How service businesses can use an online shop to boost sales

Published on February 16, 2012 How service businesses can use an online shop to boost sales

If you run a services business in any field from hairdressing or beauty products, can an online shop help you? Yes, it can.

An integrated marketing approach between your offline service business and your online website can boost customer service levels, enhance trust, stimulate repeat purchases and add additional revenue streams. Here’s how.

Let’s consider, for example, a drop-in beauty shop doing hair and nails. No need for a website, right? Not at all, there are three ways that you could use a website, and in particular an online shop (with content pages functionality like Ozcart does) to further grow your service business:

• Improving customer service pre-sale
• Encouraging preference post-sale
• Adding a new revenue stream post-sale and in-between the next sale.

Let’s go through these one at a time.

Improving customer service pre-sale

If you’re a drop in business, then you don’t have a booking system, so the most annoying thing for your potential customers will be the wait. There are a number of you could tackle this using the web:

• You could use a newsletter to offer discount vouchers to members who “drop in” on certain days, or run a competition for people who “drop in” during off peak times. Encoruaging off peak times helps customers feel better abuot their potential wait times and stimulates further sales.
• Through a 12-month VIP club card that you could sell online. You could designate a staff member to do “appointment bookings” to those in the club (with drop in for those who didn’t make an appointment or who didn’t have a card) or offer out of hours bookings for those VIP members. We would not recommend a preferential waiting system for VIP club members who turn up under the drop-in scheme because it would create a “class system” in your store. VIP Exclusivity of Status works well in luxury items like travel where things like Business Class matter, but in our opinion do not work so well for mass services like hairdressing, beauty and nails, medical etc as everyone else feels less valued or cheated.
• You could list the wait time on your website based on the approx number of people waiting. You could even do this on a mobile app. You could also try a webcam of your waiting room, but you would have to tackle the issue of privacy (people don’t want to be watched while they wait). You could blur out the faces so people could only get a general sense of how full the waiting room was if you went down that route.

Encouraging preference post-sale

Offering loyalty or reward points in an online store that you are running for a visit offline, is an extension of the “ten stamps” loyalty cards used by hairdressers, coffee shops etc. It gets people considering your store again after the service, and if you encourage them to write a review on Facebook or on your site, then you can hep encourage written word of mouth referrals to your store outside of the customer’s original bundle of friends.

Adding a new revenue stream

If you have given the customer great service through beauty products, why not also run a shop selling beauty products to enhance their post buying experience. Organic foods, hair extensions, cosmetics, hair care products are all good fits for a beauty shop (depending on the brand values you promote for your store) and can help you sell products and encourage further sales. You could send out discount vouchers for your offline service to online buyers, or sell gift vouchers online that could be redeemed in your physical store.

There are plenty of ways offline and online can be integrated, and that online can be used to grow offline business. What is best for your business needs to be carefully evaluated, but well considered the two can definitely work in combination – to make the value of the two worth more than the sum of either the service or the website by themselves.