Now that the first month of the new year is under your belt, it’s time to crack down on your marketing strategy for your tanning salon to ensure maximum success throughout 2023. To help you get ahead of the hustle and bustle of each month and the various peaks and valleys throughout the salon season, we’ve compiled a complete list of marketing ideas, helpful tips, and key seasons for your salon to capitalize on this year.

Marketing Ideas

1. Email & Text Marketing

If you do not already have an e-marketing plan in place, now is the perfect time to start! Salon software systems like TanTrack integrate salon data with popular online marketing platforms such as MailChimp, for example. This makes it really easy to build and schedule timely email marketing campaigns to your client base. TanTrack also offers SMS text messaging packages to help you communicate with your customers and potential clients in a variety of ways. Email and Text Message marketing can really level up your overall marketing game and drive meaningful interactions with your clients on a more frequent basis.

2. Up Your Social Media Game

Social media continues to be a strong business tool for tanning salons, allowing you to really lean into your brand voice, stay connected with your clients, and explore trends. Define what makes your salon unique and list out a few categories and topics that align with your brand. Create fun content that reflects your brand voice and share at least once a week to remain top-of-mind online.

3. Good Old Fashion Snail Mail

When was the last time you sent out a postcard or mailing to share your salon features, services, and products? With so much happening in the digital world, the print approach may seem dead and outdated but it’s actually a path less traveled by in the industry. What this means is there’s an opportunity for your salon to do something different than your competition and reach your audience in an “old fashion” yet fresh way.

4. Events

Hosting events for your salon can bring in fresh prospects allowing you to show off your features, services, and products to new buyers. Offering an Open House, Try Before You Buy, Pay What You Can, or Buy One Get One (BOGO) event can be just what your salon needs in 2023 to infuse some new energy into your customer base.

5. Promotions

Add-ons to products like a free sample or a free, one-time tan pass can be an easy and low-risk way to keep customers coming back with smiles on their faces. Consider offering an add-on promotion to a service or product rather than a discount to truly drive home the value of your salon offerings and to show appreciation to your clients.

6. Collaborations

Partnerships can be an excellent way to get your salon name, services, and products out to a new audience. Even becoming a sponsor of an event can amplify your visibility and lead to higher website traffic, online sales, in-person foot traffic, calls, and bookings. Don’t have a website to leverage? With TanTrack, you don’t need one! The TanTrack Client Portal is an online storefront that connects seamlessly to your TanTrack system in-house but can be accessed by clients to book appointments, purchase services, or buy products anytime, anywhere.

7. Paid Advertisement

It’s easy to try and go the organic route when it comes to promoting your tanning salon. But sometimes putting together a well-thought-out paid advertisement strategy can really pay off and have minimal risk, especially if you’ve done the work to truly understand your ideal client, where and how they shop, and messaging that will speak to them. Do not underestimate the power of paid advertising with a captive audience that aligns with your offerings. The return on investment can be a big game-changer for you when advertising is done right.

8. Take Advantage of In-Person Experiences

Having a customer physically in your salon is an excellent time to up-sell your other services and products. Ways to subtly and effectively do this are through well-placed in-house sales promotions. For example, TanTrack offers a self-serve kiosk that allows clients to book services, purchase products, sign digital paperwork, and even check themselves into a tanning bed. This presents an excellent opportunity to prompt add-ons during their check-in/out experience or even just flash a promotion in front of them. The billboard feature of TanTrack can also help you promote your services, products, and promotions in your salon waiting room. Consider all the touch points and opportunities your in-person salon experience presents for up-selling and map out the best ways to integrate these opportunities tactfully and meaningfully.

9. Customer Care

Customer Care plays an essential role in your salon from an acquisition and retention standpoint. Take time to evaluate the overall customer experience and the opportunities your sales process and services present for you to have more meaningful interactions with your customers. The way you make people feel when they are engaging with your salon, services, and products is a huge determinant for when and if they return as a customer. In addition, take the time to ask for feedback. You may identify a pattern or a potential blind spot in your business that could really make a difference for you and your customers. Customer care doesn’t need to be complicated, it just needs to be genuine.

10. Contests

Finally, a fun way to engage your audience, drive sales, and bring in new faces to your business in 2023 is to run a contest promotion. Put together a giveaway package that is enticing and exciting. Leverage this package to bring people to your social media channels, website, and even into your salon. Growing your following will pave the way for the previously mentioned marketing ideas to be all the more effective in the new year, so don’t be afraid to ask for likes, follows, email sign-ups, etc. in exchange for a contest giveaway entry. It’s a fun, low-risk, and engaging way to promote your salon.

Pro Tips

1. Put Your Customer First

As mentioned in the previous section, customer care is so important but it can easily be overlooked. One example of how to put your customers first in 2023 is to offer something special to loyal customers that gave you business in 2022. This can be as simple as sending each of them a $5 voucher for a product or service to be used over the next few months in exchange for their feedback. This action can really make your customers feel valued, heard, and appreciated and gives you the opportunity to collect important data to help you make better business decisions in 2023.

2. Capitalize on Trends

There are so many viral digital trends on social media these days. Don’t be afraid to lean into them and put your own brand spin on them to promote your salon! Ride the wave of the trend and have fun with it!

3. Stick to What Works – Hint, the Answer is in Your Salon Data

When exploring marketing ideas and tips for your tanning salon, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by all the advice and the different things to do and try. While the advice and the tips should be considered, don’t forget that it doesn’t have to be complicated and that oftentimes your fastest path to more revenue for your salon is right at your fingertips! Look at the salon data you have in a couple of different ways to determine the products that have the best profit margins, the services that are always booked up, your most profitable months, etc. You may uncover patterns in your own salon that you can leverage. Spending time on the things you know brings in money will always pay off.

Not sure you have what you need from a data standpoint? TanTrack offers over 300+ reports to pull and review salon data. Talk to our sales team today to learn more about how your data can be viewed and utilized for business growth with TanTrack.

4. Continuous Communication to Stay Top-of-Mind

Creating regular touchpoints with your audience is important. To help you keep up with continued communication, automate your system. TanTrack not only offers email and SMS messaging marketing integration but also has automation features that make it really easy and quick to keep in touch with your customers.

5. Consider a Loyalty Program

Everyone loves a good loyalty program. Why do you think coffee shops and credit card companies utilize them so much? It’s because they work. Happy customers who love your products and services are even more willing to come back and spend additional money at your salon when they are rewarded for doing so. A simple punch card or even digitally tracked rewards program can be easy for you to implement for your customers to keep them coming back for more throughout the year.

6. Do Something that Scares You

Perhaps there’s something you’ve really been interested in investing in. Like new tanning equipment or technology, an aggressive advertising campaign, or improved salon software. Whatever it is, you won’t know how it can truly benefit you if you don’t try it! Trust your business instincts, call on your past experiences, and do the research to understand your investment, but then ultimately take the leap. This is your year!

7. Clean Up Your Business Methods

This may seem like an odd tip but hear us out. The salon industry has been slow to convert over to digital, streamlined business practices and methods. Paper waivers and in-take forms are a thing of the past but maybe you haven’t quite figured out how to swiftly and successfully shift over from them yet or your system is a bit clunky and unable to take on the uptick in the digital filing. That’s where TanTrack can help! TanTrack offers templates, reports, integrations, automation, and so much more to help salon owners like you streamline their business, break old and clunky methods, and make way for business growth. Book a free demo to see just how easy TanTrack is to use and all the amazing features this top-rated salon software system has to offer.

Key Seasons for 2023

There are so many more occasions, holidays, and seasons we could dive into, especially when we look globally. However, these top 10 have proven to be the most popular and ideal seasons to focus on from a tanning salon business standpoint.

1. Valentine’s Day

Whether it’s a gift from a significant other, a “gal-entine’s day” gift, or a self-care, self-love gift, Valentine’s Day is a high-traffic gift card holiday for tanning salons. Why could this be? Valentine’s Day falls in February, one of the coldest months in northern parts of the United States. It’s also timed appropriately for people preparing for a Spring Break vacation, and also the time of year the mid-winter blues tend to settle in. So while it might seem like a fluff holiday, make sure your salon is well-stocked with gift cards to meet the demand. Valentine’s Day is also an excellent time to run a promotion or host an event to bring in more traffic.

2. Spring Break

The few months between the holidays and Spring Break can feel like decades but not when you have something like a Spring Break vacation to look forward to! Even if your idea of an awesome Spring Break looks more like a “stay-cation” on your couch binging Netflix, many of your clients will be gearing up for vacations to warmer climates, which means their need for a stellar tan will be at the top of their to-do list. To gear up for Spring Break, consider launching a contest to engage with your clients, build your audience, and drive sales.

3. Mother’s & Father’s Day

These two holidays fall during an excellent time to promote your salon. At the end of Spring and the beginning of Summer, many people are looking to get their bodies poolside ready, and what better way to encourage that than with a tanning gift card or package? For Mother’s and Father’s Day, consider running a BOGO sale on your services and products to drive sales and traffic to your salon.

4. Memorial Day Weekend

The unofficial start to summer! Much like Mother’s and Father’s Day, this one is ideal as well because of the timing and the lead into summer. Plus, many young people are celebrating graduations and teachers are winding down the school year. Tanning can make an excellent graduation, end-of-the-school year, or “just because” gift for many of your clients so we suggest exploring messaging that relates to these audience types on your social media and e-marketing channels.

5. Everyone Has a Birthday

While it’s easy to get caught up in calendar-specific dates and holidays, don’t forget that everyone has a birthday. Consider setting up email automation each month that offers a promotion for clients celebrating their birthdays that month. This is an easy way to stay top-of-mind, utilize your salon data, and make your clients feel special.

6. Summertime!

When the sun is hot, so are the tanning beds! Just because people have the option to tan outdoors in the sun doesn’t mean that you should completely neglect summertime. It is usually a slower time for the indoor tanning industry but with the right approach, it can remain steady through the fall. Maybe you roll back some of your hours so that you only offer tanning on certain days of the week to ensure a booked-up schedule, or you might even consider special offers or perks for people with Memberships during this time. Summer is a great time to play around with promotions and events. Get creative!

7. Back to School

This time of year, leverage your services and products to help people keep their summer vacation glow into the fall. Consider offering specialty packages or BOGO promotions to get people back into the tanning salon as summer winds down.

8. Happy Fall, Y’all

Jack-o-lanterns shouldn’t be the only thing glowing this time of year! As fall settles in, so do cooler temps. Remind your clients that they can find warmth and joy at your salon. Consider hosting an event or doing a collaboration with another popular fall vendor this time of year to get ahead of the holiday rush and reinforce your brand right before the salon’s busy season kicks in.

9. End-of-Year Holidays

Between Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year’s, this time of year is a high-traffic one for salons, especially with gift card purchases. Make sure you are stocked in advance and that you are equipped to handle an uptick in sales. Consider hiring seasonal staff, extending hours, or opening up an online storefront with TanTrack’s Client Portal to support the increased sales.

10. Just for Fun

There are at least a hundred other reasons or occasions to promote your salon services, products, and gift card offerings. You can virtually turn anything into a holiday these days, so have fun with the way you talk about your salon and engage with your audience. Be genuine, light-hearted, and intentional, and focus on tactics that will drive sales for your salon throughout the year.

Also, consider these tanning-specific “holidays”:

• Third Thursday in March – National Spray Tanning Day presented by Sunless, Inc.
• April 6^th – National Tanning Day
• June 25^th – National Sunless Day

Interested in salon software that supports marketing efforts such as an online storefront, digital signage in your salon, email and text message marketing, automation, and more? Talk to our sales team here at TanTrack to book a FREE demo and learn about all the possibilities our software can unlock for your salon this year and beyond. Book a call now.