Ask the experts

How can add-on services be marketed in order to benefit my salon business?

Add-on services can position your salon business as the place to go for a variety of treatments and services that cater to a diverse clientèle. One approach is to highlight your add-on services to ensure you tailor treatments to individual client needs. Treatments can be mixed and matched, according to your client’s current skin concern, and adapted within a course.

Add-on treatments will enhance a client’s experience. They can be marketed as stand-alone ones, such as lunch-hour or express treatments, or as part of an extended treatment plan. They are also cost-effective, as they help to increase your revenue, without compromising on treatment time. You should, however, work out your costs carefully – for any add-on services, calculate the costs at time and a half.

Offer a complimentary taster session for clients to experience an add-on treatment without commitment

To market your add-on services, capture your audience appropriately. More mature clients may be less tech or social media savvy. Therefore, they will require a different strategy, such as direct mail or a phone call. Always ensure your messaging is personalised and inclusive.

Offer a complimentary taster session for clients to experience an add-on treatment without commitment. You can think of this as like test-driving a car. As Apple founder Steve Jobs famously pointed out, a lot of the time, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them – so it’s important for salons to make add-on services attractive to their customers.

Choose an aesthetics systems brand that continues to focus on developing new add-on attachments that fit previous models. This will make it cost-effective for salons because you can offer clients new treatments using new attachments, without having to purchase a new machine.

What is regenerative beauty and how can a brand embody the concept?

Regenerative is a concept that is beyond sustainable. Rather than ‘less bad’, regenerative is actually positive as it’s restorative for the planet, and restorative for body and mind.

To be positive for both the planet and for mankind, regenerative means we need to put back more than we take out. This could be measured in several ways, such as improving the health of life on the land and in the sea by focusing on biodiversity and soil health.

One of the main ways a beauty brand can be regenerative is to use organic and regeneratively grown ingredients. Regenerative organic agriculture is a holistic, sustainable approach to farming, which aims to restore the nutrient content of the soil during the farming process.

One very important part of that ecosystem is the microorganisms in the soil. There are more organisms in a handful of soil than humans who have ever lived, and they all help sequester carbon from the atmosphere and trap it in the ground. By reducing their diversity, we risk losing this benefit.

One of the main ways a beauty brand can be regenerative is to use organic and regeneratively grown ingredients

Large-scale commercial farming is characterised by large monocrop fields, over-tilling, and the use of pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertiliser. These efforts deplete the soil, resulting in eroded land, a depleted planet biome and reduced quality of output. This has a severe environmental impact on a broad scale.

Although current organic certification doesn’t cover every aspect of regenerative farming, it is still a real improvement on commercial farming. Research shows that greenhouse gases could be reduced by 40-50% by 2050 by following organic principles, and organic soil is 25% more effective at storing carbon long term than non-organic.