5 Things To Do During a Summer Slowdown

1. Focus on Retail

If customers aren't coming in, they probably need products to use at home!  Hit your social media channels hard with product knowledge posts.  Create an email blast that focuses on a few products and be sure to include direct links to where clients can buy them on your site.

2. Look At Your Website

If you read my first suggestion and thought to yourself, "ugh, I don't have retail products on my site", guess what?  Now is the time to get them there!  Use your downtime to figure out how you can create an online store that easily allows clients to purchse things from you online.  I can help with this if creating a store seems confusing! While you're on the site, it's the perfect time to make sure everything is up to date.  All your services should be on your site, with customized descriptions that tell clients why they should book that service.  Make sure your pricing and policies are correct too!

3.  Review Your Customer Experience

Ask yourself, what can I do differently to make my client's time with me even better than it already is?  Maybe it's your onboarding process.  Do you have clients complete forms electronically before hand?  If not, that is something to consider.  Maybe this means adding refreshments to your waiting area, or a heated blanket to your treatment rooms. Once they leave, how are you following up to check on them and get their review? If you're not, use your slow time to get a system in place to manage and automate these things.

4.  Evaluate Everything

Sometimes a dip in business is truly just a dip in business and things pick back up on their own quickly.  That said, if this slowdown is unusual for you, it may be time to evaluate everything that is going on in your business.  Has anything changed customer service-wise?  Are you having staffing issues?  Do you have a new competitor? Has it been a while since you've added something new?  How are you feeling?  Are you energized and excited to see clients, or are you burnt out and ready for a vacation?  Evaluating what's going on in your business may help you determine if this is just a random slowdown or if this change is a result of something that is going on internally.  If you determine it's something going on internally, use your downtime to come up with a plan to reverse course.  I can also help with this through my consulting services!

5.  Don't Stop Marketing, In Fact, Bump It Up

When business slows down, many business owners ‘ jerk reaction is to pull their marketing to save money.  Don't.  Now is the time to plan your promotions for the next few months and hit your marketing harder than ever.  Communicate about you're offering early and often (but not in a spammy way).  If you need to pause paid ads for a while that's one thing, but don't let up on using the marketing channels available to you at little to no cost like email marketing, social media and leveraging the clients you are seeing.  Here's a post I wrote about this subject in more detail. 

A Summer slowdown doesn't have to be a bad thing.  On top of the things I mentioned above, you can also use the time to catch up on things that have needed to be done for a while but you just haven't had time to do.  This could be anything from staff training to cleaning to marketing projects.  If you use this time wisely, you'll be ready for success when things return to normal.  

If you're not quite sure what's going, or what you should focus on, contact me to schedule a consulting call.  We'll dig in, figure out what may be happening and I can suggest ways for you to address it!