When Vikram Bhatt, director at Enrich, realized that customers were increasingly engaging online, he knew he stumbled on an untapped business opportunity. In January of 2014, Enrich launched their webstore - part of their Zenoti solution that enables customers to browse their service menu, self-book appointments and purchase memberships, packages and gift cards from Enrich’s website. Vikram’s team ran a limited time promotion using Zenoti's marketing tools that also announced the new online capabilities. As a results, their weekend promotion surpassed all expectations and resulted in phenomenal membership sign ups.

We spoke to Vikram, here’s what he had to say …...

Describe your business in 1-3 sentences. Enrich Salons is Mumbai’s largest unisex salon with over 50 centers that span 5 cities. In the last year we successfully doubled our number of salons and are continuing that growth. Our customers appreciate the quality of service we offer, through high quality of training, our consistency in service and overall focus on customer satisfaction.

Describe the promotion you ran that resulted in such a high volume of membership sales. We created 4 different memberships, which bundled services that could be redeemed within 60 days. The offer went out via email on Thursday evening, just before a long weekend in India. The offer expired by Sunday night, so customers had to make the purchase quickly, either by coming in to one of our centers or making the purchase online.

Have you run a similar promotion before? Absolutely. This time however, we were able to accept online payments through our webstore. This is a significant difference and we saw it in the results of the promotion. Customers often cannot make it into a center, as they only have a window of 4 days to purchase the discounted memberships. With the webstore, we were able to eliminate that pain point.

What do you know about the people that signed up for memberships? The email promotion went out to a targeted segment of our customer base. We’re careful to not send too many promotions to the same people, and target our customers based on their service history. We also advertised the promotion on our website, and so in that way were able to attract new customers as well.

What software and tools are crucial for running a successful promotion? We've been using Zenoti software to manage our salon operations for years now, but more recently rolled out the webstore, that allows us to sell our memberships online. We ran our promotion using Zenoti's marketing features and in the email directed traffic to the webstore, which processed the payments for us and updates our guest database with their membership balance.

Our managers use reports and analytics to monitor the promotion’s performance. We can look at each center’s performance as well as how it did for certain regions and cities as well. In that sense, Zenoti software is critical for running our promotions. But beyond the context of this promotion, Zenoti helps us manage our busy days at the salon. My mangers appreciate how much is automated within Zenoti, freeing up their time to interact with customers in the center.

What key advice can you offer other spa and salon directors looking for additional revenue opportunities? I was unsure about the potential of online sales given India is still relatively new at online engagement and payments relative to western markets. The success of the promotion surprised us - with such limited awareness of our webstore, we were able to see such great results. Moving forward, online sales will only grow and expand and I would expect other businesses to take advantage of this trend.

Visit Enrich Salon’s website at www.enrichsalon.com.

‍Read more case studies to learn how businesses have grown with Zenoti (formerly ManageMySpa).