Growing your client base: how to engage with your loyal clients to win new ones

Believe it or not, the most powerful PR and marketing tool you have is your existing clients. 

Word-of-mouth recommendations and reviews from happy customers are worth their weight in PR and marketing gold. They give your business a special kind of credibility and real pulling power when it comes to attracting new clients that money just can’t buy. Marketing specialists Nielsen report that 83% of customers trust recommendations from people they know – and that 66% trust online reviews. So how can you harness the positive feedback of your happy, loyal clients to win new ones? 

Client notifications

With Fresha, you can send a number of client notifications via text or email including booking confirmations, appointment reminders, special offers and thank you messages. Notifications can be personalised to your business, so you can use the thank you message function to request that your happy clients leave a positive review. 

A Spiegel Research Centre survey found that 95% of clients will check out reviews before booking an appointment – so the more positive reviews you can collect, the better for your business, and the more likely you are to reel in those coveted new clients.

Loyalty schemes

There are many ways in which you can make loyalty schemes work for your business. Loyalty cards that reward existing clients with discounts or free treatments are incredibly popular. Or you can offer bundles or package deals that clients can sign up for on a regular basis at a discounted price. 

Fresha has a great way to leverage this through its memberships feature, which also happens to be simple to manage. This feature really builds and rewards loyalty as it allows clients to buy bundles or a course of services that not only saves them money, it’s something they can share with their friends, family and colleagues; this helps to attract new clients too. Read our blog on how to benefit from memberships here and learn how to sell memberships with this article on our Help Centre.

Loyalty programmes and memberships can help you to capture new clients through word-of-mouth. Build on this trust by offering a two-way reward system where your existing clients are given a discount if they refer a friend who will also receive a discount off their first service or treatment. With a reward scheme like this, everyone wins! 

Social media

Engaging with clients new and old has never been easier thanks to social media. To successfully use social media channels to promote your business, you must be prepared to post consistently – but that doesn’t mean swamping your client's newsfeeds, and quality is always better than quantity. Social media management platform Hootsuite recommends mixing up the content and format of your posts to find out what works for you.

Once you have engaged your existing clients, it’s time to turn your hand to attracting new ones. Invite clients to leave reviews on your social media channels, use competitions and giveaways to encourage likes and shares, or incentivise your existing clients to recruit for you with two-way ‘refer a friend’ discounts. You can also pay to boost posts and run social marketing campaigns to advertise your business to suitable potential clients that you may not have been able to reach otherwise.

Marketing messages

If you have a Fresha account, then you already know it’s the best appointment scheduling software for small hair and beauty businesses. One of the reasons for Fresha’s success is that the platform allows its partners to engage directly with clients thanks to the blast campaigns feature. This feature gives our partners the tools to build and send marketing emails directly to clients, and it’s so user-friendly that you don’t need to be a tech genius to create really effective campaigns. Although social media is huge in today’s world, it may surprise you to hear that marketing emails are up to 40 times more effective than social channels for engaging your clients. 

One thing to remember is to make sure that all of the clients on your mailing list have signed up because they’re keen to hear all about your latest news and special offers – so don’t be afraid to ask your email subscribers to leave you reviews and to share special offers with their friends and family. 

Discover more about Fresha’s free salon and spa appointment scheduling software at www.fresha.com/for-business