I want you to stop and think for a minute about the city you’re in. Imagine your town - how big it is, its borders, how many people live in it. Got that mental image ready?

Now zoom in, and think about out of those thousands or millions of people, who could be the ideal clientele of your beauty business.

They probably live or work near your business. They’re in the right age range (for example women 25 - 45 years old). They have the right interests and passions that align with what you offer.

Out of that group of people - let’s say it’s 10,000 women - that entire group can be divided up into two distinct categories:

Those who know about your business. We call that your “warm audience”.

And those who have yet to discover you business: your “cold audience”.

That warm group may or may not be your clientele. They might just follow you on social media. Maybe they checked out your website a few months back but haven’t booked yet.

And that cold group? They might absolutely love to be your clients, they just need to be properly introduced.

The reason it’s so crucial that we make the distinction between the two is this: You need to be marketing your business to these groups in two completely different ways.

In this blog post, I want to show you how to sell your beauty services to cold audiences and warm audiences - and how to treat them differently.

If you Master these two types of marketing - “warm” marketing and “cold” marketing - you’ll have more clients booking with you, more returning clients, and find that you’re growing your brand in your town.

Let’s jump in!

Warm versus Cold Audiences

Your warm audience is your community. It consists of people who are familiar with your business; whether or not they’ve actually become a client of yours.

Online, there are a few key places where your warm audience connects with you.

Your first warm audience is your email list. This is probably the most important group you have. And they don’t just have to be clients! You can and should be getting email addresses from other people online too, to grow a relationship with them and eventually welcome them in as clients.

Second, you have a captive warm audience who follow your business on Instagram and Facebook. This is probably the place you spend most time promoting your business.

Okay, so now that you’ve got an idea who your warm groups are, let’s look at your cold audiences.

Your cold audiences are people who have yet to discover your salon. But just because they don’t know about you yet, doesn’t mean they won’t come across you! Cold audiences can come into contact with your business through a Google search, Google Maps, coming across you on social media, or seeing one of your paid ads online.

As strange as it seems, the way you promote your business to these two groups should actually be quite different. You need to use different messages, different marketing, and different tactics if you want to convert them over to become clients and book with you more often.

Let me show you how.

Warm audiences: nurture and respect them, instead of selling constantly

So now you know that your warm audience mainly consists of your email list and your social media audiences. And it makes sense to call them warm: They probably already have a warm feeling towards your business, and are at least interested enough to want to see what you’re posting and open up your emails. Again, they don’t need to be clients yet to be considered “warm”!

Here’s the part about marketing to them that you might not expect me to say: Warm audiences don’t need to be sold to, and in fact they should not be sold to on a regular basis.

Your Facebook and Instagram pages should not be constant sales pitches. Otherwise, you’re going to get minimal engagement, your followers will unfollow you, and you’ll have lost many of them forever.

Same goes for your emails. The emails you send out regularly should not be super salesy and they should not be used as a simple promotional tool when you need to fill your appointment book. If you do, you’ll find that fewer and fewer people open your emails, they ignore them, they unsubscribe, and you say to yourself “email marketing doesn’t work!”

Actually, email and social media are two incredible ways of selling your services and getting more appointments, but they should not be used for the “hard sell”.

No one wants to be constantly bombarded with your salon’s pricing and promotions on Instagram. No one wants to be spammed with 10% coupons through email whenever you’ve got a slow week.

This is where the concept of “nurturing” comes in.

Because here’s the thing: not everyone on your email list or social pages is ready to buy from you right at this second. And if you are constantly trying to sell to them, you’ll ruin your relationship.

Yes, I said relationship. Because you do have a relationship with your email list and your social media followers. Even if they’ve never come in as clients before!

Think about your favourite Instagram accounts you follow. Maybe it’s a celebrity hair artist like Guy Tang. Maybe it’s a business coach like Jenna Kutcher.

Is this person constantly trying to get you to buy their programs, their products, or their coaching? Probably not!

Most likely they’re posting things that pull you deeper into a relationship with them. Photos of themselves with stories about their life. Post that share things from every day life. Helpful or educational posts about how to do a certain technique, how to deal with difficult clients, how to rock your consultation.

Your account is no different, whether you’re a hairdresser, waxer, nail tech, or lash artist. You should not be constantly selling on Instagram and Facebook!

Here’s what you should probably stop doing:

• Stop posting graphics that share your sales and specials every other day

• Stop using your captions simply as a place to tell them “Book an appointment now!”

• Stop sharing stock photos of your retail products

Your followers and clients want a deeper relationship with you, they want to have a connection. Remember: your followers are valuable even if they’re not ready to book with you at this exact moment. Some of them won’t be ready for a whole year. Some might never be ready, but they still could recommend their sister or coworker to you.

But that won’t happen if they don’t feel like they have a relationship with you. Not a relationship as a business, but as a person.

So how can you nurture that relationship on Instagram and Facebook?

• Share more photos of yourself! Yes, of course you want to share pics of the hair, nails, lashes, brows etc that you do, but you also need pics that build relationships!

• In the captions of your photos, share your personal journey, story, struggles, wins, excitements, etc. Put in all the feels!

• When you do show photos of your client work, inject your own stories. Don’t just describe what you’re showing, but tell them about your client - how long has she been with you? What was she looking for? What was her reaction to the finished result? What do you love about this client? You captions should be the context and story of your post. Do not just use them to describe what the service was, the cost, and a command to book!

• Turn the camera around once in a while! Show the behind-the-scenes of your salon, photos of your team, the fun you’re having. Even things that to seem boring to you, like mixing up product, can be a way to educate.

• Video is also one of the best ways to share your personal self on Instagram and Facebook.

When you share yourself as a person on social media, you’re being vulnerable. And I know from experience that it’s tough to be vulnerable because you might feel weird, egocentric, ugly, awkward etc.

But I promise that’s the kind of thing that your followers want to see. That’s going to help them feel a real connection with you as a person. They’ll feel like the know you, like you, and then trust you. And then when they are finally ready to book, you’ll be the first person they think of.

Next, let’s look at your emails.

So many businesses are using email as a boring, dry, white piece of paper where they write a description of their services, pricing, and what promotions they have on. A few years ago, this is exactly how I was using email. And it showed: I had about 10-15% of my list opening up my emails, and pretty much no one was clicking on them. Email was one of those things I did because I felt like I “should”. It definitely wasn’t working.

But now? Now I send weekly emails to my list with blogs, videos, tips and ideas, stories about my own life. I have a list of 11,000 people, usually 20-25% of them open up my emails, and email is one of the main ways I make money in my business.

The reason my emails work so well is because I don’t do a lot of selling in them. Instead, I use my emails to “nurture” my list.

Email should be used as a way to maintain a relationship with your community, just like social. Many of the people on your email list are clients that came to see you a few years or months ago, but haven’t been back. Some of them will be people who got added to your email list from promotions, contests, etc and haven’t actually been in to visit you.

What you really want to do is keep these people “warm” about your business and yourself. You want them to continually open up your emails, devour them, love them, and feel a connection with you - even if they’re not ready to book yet!

Imagine you had an acquaintance on Instagram who only ever DM’d you when she was selling something. You’d probably end up resenting her, right?

Then why do we give ourselves permission to do this exact thing with our email lists? Why do we think it’s different, just because we’re businesses and "that’s what people expect”?

Instead, your emails should be the place you show up once a week or once a month to say hi! They’re a place to keep in touch with your community, and make them feel like they’re part of something.

I have been to so many hair salons and nail salons in my journeys of living in different places. And often times a stylist will say “follow us on Instagram!” and I do, but often times I will never see their posts again.

But what if instead of relying on just social, these salons hooked me into their community through email? What if they sent me monthly emails? Not those stylized, template emails with sales, promotions, and available appointment times. But emails where they showed me photos of what’s new in their salon, updates from staff, style tips, product reviews? And what if it was written like from a friend of mine instead of like a business?

Hell yes I would open up that email every single month! I would feel like I’m part of something, and that I’m included in this little community the salon has built.

How to sell your salon services to warm audiences

The moral of the story up to this point? You warm audience on email and social should be respected, nurtured, and treated like friends instead of clients.

That doesn’t mean you can’t sell to them. In fact, your warm audiences are for sure the ones who will react most excitedly to your promotions, sales, free appointment spots, etc. There’s definitely a time and a place to sell to your warm audience.

In fact, every single email or social post they see from you is a bit of a “sale” even if you’re not forcefully selling something. Whenever you email or share a post, you’re reminding your community about yourself and what you do, you’re inspiring them with beautiful styles and your work, you’re creating a connection with them, one piece at a time, and that makes them more likely to book with you, buy from you, and come back soon.

However, you can and should sell to your warm audiences, too! And if you nurture them when you’re not selling, and you put personal, relationship-building content into your sales, it makes your community more receptive to your sales too!

For example, you can finish all of your fun, educational, friendly emails with some photos of your favourite work and a link to book. If you want to promote a certain service, make a video explaining how that service works, starring yourself, and then include a link to book that service.

And you can also do flat-out promotional emails and posts. I’m not saying that you should never sell to your warm audience, I just want to make sure that for your warm audiences, you’re doing more nurturing than selling on social media and email.

That will keep them interested, it will help build a long-term relationship with you, and in the end you’ll have more of your community converting into paying clients and spending more money with you.

Cold Audiences: Introducing your salon and getting the booking

As I mentioned, cold audiences are your ideal clientele in your city, but they just don’t know about your business yet. There are so many places they can find you online though, and you want to make sure that however they find you, you’re doing an amazing job of presenting your business and encouraging them to book.

How you promote your services to cold audiences is actually quite different than how you present your salon to your warm audience. Here’s the ironic part: You can actually be more aggressively “salesy” to cold audiences than to warm audiences. I know, it’s shocking but true. Here’s why.

First of all, for people who search you out, they’re most likely very interested in booking an appointment with you sometime soon, which is why they’re searching you out!

They might find your website from a Google search, they might find your Google My Business profile from Google maps, or they might be creeping your Instagram profile because they found you from a hashtag.

That’s why you want to make sure that every single one of the places your salon appears online does an amazing job of selling your services, and encourages them to book now.

The next place that you can introduce your salon to cold audiences is through advertising. Especially through my favourite platform ever: Facebook and Instagram ads.

When you promote your salon services with Facebook and Instagram ads, you necessarily have to be salesy. You can’t “nurture” that audience, you can’t go for the “soft sell”. In order to get bookings and appointments, you’ve gotta be aggressive. That’s because they’ve never heard of you before, and you only have a split second to get attention and convert that to appointments, otherwise you’ve lost that person for good.

How to sell your services to cold audiences

So the main difference between warm and cold audiences is that while warm audiences need to be constantly nurtured, cold audiences can actually be sold to more “aggressively", but in a smart way.

For example, on your website you can and should make it very easy and obvious to book an appointment: put that button everywhere! Many of the people searching you on Google will end up on your website because they’re interested in booking an appointment, so make it dead simple.

Also, on your Google My Business profile, tell potential clients everything they might want to know before booking an appointment, and optimize your profile to get bookings. If you want to create a Google business page that brings you more bookings, read my blog post here.

On your Instagram profile, in your bio, make it super clear how to book an appointment, with a link, and be sure to include extra buttons for email and booking.

And this brings me to my favourite part: Selling your salon services through paid social ads! In your ads on Facebook and Instagram, don’t be afraid to be “Salesy”, but do it in a way that’s smart. Make your ad fun, personal, and attractive, by including videos or photos of you, and by writing your text in a personal way that gets attention. Once you’ve gotten that attention, you want to convert it to bookings. The best way to do this is to offer a special promotion that’s just too good to pass up. Don’t be afraid to sell, but do it in a really social fun way.

If you want to learn how to target cold audiences on Facebook and Instagram (who are your ideal clients), show them your ads, convert them into paying clients… I’ve got an ebook for you!

Facebook and Instagram ads are my favourite ways of making more money and getting more clients, and in this eBook I show you how to do it for your own beauty business. You can download it below:

In conclusion

It seems stupidly simple, but every single person in your town can be divided up into two distinct groups:

Those who know about your business and are part of your community (usually through email and social media). This is your warm audience.

And those who have yet to discover you, but might find you on Google, scrolling through social, in from your paid ads: Your cold audience.

You need to promote your beauty business differently, depending on which group you’re talking to. Warm audiences need to be nurtured more, with frequent emails and posts that do less selling, and more relationship-building. Instead, cold audiences can be “sold to” more, as long as you do it in a smart, respectful way.

If you do it right, you’ll be able to convert more of both your warm and cold audiences into life-long clients!