The TanWall Blog

If you own a tanning salon you probably know how important it is to have a friendly and engaging employee at the front desk. They’re essentially the face of your tanning salon as far as your customers are concerned.

A large part of customer retention has to do with the customer’s comfort level when they come into your salon. A combination of clean, visually appealing tanning environments with personable employees goes a long way in securing the loyalty of your customers.

If customers come in to find the person at the front desk texting or talking with other employees or altogether ignoring them, they might not come back the next time if they don’t turn around and leave on the spot! A customer always wants to be the subject, not an object.

If you have your employees get to know your customers by name, your customers will feel welcome when they come into your salon and will most likely return. Tailor your services to each customer based on their habits. Do they have a favorite bed they always go to? A favorite lotion? Do they feel that their visit is a social occasion and not just something to “get done?”

It is the little things that keep your customers coming back.

Tanning salon businesses across the nation will feel the effects of the new health care insurance bill as early as July 1, 2010. Indoor tanning salon patrons will soon be charged a 10% tax to help fund the $940 billion health care overhaul.

President Barak Obama signed the new law into effect only yesterday, marking a pivotal, and surely controversial, moment in our present history. The controversy is mainly fueled by unclear, and seemingly miscalculated—or at least under-estimated—budget cuts and tax increases; not to mention measures to impose insurance coverage on those who choose not to carry any, the banning of insurance companies to deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions, the banning of insurance companies to drop coverage of an individual due to severe illness, and banning limits on lifetime or annual benefits. Read more…

One of the biggest mistakes that any salon owner makes is to not understand their customer.  The most successful salons understand what’s important to their customer.  The things that you may think are important are not. We all heard the saying “the three most important things in business are location, location, location.  Although the location is important I don’t think it’s the most important in most cases. I will talk further about that at a later time.

Knowing your audience’s likes and dislikes is extremely important. The simplest of questions never seemed to get answered when a business owner opens their salon.  One of the questions you need to ask your self and your customers are

What makes you choose one tanning salon over another? 

There are several answers that can come with that question.  You need to know the answer in order to be successful.  Some of the answers that you may receive are comfort, security, cleanliness, price, location, appearance, and how the staff treats me.  These are just a few of the answers that you may get from your clients.

How do you get this information?

There are several ways to obtain this information from your clients.  If you’re a new store and have not opened yet, you can visit other salons in the area and put a flyer on each one of the cars in the parking lot and asked them to fill out a survey online.  There are many survey companies online that are free.  You can use companies like survey monkey.com to develop and track your surveys.  In return upon opening your provide them with the first month free for providing you with survey results. Just so you don’t break the bank on the first month you can limit it to the first 10 who do the survey.

If you are an existing salon owner, you can do something similar however you can distribute this flyer in your store.  If you have a large chain you can select 10 customers and put them all in a customer board. What is a customer board you ask?  This would be a group of your customers that could meet once or twice a year at your cost at a local hotel ballroom where you could feed them lunch and listen to their feedback.  They could recommend changes likes and dislikes and could build your business into greatness.

When you get the answers the next step is acceptance.  One of the hardest parts for a business owner to grasp is criticism.  Always accept the criticism no matter how much it hurts.  Your denial of reality from your customer’s perspective can be devastating.  We all have an internal button to make excuses for other people’s opinions.  These are the people that are giving you money or could potentially give you money. Listen to what they say and accept it.

Putting criticism for action is vitally important.  After you’re finished being hurt, and insulted, take action, instead of making excuses.  Capitalize on the things that your customer does like and work on the things that they don’t like. Most of the criticism will be simple to solve. For example, one of the things that you’ll hear most is “the person working the front counter is not very friendly”. That’s a pretty easy one to solve, isn’t it?  It is unless it’s your wife’s sister who was working the front counter.  No matter who it is they need to be either properly trained or replaced. It’s never about the people it’s about the management of people.  Most people want to do a good job they just don’t know what that is.

We could go on forever about the trials and tribulations of any business.  But if you’re the owner, it’s all your responsibility.  If it’s not working, “it’s all your fault”.  Accept responsibility and make the changes necessary to make use business successful.

Working the Smart Tan Trade show 2009 in Nashville, Tennessee was a great experience in learning.  Talking to Tanning salon owners from across the globe, there are many similarities but just as many differences. Demographics, styles, color ideas, marketing approaches, future business plans and many other topics.

This led me to write some of those differences and provide a different perspective in many of these areas.  Over the coming year, I will be blogging about those different types of perspectives from around the country.

With our knowledge and experience I believe we can provide a perspective on different areas that business owners need to pay attention to. Being in a successful business for more than 20 years I believe that we understand just a bit more than most.  Helping over 15,000 companies in our industry achieve their objectives over the years, I think we bring to the table a time of knowledge that we would love to share.

The entire world is made up of marketing messages all around us.  Some of which we buy into some we don’t.  Some of them we buy into so much that we think that it is reality.  Although no data or facts to back up the claims people believe them.  It’s been said that each person faces upwards of 30,000 marketing messages per day.  From television commercials to signs on the side of the road, everyone is trying to get their message across. With new social media, the messages are only increasing.

On the positive side, people can learn what ever they want whenever they want.  In our digital age we can be informed with a little extra effort become experts in just about anything.  I might want to caution you though, a lot of people claim expertise when in fact they don’t know much.  Just enough to spin their perspective and change you’re thinking of something.

There are many myths in the marketplace.  One of them which I always find fascinating and the tanning industry is airflow.  Movement of air can be extremely complex but in most cases it is just a matter of common sense.  I heard several times at the show that they would like an air gap underneath the wall to help the heat removal from a salon room and be more energy efficient.  Of course there are several people in the industry pushing that this is as real issue.

Common sense tells us how could that be?  Hot air or the molecules move up.  That does not mean that the air has any velocity and moving up caused by heat.  Without fans or other equipment to push the air out of the top of the room no pressure or back draft will be caused under the wall.  Obviously the reason for this is that some people in the Tanning industry make a product that stands off the ground.

I have heard more horror stories than success stories with having a gap underneath the wall.  There are currently more than 30,000 lawsuits per year in the United States attributed to privacy issues in retail locations.  This day and age with cell phone cameras and other spyware technology, a salon owner is putting themselves at risk by not providing the maximum amount of privacy to the consumer. As a matter a fact, I have not seen one energy study, heard one salon owner say after putting a gap under the wall they saved money on their electricity bill… If that is the case, why do people believe it? Marketing…

Many people have heard of the case of Erin Andrews, sports announcer who was photographed at her hotel room naked and posted on the Internet.  Most of the stories do not make front page news but they do end up in the courtroom causing thousands of lost dollars to salon owners trying to defend themselves from these cases. Yet, some companies are still insisting that energy efficiency in their salon is happening in the gap under the wall.

Let’s go ahead and say for argument sake, you were saving money or your power bill.  How much do you think that would be?  Doesn’t your air-conditioning systems still have to remove the same amount heat? I could get into a lot of technical beta to prove to you that it really doesn’t matter but it really comes down to common sense.  Even if you were to save $20 a month would the risk be worth it? I’ll let you be the judge.  Last time I checked attorneys were very expensive.