Aug 16, 2015 | Get Help
You have put the greatest pictures on your website, the best stories and you have very competitive prices. And you have a lot of viewers, but hardly any sales, what can you do?
People visit your website, Instagram or Facebook page but how do you keep their attention after they left your page? You know on an average people need to see a shop or the hair extensions before they will buy something.
In 4 strands we will share with you how to keep their attention, even if they are not on your website or Facebook page anymore.
1. Keep your website up to date, refresh your content or offer new content on a regular basis. Avoid to have outdated offers on your site because first time visitors might decide your website is no longer maintained and start to look for another sop without even checking your web shop.
2. Create a social media button (twitter or Facebook) on you site so people can just click on this button and follow you after they left your shop.
3. Keep the conversation going. In other words, keep your social media alive with promo´s and interesting postings and tweets. There are tools, like “socialbro” that can indicate what the best time is to post your tweets, and if you schedule your postings on this best times with Hootsuite you can get the attention from your followers when they are ready for it.
4. Start with your own newsletter. Make sure you have regular updates with interesting articles and relevant promotions. There are various providers of these newsletters, you can select anyone you like, but options you should considers are :
a. Templates available, unless you like to spend a lot of time on composing your newsletters look for a provider that offers a lot of readymade templates. Focus on the content instead on the format of the letter
b. Analytics, learn from your victories and mistakes. This option allows you to see who opened, clicked or downloaded etc. and who´s not. This helps you to fine-tune your emails and to make them more personalized for your followers. And this of course will make them more interested in your offer!
c. Segmenting, this allows you to targeted messages to readers based upon shared behavior. For example a certain region.
We use Aweber because they have the features and even more and Aweber can be easily integrated with your social media. But there are more providers of email marketing solutions. Select the one you feel most comfortable with and does not qualify your mails as spam.
If you want to try if an email program can work for you try the free Test Drive below. No commitments and you can only sell more!
Start Now Selling Hair Extensions
Your first time visitor is very important because if you do it well and you offer interesting content they will return to your site and with every time they return there is a bigger chance you will have a new client!
Aug 9, 2015 | Get Help
Only if you measure the activity and outcome of your business you know what is happening. Of course you will have a (kind of) bookkeeping to check on the financial side and to prepare your tax return. But bookkeeping is telling you what has happened some time ago, while to take the right decisions in business you like to know what is going to happen. For this you need to define for yourself a number of indicators that will tell you what is likely to happen tomorrow or later.
Good indicators are for example the number of people visiting your site or the number and type of comments on your Facebook postings.
Once you have more than 30 likes of your Facebook Page you will be able to see a treasure of information on the people who are interested in your Page. Only the administrator of the Page (so you) is able to see this data. There is a lot of data available, but you should again focus on a few, otherwise you will get lost in the information, but if for example you have a base set of 5 indicators and every month you select one other you will enrich your insight without losing yourself in all the data available. Here are some suggestions to start with:
Evolution in number of ¨likers¨ or fans: If you follow on the ending of each month the number of ¨Likers¨ or fans, you will be able to see how appreciated your page is. If you manage to have a growth of 10% a month you are doing very nice. If you see a certain spurt in growth or many ¨unlikers¨, then you should analyse what might be the cause and use this to or further improve the growth or to avoid more people to turn their back to your page.
The average number of Likes or comments: These indicators show you which discussions are of more interest to your fans. Watch for unusual spikes or drops in this number as it will teach you what exactly your fans are interested in. Increase the number of postings around the topic your likers are more engaged with and decrease the number of posts around topics they are not interested in. And check afterwards the impact. Instead to check all postings, you can also check the top 10 postings with the most engaged users and the top 10 of the less engaged users in the last period (month). Just click on the arrow to sort by most and less popular.
Aug 3, 2015 | Get Help
Question: I would just like some information on how to starts online extension business. Thank you in advance.
Monica
Answer:
Hi Monica,
Thanks for your email and welcome in the beautiful business of selling hair.
In my Vlog of last week I had a question from Lisa who also was wondering how to start selling hair online. You can see the VLOG.
I recommend to use a combination of social media and your website, because survey shows potential clients spend much more time (8x) on social media, you can use this to build up your reputation and trust. Keep you social media up to date and not only post your messages but also comment and like on the posts of others. For the Hair Business make sure you use Facebook and Pinterest at least.
Did you already find out what kind of clients you want to service? It helps to focus on a special part of the market, You can design your website just with the components your clients like. Use in your social media expressions also non hair related issues, share content that is in the line of your clients interest. You can use the Facebook add tool to get a better understanding of your clients interests.
If you know where your clients are looking for, you are also able to select the key words they use to search for hair extensions. Use these words in the meta tags of your website. You will see more clients will find you, because you offer exactly what they are looking for.
Please feel free to contact me any time, and do not forget to subscribe for free on our newsletter
,
Start Now Selling Hair Extensions
Jul 17, 2015 | Get Help
You have great hair business ideas, but you do not have much money to start your own hair business. The money you have, you prefer to invest in hair stock and marketing. So what can you do to attract visitors to your webshop?
It’s a great, and cheap way, to start your business on social media and to use social media to attract visitors to your website. But if you can not invest money, you should be willing to invest time, a lot of time, but this will pay off because of the increase of traffic to your site.
The good news is nearly one out of three people on the internet spend time using social media, so Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or other platforms. The most popular is still Facebook, but Pinterest is a fast grower.
The other good news is that people on social media, are not clicking away that fast, once they found your page, they are there to stay and to enjoy what you and others share. People spent a more then average time on the site, visited more pages and more happy what they find. So how to benefit from all these advantages of social media?
Rule number 1, be consistent. And stay consistent, you will see little to none impact if you execute a strategy only this weekend. You will see results if you manage to continue for a month , but the traffic starts to kick in of you follow the strategy for a year. So what do you prefer?
1. Who do you want to reach? Make sure you know who you want to visit your site, do you want to reach the husband or boyfriend who is looking for a great and orginal present, like hair extensions. Or are you going for a certain type of women, business women or college girls? Read more about Joan for more info on how to profile your visitor. Now you know who you want to visit your page or shop, you
2. Select your social media platform. There are a lot of social media platforms, and new platforms are launched even when you read this. But instead of being present on all those platforms, it’s better to select two or three. This helps you to stay focused. But which social media platform should you choose for your hair extensions business? The graph below, composed by ComScore, shows you the average age of the visitors of the various social media platforms.
It shows you Facebook, although still the biggest social media platform is less popular under the younger hair lovers. Try to use Vine, Tumblr or Instagram.
3. Create content Make sure you can deliver enough content for the next months to come, collect relevant content your visitors will like, social media is all about sharing so, share! But of course you can also prepare content of your own, send out the right message, appealing enough for others to share. Avoid to only broadcast messages with a commercial context, do not shout Sale all the time, but start the converstation in a non promotional way. Remember, first you get along, then you go along.
4 Get followers There is one Golden rule in social media, and that’s it’s not a numbers game. Not the number of likes, followers or G+ counts, but the interaction. So save yourself money and frustration and do not buy followers. If you have good content to share, you will gain perhaps 1,000 followers less, but you will gain 1,000 times more valuable followers, real people who might decide to buy your hair extensions one day! Start to follow influential accounts and start tio interact, share content and overtime your will grow in number of followers, do not go for quantity but for quality.
5 Do not talk too much If people like what you share, you could decide just to share more. But who likes the person on the party that’s doing all the talking? Avoid your postings are qualified as spamming. If you are on Facebook twice a day a posting works fine, on Google + three times a day and for twitter 3 a day should be enough. Make sure you post at the time your audience is checking their social media network, so use a tool like social bro.
6 automate your postings Now you know what you want to share, the frequency and at what time. The last thing to do is to automate the broadcasting, just to be sure you can focus on your business and your messages will be communicated in a consistent manner. You can use tools like Hootsuite to schedule your messages, the tool is for free and will save you a lot of work and working hours!
7 Measure You need to fine tune the steps above over time, check the best postings, analyse when your visitors are online and last but mot least, keep on going to share content. Commit yourself to the plan and you will see in a year time the number of visitors has grown a lot.
Start Now Selling Hair Extensions
Jul 17, 2015 | Get Help
What is the level of inventory I should keep
A returning question on our email consult is what is the level of inventory I should keep? Of course you do not want to put all your money in your stock. No problem if you have a high turnover rate (for example what you purchased yesterday is sold today) but it can kill your business and passion, if your money is piled up in beautiful hair extensions, but nobody is buying. You do not want to feel like Scrooge McDuck in a warehouse full of hair, do you?
How to calculate your minimum level of stock
To calculate how much inventory you need, you have to analyze a couple of things. First of all how are the delivery conditions of your supplier? In case they offer next day delivery, you can afford to keep a low inventory. But do they always have all the required textures or inches available? If this is not the case you could decide to find a second supplier or to keep extra inventory for these specific extensions.
If your supplier needs more days or even weeks before they deliver, you need to have some stock in the house in case your clients want to purchase the hair. But how much? For this you need to develop a crystal ball over time, you need to predict future orders! Easier said than done? Not easy but it can be done!
How to predict future orders
There are three things you need to develop to have the right insight to predict the level of inventory needed.
First of all, make sure you stay in contact with your clients, in your shop but also through social media. Activate discussions and analyze how they respond on the postings with new pictures of hair. Organize events and make sure at the end of the event you know what they are looking for and might be interested to buy a next time.
Next to this keep good track of your sales, this will help you to discover the most popular items for your clients, okay it is looking backwards, so not really a crystal ball, but it will tell you which items in origin, texture or lengths are the most popular ones.
Finally use analytical tools like Google Analytics or Facebook to analyze the visits to your website, what items attracts the attention of your visitors, how much time do they spend on checking the different hair you are offering. And why don´t you start to write a blog or some postings about a specific type of extensions and see how the people will respond. Do they like it and comment a lot, it does not mean they will actually buy it, but it gives you insight in what item is more popular or could become more popular.
Keep your focus
And do you really need to sell everything that is available on the hair extensions market? If you focus on some specific extensions you can become the expert and distinguish yourself from the others even from big shops that do sell everything. This will also reduce the items you need to keep in stock. See also our post on the right number of extensions to keep at hand.
