Considerations before you print your next run of gift vouchers

Following 30 March 2011 post on costs gift certificate setup could have on your salon, I was asked what should be included on the actual voucher to work with the system.

I’d personally look to incorporate a card reader to offer a salon branded card that will update both loyalty club and gift voucher credits each time it is used. Regardless of whether you adopt such technology used in many big brand stores or choose vouchers on paper media, you should still communicate your terms and conditions for their use both at the time of sale and before you finalise the bill for the person who redeems them.

What to consider including in your voucher design:

1.    Room for an expiry date?

Retailers are allowed to impose expiry dates on vouchers if they follow certain rules their legal advisors can help with as covered in;

• The Sale of Goods Act 1979


• Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982


• The Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977


• The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts regulations 1999

You need to decide if imposing an expiry date to use a gift certificate strikes the right relationship balance between the salon and its clients? (It may not be popular for clients however, unredeemed vouchers remain a liability to business, so consider a 12 – 36 month time limit.)

Ensure your salon team know the rules at point of sale

Formerly the Consumers Association, says the contract with the consumer would be undermined if the retailer failed to spell out the expiry rules at point of sale.

The retailer must tell the customer what conditions apply to the vouchers and be prepared to answer questions about them. It is not good enough to simply include terms and conditions in the small print with the voucher.

Clients seeking to defend their consumer rights would need to show expiry was not a term included in the contract at the point of sale. If you ask yourself 'was there a time limit pointed out at the point of sale?' and the answer is 'no' then you have a reasonable argument to say the rules have been breached.

2.    Room for a tracking number?

Good salon Point Of Sale software systems generate a tracking number or allow you to record one for each gift certificate you sell if you order them with pre-printed sequential codes, so you know both who you sold it to and who used the voucher towards products and services when redeemed. This allows you to know the business liability at any point, in outstanding credit from the sale of these vouchers. If you don’t computerise your salon records it’s an important practise to keep a book for this purpose.

3.    Pre-printed face values or blank?

Many salons reproduce their own version of salon currency and pre-print a range of denominational values, like bank notes of 5, 10, 20, 50 or similar. These may look more professional than the alternative of handwriting the actual gift amount on a single blank cheque style voucher, but pre-printed vouchers raise many more issues to overcome;

• You need to design, purchase and stock many more than with the blank cheque style, even if you only choose to offer a single value, say £25, all gift purchases greater than this require additional slips which take time to process at reception when given and received.


• You need to track a voucher number for each denomination purchased. This opens up more opportunities for human error to occur, when writing, inserting or even scanning in your voucher codes.


• You need a policy for unused balances. With blank cheques you can reissue any credit left on vouchers by copying the tracking number and amount of change to a new slip, but with pre-printed face values you are obligated to either inform both when selling to the purchaser and before billing the redeemer that vouchers are not exchangeable for cash. i.e. The voucher can only be used towards purchases of equal or higher face value as no cash is given for unused balances. If you can give change (without leaving an unused outstanding amount against a tracked voucher) you are actually refunding a previous purchase against a later days takings.

Set up & salon training available

We offer training for setup of gift certification on your system and how team members are to sell and process redemptions at point of sale.

Online Discount Vouchers - Does the deal stack up?

Groupon, the oneline discount voucher company, was recently described as "the fastest growing company of all time" by Forbes Magazine. Is it any wonder then that Salon Owners ask me should I do an online discount voucher campaign such as those offered by Groupon or Mycitydeal for their Hair or Beauty salon or Spa?

There is no doubt these deals have their place, but there are a number of issues you should consider as a Salon Owner.

Does the deal stack up?

What I mean by this is a 70% discount might be good for the client but it might actually cost you money to perform the service, especially once you have paid the commission to the voucher company.

What type of clients will it attract?

Clients that typically go for these deals tend to shop around and are not loyal. Are they the sort of clients you want?

Can you handle it?

Often the terms of the voucher company want you to offer a large number of deals. Do you have enough capacity to offer it? How will you pay your team? Will you sacrifice full paying clients for those on a deal or worse prevent your regular clients rebook for their regular appointments?

So how do I know what the pitfalls are?

I have crunched the numbers for a few campaigns to see if they were viable for a Salon business. Like any promotion, you can make it work if you are clever and quite restrictive about the offers and you are careful and do it on a small scale in order to only fill your quite slots.

I also sent in one of our Mystery Shoppers on a Groupon Deal at a branch of a medium sized southern based salon chain to see what the experience was like through the client’s eyes.

These were the results:

• The Mystery Shopper called the local branch to make an appointment but was referred to a central booking system.


• The salon chain must have been swamped as it took a week to get back to them to make the appointment.


• The only suitable appointment was on a bank holiday, but was made.


• On the day there was only one stylist in the salon who complained throughout that they were having to work a bank holiday, do a full day of voucher clients and would be working for almost nothing as they were only paid commission on the discounted price.


• The stylist also said they were going to be leaving the salon as they were fed up with how they were being treated.

Question: Would the client go back? Would you?

The point of doing a heavily discounted promotion is to fill the columns of quite team members on quite days at quite times, because it would be better off to give a service away to at least have a them work on someone for the time you pay the team member to be in salon. Sadly this point was missed in this promotion.

So what can you do to ensure that your promotions work for you?

Nexus Revolution offer a Professional Pricing Service that enables you to identify how much profit you make on every service performed. We use this to enable the setting up your entire seasonal plan of profitible promotions over the whole year so your cleverly designed campaigns even lock in profits.

~ Ryan Fox - Nexus Revolution UK BDM

To find out more about this service follow this link http://tinyurl.com/3xmdzuz