Aug 7, 2016 | Sell Online
Time management for hair store owners
Last week I spoke a nice woman, let’s call her Sandra, and she was the proud hair store owner. We had a chat about the business opportunities in her market. She wanted to grow her business, sales have been lacking behind expectations.
We discussed how she could, next to her online store, organize some events, with local hair salons or at the home of some of her clients. The hair business is all about trust and with an online store it’s not always that easy to convince your visitors to buy your hair.
It helps to market the hair, if you wear it and show it on public events, but also if you organize special events for your existing clientele who can invite their friends.
Sandra was enthusiastic, but she hesitated also. She told me she was five people in one, since she started selling hair. She was:
- in charge of the inventory, looking for suppliers and checking the hair
- dealing with customers as sales person
- busy with the payments and bookkeeping
- very busy trying to be social on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and
- all the other stuff a shop owner has to do
and now she needed to organise events?
It was just too much, she admitted it was a good thing to do, but Hey she was not with 5 people, it was only her!
I gave her some advice on time management, sometimes you need to spent time to win time.
Time management is about organizing and planning the tasks you have to do, so even if you are not 5 people or more in one, you still can much more than only one person can do.
First of all, do your brains a favor
Your brains keep track of everything you have been doing, are doing and will be doing in the future. A great way to relax your precious brains is to make use of an agenda, and other filing system. This can be on paper or in the cloud, as long as you register your appointments a.s.a.p. in that calendar. Things to do for a client, do not keep it in mind, but place it in your calendar, client file or customer relations management system.
Free up space in your brains, because instead of remembering all the things to do, you only will remember to check on a regular basis your calendar or customer relations system. Do you see the benefit of time management already?
Make appointments with yourself
What you do if you have meetings with clients, or suppliers? You block time in your agenda, nobody will disturb you anymore at that time of the day. So you can focus on the meeting. Perfect and very productive. But why you do not block time in your calendar for meetings with the boss of your hair store? If you have to prepare a new marketing campaign, why should it be of less importance than a meeting with a client? Block the time in your agenda to think, research, analyse and plan your marketing campaign. This will increase the productivity of working on that campaign, and the result will be much higher than when you do it in between other important things.
Use every second if it’s your last
The world is mobile, your clients visit your website while they are stuck in a traffic jam, order the hair will they wait for their kids to leave school. What about you? If you have to wait in the shop to buy office supplies, what do you do? If you have to travel and you have some time between two connections? What do you do? You quickly call that client who you couldn’t call earlier, right?
Wrong, your client is the most important person in your business life, sorry boss. So she or he deserves your full attention and preparation. Instead to make quick unprepared call with your client, better to use the time in between other things to prepare your campaign, to eavesdrop on people talking about hair or other stores. Make notes to use later and your marketing campaign will be much more enriched. Call your client when you are back in the office or store and read the files before you call.
If you still lack time, and you want to grow your business with a marketing campaign more social media presence or any other support to grow your business call your coach. You are not alone!
Feb 23, 2016 | Hair Store Names
Home 9 Tag: clients ( Page 11 )
Hair and makeup company names
To pick awesome hair and makeup company names is one of the most fun parts of starting your own business. You are the boss, so you decide, right? Wrong, your hair company name is so important you have to take some guidelines into consideration before your start to tell everybody about the name of your hair and makeup company. See further for the guidelines from Brand Name Experts on how to find the best Company Name.
Your company name will be the very first potential customers will see about you, so make sure it’s a well-chosen name.
What is your mission
Every company needs to have a goal and mission, so before you start your own business you have to think about where your company stands for and how you want to achieve this. Are you a very innovative re-seller, make sure your clients who are sensitive for the latest evolution on the hair market feel at home with your brand. Do you want to put your passion and love for people to service women who suffer from hair loss, you have to share this through your name.
Maestro, music please
Dim all the lights, get yourself a nice drink, light some candles and play your favorite music, because now you are starting a creative process, write down all ideas that pop up in your head:
- Your own name
- Synonyms
- Popular phrases
- Play word games
- Words in foreign languages, like in French
- Anything that comes from the creative part of your mind
Make sure not to drink too much, because you will use this list later in the full light to compare them with some guidelines.
Guidelines
Did you turn on the light again? Now we are going to use some guidelines to select a hair company name, this is serious business.
Are you allowed to use the name?
First of all, now you have a list of probably 15 to 20 names, you have to check if you are allowed to use the names from a legal point of view. Check with your chamber of commerce for example if the names are not already taken. This avoids a great loss of time and money, because the town is never big enough for two hair companies named TheBestHairofThisTown.
Can your name be remembered?
Please think again why you need a name for your hair brand or hair and makeup company, because you want people to find and remember you, right? If your hair company name is too difficult to note or to pronounce, people will give up the effort to remember it and gone is your first client.
Nothing bad if you have to explain your name, but make sure your clients will understand the link between your goal and mission and the hair company name. For my first company I selected some letters of the first names of my four kids, Maxime, Naomi, Chantal and Raymond and this gave me ‘MaNaChaRay’ , it looked great, but except for myself nobody could pronounce the name and my explanation did not turn a smile on the face of any client. Lovely kids but bad idea for a business.
Do not forget the internet
Okay you might have a smaller number of potential names left by now. Now take into account how people will try to search for you once they heard somebody telling them about your hair company. How will they note your name, is it easy to spell or will it be difficult for them? You do not want to lose people because they misspell your company name and end up with the competition, do you?
The same goes for the yellow pages off course.
Talking about the internet, avoid to use a name that starts with the same wordings as other hair companies. If you selected TheBestHairofThisTown and the domain www.TheBestHairofThisTown.com already exists, you will be in a serious competition if you name yourself www.TheBestHairofThisTownForSure.com.
Use the tool below to check the availability of your name on the internet.
CHECK and CLAIM your domainname and brandname BEFORE ANOTHER does
Wait before to do a shout-out
Now you did nearly everything that is needed to pick the best hair and makeup company names, but before you do a shout-out, please
- Make sure your name is not related to a product or service you do not want to be linked to, there are a lot of girls with the beautiful Egyptian name Isis, meaning throne and it would not be bad for a hair selling business, but many people doubt if this is still a smart name to use.
- Ask your family or friends what they think of the name, do not tell them it was your idea, because than your mother will like it anyhow, but go for the most critical response.
Did you pass the test?
If your name did pass all the testing and you selected the best of all hair and makeup company names it’s time to register your domain, to open a Facebook page, a Twitter and Instagram account and do not forget Pinterest. Please do not forget to share your name with me so I can help you to give your name the recognition it deserves and let me do the shout-out!
Aug 14, 2015 | Get Help
Perform an online market survey for free
Why would you spend a lot of money on performing an online market survey? Wouldn´t you prefer to build a strong relation with your potential clients right away and to get their opinion about your future?
If you start your business, you want to know what the exact need of your target audience is. You want to perform a market survey to be able to only purchase and market hair extensions and hair products your potential clients want to buy.
There are several commercial and free platforms that will help you to get the answers you always wanted to know from your potential clients. But why would you pay money for a platform you can only use once, if you can also set up a platform that will earn you money instead? 
How to perform a hair extensions market survey
1.
Define your target market. Make sure not to start to ask the whole world, but segment the market. Select an audience amongst potential customers.
Read more if you need help to define the target audience. Define also the number of people you are going to contact with your survey. Take into account not everybody will respond to your request to answer your questions. So your initial group should be larger than the number you need to get a significant feedback.
2.Put a benchmark, at what outcome will you decide to continue to launch your new brand? If 60% of the respondents give positive feedback, will this be enough? Or only if you got 90% support for your new product or brand? It is important to set the goal before. The goal can be based upon an internal benchmark, for example a previous held survey. Or you can use External benchmarks available with marketing agencies or the chamber of commerce.
3.Keep it simple. Do not over ask your audience. The risk is too big they will not answer all the questions, or they will stop participating.
4.Share your findings. If you have asked people to participate, they will also appreciate to know what you did with their answers; share your findings and next steps. No need to give away the concept of a unique product before the launch, but share general thoughts. This will help you to get the corporation of your audience the next time.
5. Next to the reward of the feedback you will share, do not forget to share a reward for every participant. For example a discount voucher for the first order with you!
How to get contacts for your survey
It´s good to start as soon as possible with building your network on social media. Interact and start to follow people with interest in beauty and fashion. There are programs like socialbro who can help you to identify these people easily on twitter and Instagram.
Make sure you interact, so people feel you are interested in their messages and not only in your own story.
If you interact with them it is easier and natural to contact them through Direct Messages. Contact them through DM about your idea to start your online shop and tell them you want their opinion. For sharing their opinion you will give them a small gift. Most people like to support others, so a great chance your will get a lot of positive feedback. Ask for their approval to send them an invitation email.
How to roll out the survey?
Now you have a number of contacts that want to share their opinion about ¨
your future¨. All you need to do is to contact them using email platform like
Aweber. This platform allows you to share emails with many people, track the response and also allow you to check who did not yet open your email. This helps to send them a follow up. Sometimes people get a backlog on the emails and appreciate a reminder.
List your questions in the email or attach a Microsoft Office Word document with the questions and enough space for answers.
Make sure you include a deadline for the response, mention the reward and do not forget to thank your respondents.
After the deadline, you will have a nice staple of answers that will tell you if your business idea is supported by enough potential clients.
Because you have the names in your Aweber email platform, you can use this to share your survey feedback, but also to pre-announce the launch of your business and later to shout out your promotions only for your VIP audience. Because people who care enough about your business to share their opinion I consider as VIP´s, don´t you? Now you can make money with the email platform because you will be able to promote and to sell exactly the right products! Over and over again!
Good luck in getting to know the needs of your clients!
Aug 12, 2015 | Get Help
Did you know 2 out of 3 people have more trust in pictures shot by other users, or ¨user generated¨ pictures of a product, then by professional pictures ? ”
This can be great news if you prefer not to invest too much money and to enhance your relation with your customers.
What can you do?
Encourage you clients to take Selfies
and to place them on your social media platforms or even in your newsletter or flyers. Recent research shows people will click, up to 25 percent more often, the buy now button this way. So, thanks God we have selfies!
How to show your brand selfies automatically?
Instagram is growing as a very important platform for people to orientate before they buy a product, like hair extensions. Instagram users very often add comments to their post and every time this includes a hastag with your company name or brand, it´s bingo for you!
The great thing is people like to share their experience with their friends. So if they bought your hair extensions and they have them installed, they want the world to know how good they feel and look!
You can easily integrate these selfies and other promotions of you products by, for example, using
websta. If you encourage clients to add your name or a special hastag to the pictures they uploaded, your websta frame will automatically refresh every time a new picture, using this hastag is uploaded on the net. The big advantage is it´s not you who promotes the pictures on your own Instagram account, but your clients on their own account.
Make sure you inform you clients well about the possibility to share their happiness with your brand with you and other buyers. Do not forget to reward, the most active clients, for example to share an
Amazon Gift Card or discount voucher. The small money you will invest in the discount or card, will be repaid in no time because of the increased sales!
Start Now Selling Hair Extensions
document with the questions and enough space for answers.
or discount voucher. The small money you will invest in the discount or card, will be repaid in no time because of the increased sales!