Selling Strategies

You’ve stocked up on great lotions, but the bottles are collecting dust on your shelves and sitting untouched in your display case. What gives? Perhaps you’re not doing all that you can to move lotions and other ancillary tanning supplies.

Selling products effectively takes a plan, which involves knowing your market, your customers and their tendencies, and keeping up with industry trends. It’s all about merchandising—and merchandising is all about how products are displayed. Basically, it’s a matter of arranging products in the salon to catch customers’ eyes and lead to a sale.

Salon owners need to decide if they prefer to sample lotions, whether to put products behind glass and how often they should change the arrangement. With this plan in hand, it comes down to one main principle: A display must appeal to a customer’s senses. If they are intrigued visually and can then feel and smell the items, they will be much more inclined to buy.

Some salons keep displays of point-of-sale bottles right by the registers, where customers are sure to see them. This gives managers the freedom to develop their own display feel, within certain parameters. Other salon owners spread out the products and feature different lines on different shelves to attract more interest from clients.

Sampling For Success

Experienced tanners swear by their favorite brands of lotion for one simple reason: they work. Today’s formulations are chock-full of vitamins, botanicals, essential oils and antioxidants and allow salon professionals to provide a multitude of products for every client’s needs.

Regular patrons don’t need lotion pep talks; however, it is often tough to sell clients on a professional-grade lotion when they find out that a typical bottle costs anywhere from $25 to $50. That’s why sampling is one of the industry’s most important sales tools and the best way to help new clients ease into the full indoor-tanning experience without breaking their banks.

Allowing clients to sample the latest products free of charge or for a small sum gets them to see, feel, smell and touch the products before they buy. Assuming the salon operator stocks quality products, customers should be able to see results after two or three sessions. If the tanner sees results, it could lead to a full-sized bottle purchase and a long-term client.

Sampling physically will prove why the bottle is at its price-point. The more samples you sell, the more bottles you will sell.

One uncertainty salon operators might face with sampling is whether to charge clients. Lotion samples can be a nice ancillary item, says one sales and marketing expert.

“Trial-size packaging no longer is used just for introducing new products,” he says. “Demand for convenience and portability is driving the development of smaller-size containers to be used as unit-dose or travel-size packages.”

Many salon operators often sell packettes or sample cups for $1.50 to $2. Some even have had success by selling their samples as high as $5. Then again, “free” still has a high value in any business.

“Giving free samples to our customers tells them that we care,” says an Ohio salon owner. “By caring, I mean we take the time to find out what they like and don’t like, and then we go through what we offer. From there they can decide what they want to try.”

Free may be a scary word for business-minded operators, but it’s important to remember that free samples could lead to a lot of lotion sales because quality lotions do their jobs. Veterans advise salon operators to be careful when it comes to sampling. Some people will sample a product more than once, never buying the bottle. Counter that by keeping all the information about the customers in the computer and on their chart so you know what they tried, when they tried it and what they thought of it.

Display Options

Salon owners have varying opinions when it comes to displays. Some like to have their products out and easily accessible to employees and customers, while others prefer to keep their lotions locked up for security reasons.

Many salon owners believe strongly about keeping products in the open and readily available to customers “I do not like it behind glass cases, because if it’s behind something, the customer’s going to see that you’re going to have to open up the case, and they’re not going to bug you for that,” says one salon owner. “They don’t want to bother you if you’re really busy.”

The exception to his rule is the products in the hallways. But he has a compromise there. So customers can read the bottles from behind the glass without assistance, he keeps one bottle facing the front and one of the same lotion facing the back, so customers who want more information on the ingredients can read them without assistance.

“Some customers don’t care what the ingredients are,” he continues. “They’ll take the word of whoever’s working that day. But I always tell customers if it’s really busy that they can go read the back of the bottle.” Still, the lotions in the enclosed hallway cases are accessible from behind the counter as well.

Some salon owners have found it necessary to lock up product. “Things tend to grow legs and walk out a lot,” says another salon owner. “My glass case is closed. Of course you have to be very attentive to people looking at what’s inside. You have to immediately go up and unlock it without them asking and say, ‘Here, take a look.’ Hand them the bottle, let them feel it. I also have jewelry in there. We tell them, ‘That looks great. You’d love this. Put it on.’”

Keep It Fresh

By nature, consumers are stimulated by sights, sounds and changing tastes. Just look at how television commercials and magazine ads are different even from last year or a few years ago. Advertisers constantly are morphing how their messages are delivered, and so should salons—only the “advertising” in salons come in the form of in-store displays.

Salons are no different than any other retail business, in that displays that fail to change also fail to keep the customers’ attention. Conversely, displays that are different every week or month demand to be noticed.

Displays must be kept fresh or they lose appeal and the interest of your regular customers. Experts suggest changing them as often as you can, but at least monthly. Also, make sure they are seasonal to increase sales when buying patterns naturally increase.

No matter what kind of merchandising plan a salon picks, it should be interactive. That’s not to say the salon should be thumping with sound, video displays, touch screens or virtual-reality stations. We’re talking interactive in the traditional sense—employees attending to customers, being available for every question and responding courteously and knowledgeably. It’s the perfect complement to any merchandising program.

It is important to ask every tanner if they have their lotion each and every time they tan in your salon. Veterans agree that education is key to continued selling success. It doesn’t matter what kind of display you have or where you have it—you just need to pick the bottle up, put it in the customers’ hands and talk to them about it.