. Is there anything I could have done differently?” You’ll actually be surprised at how many people say, to be honest, you’re right. I did move on. I did not like the new stylist I saw, but I was super embarrassed because I thought you’d be upset with me for going to somebody else, so I didn’t come back to you.”
That story is so true for so many clients, but you just reaching out and being like, “Hey, I know you left. Is there anything else I could have done?”, it opens the door back up to say, no harm, no foul. We’re still all good. Do you still want to work together? It puts you back in the driver’s seat. You’ll be surprised how often you get that response too.
Just when we do that curiosity client, you reach out lost client effort, you’ll be amazed at all the opportunities that come your way, so be open to it.
Let’s get into client recovery.
First, there’s the soft efforts. Soft efforts are you wait six months since the lost client efforts, which was the text or the email and you make an offer or incentive. For me, we don’t make an offer or incentive until six months after that lost client effort or one year or more since they’ve come in to see you. Please do not give them an offer or incentive if it’s been less than a year since they’ve seen you. It gives desperate, so we don’t want to do that.
If it’s been six months since your lost client efforts or it’s been a year since they’ve been gone, then we can give them an incentive at equal level to your referral program. So if your referral program is $25 off your first visit with me, then their incentive to come back in is the same essentially. They’re not a part of your clientele anymore, so you giving them the referral credit is self referring them to your business. Do not give more than that. Again, it’s giving desperate when you do that, so that’s enough.
If they don’t take the bait on that one, they’re not coming. We don’t have to sell our soul to get a client to come back in. Now if you want the more effective effort, like I said, that was the soft effort. That’s the mediocre. You can try it. I don’t love a coupon, but you can go for it.
A more effective effort is to listen to all the feedback as you’re receiving through these efforts. And let me tell you, doing this process requires thick skin. Feedback can be hard to hear, but good feedback is honest. And even though it’s hard to swallow sometimes, it’s exactly what you need.
As you evolve as a business owner, you start to realize, well, maybe some of the feedback’s not right, but a portion of it is always going to be true. And we as humans are always growing and changing. If you can adapt to some of that feedback, your business might just hit a turning point where it really takes off.
So what I would do, take all that feedback and choose to level up or rebrand depending on what the feedback looks like and create a stronger opportunity to work with you make coming to see you more. Interesting.
Did everybody listen to last week’s podcast episode? I talked about why so many stylists and salons are truly in a financial pinch today. I talked about how it’s not the bad market, it’s not the recession. It’s not that clients aren’t spending money, it’s not that certain services aren’t popular anymore. It’s literally brand positioning and opportunity. The opportunity to work with you is just not that good. That’s probably for 80% of struggling stylists. That’s what it boils down to. It’s not deeper than that.
And when people say, “No, it is good. I do good color,” I’m not even talking about that. Doing good services, being a talented stylist is 20% of the recipe. 80% of the recipe is being business savvy. For a lot of you, it’s that 80%, that business-savvy piece that needs to adapt and change in order for these client recovery efforts to pay off. Starting there is going to be your best bet.
If you don’t know where to start from there, I want you to go back and look at the marketing funnel. I talk about that in episodes 259, 260, 261, and 262. There’s a four pack for you of the Thriving Stylist Podcast. That’s all the foundation of the brand. So go back and listen to that.
If you’re like, I’m not even sure how to do it, I tell you exactly how to do it, go back and listen. Brand has the power to make or break your business. If you can dial that in, if you can elevate, and when I say brand, by the way, brand is not logos, brand is not colors. Those are branding elements. Brand is infused into guest experience. It’s your messaging, it’s your verbiage, it’s your website, it’s just your pricing, your service packages. It leads into so much more than that. Buying new throw pillows, putting out new signage. Trust me, I’ve seen salons do that and still shutter their doors within a year. That’s not the recipe.
When I say rebrand, it’s down to service offerings, pricing, energy, a full elevation, perceived value methodology. Really get into it and take a good hard look at yourself and say, what are the habits that cause these people to leave? What are the things I did or did not do that made them choose to go elsewhere?
I like to really think about the relationship we have with our clients like dating where it’s like just because my husband and I have been together for over 20 years now, we both dated other people before we found each other. And we say all the time, thank goodness we ended up with each other. Because we look back and it’s like anybody we dated before, it’s not that they were bad people, they just were not our people.
I think it’s the same when it comes to choosing a stylist or salon owner. When a client leaves you, it’s not because the worst, you weren’t for them anymore. I don’t want you to be that person who’s like, “I’m going to change so that I’m right for them.” But one person leaving is fine. Three people leaving is weird. Five people leaving is a problem. At some point, you have to start and say, it’s me. “Hi, I’m the problem. It’s me.” You have to start to look at the world around you and say, “Are people leaving the issue? Are people leaving because I’ve instituted a pricing method that doesn’t work for my target market and clientele? Are people leaving because my brand and my target market has changed and they just don’t fit it anymore? Or are they leaving because I’ve started to run late, I’ve started to run long, my appearance has shifted. I’m not really as into it anymore. I’m doing services that make me resentful. I’ve cut corners in my guest experience. I moved to a salon and it’s not as great.”
You have to start looking at the hard facts and asking yourself, “What are the things I can do to control this narrative?” And then using these techniques to bring awareness to the fact that you are elevating, you are worth it. You are somebody that somebody should continue the relationship with. That’s what it looks like.
Alright, I hope you’ve loved this one as much as I did. Please leave me a rating or review and ask any question you have if you’ve got one.
As I always like to say, so much love, happy business building, I’ll see you on the next one.
