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