Salon Promotion Ideas: Promo Codes and SMS Offers for Spring

Quiet spring timeslot ready for salon promotion ideas

Part 6 of Spring Sorted: the 8-week series on getting your salon Christmas ready.

Most salon promotion ideas fail for the same reason: they discount the whole week to fix a problem that only exists on Tuesday morning.

Your roster is set, booking is on, deposits are holding and your reminders are running. Which means the obvious gaps are filled and what you are left with is the awkward stuff: the pockets of time that are quiet every single week and never quite fix themselves.

Aim at the gap, not the whole week

Every salon has them. Tuesday before eleven. The dead hour after lunch on a Wednesday. The first appointment on a Thursday that nobody ever wants. You know exactly which ones yours are, because you look at them every week.

The instinct when a week looks thin is to announce twenty percent off everything. It does fill the salon. It also hands a discount to every client who was going to book your busiest Saturday slot at full price anyway, which means you have paid to move bookings you already had.

A focused offer does the opposite. Twenty percent off Tuesday mornings only is visible to the people who could come on a Tuesday morning, and invisible to everyone else. Same discount, aimed at the actual hole.

There is a fairness argument too, and it is worth sitting with for a second. A blanket sale quietly tells your most loyal clients that the price they have been happily paying all year was never the real price. A targeted off peak offer says something different and true: this particular hour is worth less to us than a Saturday, so we will share that with whoever can use it.

The other advantage is that it is easy to say no to later. A standing offer on one quiet slot can end quietly. A salon-wide sale trains people to wait for the next one.

Salon promotion ideas that run themselves

Two steps. About ten minutes total, and then it looks after itself.

Step 1: create a promotional code with Advanced Discounting

Advanced Discounting lets you build a promotional code: a word the client types when booking, which applies a set discount. Make the code say what it is. SPRING20 is better than PROMO3 because it survives being forwarded to a friend, and clients remember it.

Decide three things while you are in there: the amount, what it applies to, and when it runs out. The last one matters most. A code with no end date is a permanent price cut you have not admitted to yet. The setup guide is here.

Step 2: send the offer by SMS

Now put it in front of the right people. Not everybody: the ones who could realistically take a Tuesday morning. Keep the message short and say the useful part first.

Hi Sam, we have opened up a few Tuesday morning spots before Christmas with 20% off. Use SPRING20 when you book: [your booking link]

The SMS marketing guide covers sending it. Both pieces are built in and ready to switch on.

Same housekeeping as last week: marketing messages need consent, need to identify your business, and need an easy way out. The ACMA's list of common mistakes businesses make is a useful five minutes, and a couple of them are easy to trip over by accident.

The magic bit: the discount applies itself

Here is the part that makes this worth doing properly rather than scribbling an offer on a sticky note.

The client types SPRING20 at online booking and the discount comes off by itself. Nobody at the front desk has to remember the offer, work out the percentage, or decide whether that client counts. There is no maths at the till and no argument at the end of a long day.

Which also means you can see what happened. The code either got used or it did not. If forty people used SPRING20 you know exactly what filled those Tuesdays, and you know to run it again. If four did, you have learned something cheap and useful about that offer.

It protects the client experience as well. The worst moment in any salon promotion is the one where a client thinks they are owed a discount and the person on the desk is not sure. Nobody wins that conversation. When the code does the deciding, it simply does not happen.

Most salon promotions never get measured because the discount lived in somebody's head. This one cannot help but be measured.

What it costs to run

Less than people assume. Pro includes 200 SMS per operator each month and Max includes 300, so a targeted campaign to the fifty clients who might take a Tuesday morning sits comfortably inside what you already have.

Pricing is in AUD per Bookable Operator, capped at 7 operators, with Starter at $25, Pro at $45 and Max at $55, which means the real cost of a spring promotion is the discount itself, and you chose that number.

Questions salon owners ask about salon promotions

What are good salon promotion ideas for slow days?

Pick the one slot that is reliably quiet and aim a single code at it. Off peak pricing on a named morning, a small add on service included before a set time, or a bring a friend offer on the day you have two operators standing around. Specific always beats general.

How do salon promo codes work with online booking?

The client enters the code while booking and the discount applies automatically. The booking arrives in your calendar already correct, so nothing needs adjusting at the till.

How many SMS do I need for a salon promotion?

Fewer than you think, because you are messaging a filtered group rather than the whole list. A promotion aimed at one quiet slot usually means a few dozen messages, well inside the monthly allowance on Pro or Max.

Should salons discount before Christmas?

Not across the board. December demand is strong enough that a blanket discount just gives away margin you were going to earn. A focused code on genuinely quiet times is a different thing: that is not discounting, it is filling.

The Spring Sorted series

Eight weeks, one simple step at a time, until your salon walks into December completely handled.

A new part lands every Monday until 9 November.

Fill your quietest hour this week

Already with Simple Salon? Switch it on today. Create one promotional code with Advanced Discounting, aim it at your quietest slot, then send it by SMS to the clients who could actually come.

Not with us yet? Discounting, SMS marketing and online booking are one system, so the code you create is the code that applies itself when the client books. Start your free trial. See what it costs, or look at what else is built in.

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