How SMS Marketing Can Revolutionise Your Beauty Business

There are many benefits of using SMS marketing for businesses within the health and beauty industry. From instantly connecting with customers to booking appointments and increasing sales, the opportunities for the health and beauty sector are huge when it comes to business text messaging. Due to the fast-paced nature of appointment booking within the industry, and the increasing competition, SMS marketing could be the key to separate you from your competition. Communicating directly with your customers via SMS text messaging can help you to retain loyal customers, and capture new customers after their very first booking. In today’s fast paced society where we have come to expect instant gratification, SMS messaging is very effective at delivering the results your customers have begun to expect from you. Not responding or acting on information quick enough can be the difference between a sale or a lost customer. Below, we’ve listed out some of the key ways SMS marketing can revolutionise your beauty business.

Make it work for your customer

If your customers are able to book and cancel appointments via text, you will find you have a much more efficient booking system. It makes cancelling an appointment, as things change last minute, so easy that you will dramatically reduce your number of ‘no show’ appointments, meaning you can fill the spare appointments with other people who’ve been waiting to visit your salon. Once appointments are cancelled, you can send a quick text out to your database stating there are availabilities and quickly replace the cancellation, meaning you no longer have to miss out on business.

Giving your customers the option to book appointments over text also increases the number of appointments you’re able to secure. A text can be sent with ease, during a morning or evening commute, or on a break – meaning your service is perfectly set up to adapt to the hectic demands of your customers’ day jobs. They will really appreciate the flexibility you’ve shown in your appointment booking system and it could be the difference between you securing a new customer and retaining a loyal one. You can also use SMS messaging to send appointment reminders to your customers, which, with their hectic schedules and already overfull diaries, will be greatly appreciated.

Gain insight

SMS messaging can also be used as a very quick and easy tool to gain customer insight. Short surveys can be created and sent out to your database of customers within a matter of minutes. Instant responses can be set up and to encourage customers to take part, you could offer the first 10 people who respond a discounted treatment at your salon.

Using SMS messaging to communicate with your customers is a highly efficient and effective way to gain insight into their preferences and needs. Let’s say you’re considering hiring a new member of staff who’s qualified in massage techniques that will be new to your salon. You could ask customers to state which of the styles of massage they’d most like. Or ask your customers if they would prefer a new style of wax treatment. Using your SMS business text messaging as a crowdsourcing channel to gain understand more about your what your customers are looking for your salon to provide could help you make more positive commercial decisions for your business. You can use the speed of response that you’ll gain from SMS messaging to make quick decisions for your business, such as offering new products or services, which will help you to forecast more effectively and ultimately generate more revenue.

Cost-effective

Thanks to the speed in which an SMS marketing campaign can be designed and inputted, it is a highly cost-effective method of communicating with customers. The speed of sending an SMS text to your whole database is the same as typing and sending one single text, so for instant communication, it’s a highly effective way of reaching out to your customers. Another reason SMS marketing is so cost-effective is that it requires no design, and amends are addressed instantaneously. Rather than the campaign having to go through numerous sign off processes, you can quickly edit any of the text you wish without having to wait for designers, printers or producers to complete the finished work you wish to send to customers. With texts starting from as little as 2.1p, SMS messaging is one of the cheapest and most effective methods of direct marketing on offer today.

Impactful

With over 97% of text messages being read, you can almost guarantee that your communication won’t get lost or ignored by the people you most want to communicate with. You can reach people instantly, with messages that will pop up on their screens as alerts, anytime you wish you send out your marketing. Texts are easy to respond to, allowing your customers the flexibility to read, acknowledge, and respond to your text at a time convenient to them. You can send SMS messages instantaneously, responding to information, such as a customer visiting your salon to build on their positive in-salon experience, and encouraging them to visit again by offering an incentive such as 15% off their next appointment. Compared to email marketing, which has an average open rate of only 10%, SMS marketing is as good as guaranteed to reach your customers and be engaging enough for them to act on your messaging.

If you work within the health and beauty sector and want to understand more about how SMS marketing can benefit your business, improving your customer relations and ultimately increasing the revenue you generate, then contact fastsms today. We are the UK’s number one business SMS platform and have helped to deliver SMS marketing campaigns for our customers across several sectors. We understand how important cost-effective marketing that provides tangible business results is, and work with you to support and develop your campaigns to maximise the return on your investment. For more information, contact us on 0800 954 5305 or email us helpdesk@fastsms.co.uk today.