You want your business to succeed rather than being one of those tattoo shops that fades away. But that means you’re going to have to find the perfect customer balance.
What is “customer balance?” Simply this: you need to simultaneously focus on attracting new customers while retaining your existing ones.
The truth is that this is difficult, and many small businesses fail because they don’t know how to do it. But with these easy tips, you’ll have enough customers so that your “small” business isn’t so small any more!
Online Booking
As a tattoo artist, your goal is to attract more customers. To do this, you need to focus on one key idea: making every part of the experience easier for your customers.
Many tattoo shops will only take appointments in person. But this means they are leaving money on the table, as many potential customers are too busy to come schedule their first appointment.
As a bonus, online booking makes it very easy for satisfied customers to share the link to your site with their friends. This makes it easy to bring new customers in while maintaining convenience for previous customers.
Power of Pinterest
Here at Tattooing 101, we’re big believers in Pinterest. Tattoos are a visual medium, so putting your work on a highly visual social media platform makes it easy for customers to discover a new tattoo artist.
The other great thing about Pinterest is that users will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. For instance, you can put a Pinterest save button on every image you feature on your website. When customers pin it to their Pinterest boards, it makes them likelier to come to you rather than other tattoo shops.
Meanwhile, others can see what their friends and followers have pinned. That means your sphere of influence expands—and all you had to do was upload an image!
Pay Ahead of Time
Many tattoo shops are really old-school when it comes to money, preferring cash interactions whenever possible. But that may be enough to turn off potential customers who avoid carrying cash and prefer to pay with some form of electronic payment.
As a tattoo artist, you can make everyone happy by letting customers pay ahead of time on your website, or pay in the shop with a credit card. Those who prefer paying by cash can still do so, but others will feel a big peace of mind when using their credit cards instead.
Of course taking payments early in the form of a deposit makes it much less likely that a customer will cancel their appointment.
Create a Mailing List
A mailing list may not sound like an exciting solution for a tattoo artist. However, it’s an easy way to retain customers, and it doesn’t cost anything extra!
Basically, you have existing customers and potential customers provide their e-mail address to sign up for the list. Then, you send them regular e-mails about new services, deals, upcoming local events, and so on.
Potential customers will be interested in the deals, while existing customers will be interested in everything else. And because setting up a mailing list is free, the return on investment for this is huge!
Final Thoughts
If you want to succeed over other tattoo shops, you need to stay on the cutting edge. Keep coming back to Tattooing 101 for more info on how to stand out as a tattoo artist!
