Something for Everyone: Sell more products to more people with a modern marketing and sales approach
The right time to maximize product sales in your tanning business is all the time, but current circumstances have made now a particularly apt time to reinforce the importance of taking advantage of every opportunity you have. Businesses around North America are in various stages of reopening and recovering from mandated closures and months of lost revenue and will be looking to make up for lost time with above average sales in the second half of the year.
Tanning businesses make money in a number of ways, and any little bit of growth in any facet helps. As suggested in the Smart Tan Magazine May Edition cover feature, maintaining and gaining as many members as possible was the first and most important step after reopening. Efforts in that regard should continue, and should always be a primary focus for your business, but it’s time to look at the next steps as well.
In examining your opportunities make the second half of the year as profitable as possible, one really stands out as virtually limitless: Increasing product sales. Maintaining previous members is vital, but particularly this time of year, there’s realistically only so many tanning memberships and sessions you can sell. Only a percentage of women in your community tan, and a smaller portion of them do it in the late summer and fall. But, every woman purchases beauty, skin care, bath and body products, and most incorporate numerous products in their routines. You just need to convince people to buy a product from you instead of where they normally do. Then once you have access to someone, you have additional opportunities to sell them more.
“Maximizing product sales should be a focus area for business owners each year, not only during times of hardship. Successful teams make product sales a priority daily, weekly, monthly, setting goals to grow this area of their business year after year. We are selling a tan, but we are also selling beauty. Not maximizing product sales leaves money on the table that may help us survive during times of hardship,” says New Sunshine National Sales Manager Jason Brooks.
“Retail beauty sales continue to grow year after year, as they should for salons too. Sales are not growing because clients are purchasing the same type of product more frequently but because of the complimentary items they pair with that allow them to personalize their skincare routine.”
All types of beauty, skin care, sunless, bath and body products fit perfectly into the mold of your business, and there’s no reason not to embrace them to the fullest extent. Products specifically for tanning are naturally your bread and butter, but why sell someone one product when you can sell them two, or three, or four? And it’s not at all exploitative to make a concerted effort to sell your clients more. Most of them are already buying these types of products somewhere, and you can truly offer them better options at better prices.
“Since everybody buys and uses bath and body products, I call them stolen sales, because you’re stealing the sale from who used to sell it to them. It’s a very simple methodology to get yourself established as a bath and body establishment,” says Sun Evolutions Global Sales Trainer David McFarland.
“UV products and bath and body go hand in hand. They work beautifully together. It makes a lot of sense that a tanning salon would sell bath and body. I think it’s really cool right now you can market locally to people around you, and get other customers who don’t even tan coming in to your salon to buy bath and body products.”
The products are already there for the taking, so this conversation is mostly about marketing and sales. Your challenge is getting them out in front of as many people as possible and helping them realize the value you can offer. Your sales approach needs to be geared to educate everyone that comes into the salon about your variety of product options, but you also need to market to your customer base outside the salon, and to really amplify your success, broaden your reach to people who have never even been in your salon.
Marketing starts with positioning and presentation. It’s not as simple as “if you build it, they will come,” but it’s definitely a start. Once you start thinking of yourself as a true skin care and beauty product destination, and projecting that to consumers, you’re on your way to actualizing it, and just need to follow through with the appropriate strategies and tactics.
Click here to read the entire article in the latest issue of Smart Tan Magazine online.
