Information Marketing Association

Greg Milner’s quarterly magazine, Salon Owner, is a magalog sent to beauty salons and day spas in Australia and New Zealand. Rather than send his magalog only to individuals who request it, he sends it to all 8,000 salons on his mailing list. This is one of Greg’s best new client acquisition tools. If you would like to see the rest of Greg’s magalog, click info-marketing magalog

This is the story of how a burned-out middle-aged former TV reporter with a weakness for Harley Davidson motorcycles created an info-product out of thin air, found a starving crowd and built a million-dollar business from scratch inside two years ... in a market he knew nothing about, from one of the most isolated capital cities on the planet.

From Perth, on the west coast of Australia, Worldwide Salon Marketing (www.salon-marketing-secrets.com) now has a global reach, selling big-ticket marketing and sales toolkits, website memberships and coaching to beauty salons, day spas and hair salons in 14 countries.

Using a combination of seminars, direct mail, newsletters, email, magazine advertising, teleseminars, Internet lead generation and automated multi-step sequences—both online and offline—the company markets to a narrow-but-deep niche of salon and spa owners who don’t have the time, skill or desire to write their own marketing materials.

“Early in 2004, I was pretty much dead broke,” says Greg Milner. “I’d been a top producer in TV news for 20-odd years, got bored and bailed out suddenly in the mid-90s, with absolutely no idea of what I was going to do, and no planning.

Greg knew that to succeed in the info-marketing business, he needed a starving crowd and a great product to market to them. His girlfriend at the time was a beauty salon owner who complained there was no marketing material written just for her industry. Greg offered to teach her how to write ads and sales letter that work, but she said, “I don’t have the time or the skill or the interest. I just want it done for me … so I can simply turn a key.”

“That was my big ‘Aha!’ moment,” Greg says.

Inventing the Product

Greg didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, so he started researching. Googled till his eyes fell out. Looking all over the world for somebody, somewhere, who had already done what he wanted to do. Maybe he could find something and simply license it.

“Nothing. Nada. Zip. Sure, there were bits and pieces, elements of what I wanted, but no complete system, nothing that ‘gave ‘em the fish on a plate,’ rather than taught them how to fish. There were hundreds of those,” Greg remembers.

Right about then, Greg got a call from his friend Jill Groves, a hotshot tele-saleswoman who’d made a name for herself in a big trade exchange company. She wanted out. Within a week, they’d cleared some space in a spare room in Greg’s house and started writing.

“We injected artificial scarcity, limiting the toolkit to only one per postcode (ZIP code). And we decided on a strong guarantee—12 months unconditional money back. We created two versions, a Bronze pack at $2,200.00 and a Silver pack at $6,000.00, the Silver coming with 12 months of one-on-one phone coaching,” Greg says.

In September 2004, they took a booth at the Sydney International Beauty Expo and launched the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®. They sold ten of them at $2,500.00 a piece. They were on a roll and decided to try selling at seminars. They bought a mailing list, booked conference rooms in hotels all over Australia and used direct mail to fill the rooms.

How They Sold It

Greg remembers, “We’d get maybe 20 or 30 people in a room. I’d do a pitch for 90 minutes. I’d hand over to Jill for a 20-minute talk on selling. Then I’d come back for the close. The one-per-postcode rule was a clincher. Soon as I’d say that, you could see people all over the room, furiously filling in order forms, lest their competition got hold of it.”

Greg and Jill jacked the price up, doubling it overnight. They kept flying coast to coast, doing seminars. The higher price made no difference to sales.

But they were still selling more of the basic Toolkit at $2,500.00 rather than the deluxe version. At a seminar in Sydney in November 2004, Bill Glazer said they should bring the pricing together so the deluxe pack was about 50 percent more than the basic version, and pitch the deluxe version first, with the basic kit as a down sell. They tested it immediately and experienced a stunning turnaround.

“From that day on, we almost never sold the basic pack. It was 95 percent deluxe version at $4,500.00, and we put a payment plan in place, spreading payments over six months, Greg says.

Greg says that in the first year he would have been “happy if we’d managed to do $200,000.00 in sales.” (This was in a market 20 times smaller than the United States.) Greg and Jill tripled that forecast in the first 12 months, and they were “only scratching the surface.”

Online Marketing

Right from the beginning, Greg had insisted they have a strong Web lead generation system and turned to former Oracle exec George Slater to build the first website, using a Canadian-sourced system called Site Build It.

“Trouble was, George was so good at it, he had the site up and generating a storm of leads ... hundreds in the first couple of months … we just didn’t know what to do with them, had little or no follow-up systems in place, it was a shambles. At one stage I had to ask George to turn the thing off for a while until we got some kind of system in place to deal with leads effectively,” Greg says.

Integrating the Systems

With George running the technical side, they began the huge task of getting several different systems to talk to each other. Infusion’s ManagePro CRM (www.InfoMarketingCRM.com) had to be integrated so that leads generated by the squeeze page were put into a sophisticated sequence of multi-step email, hard copy mail and various other up-sell processes. It was also configured to take over the monthly subscription billing from Paypal as well as do the billing of the monthly payment plans for the toolkits.

Visiongate, which runs the subscription site www.salon-marketing-secrets.com—had to also be made to update ManagePro with new subscribers, cancels and subscriber login information.

And throughout the months this process was evolving, Greg and Jill were still running seminars, organizing the first Salon & Spa Marketing Super Conference (Sydney, September ‘06) and more for 2007, writing, packaging and launching new products, and selling them.

New Products

In October 2005, the team released a downloadable starter pack—a “toe-in-the-water” version of the toolkit. It sells a handful a day on the Internet.

In June 2006, they built and launched the hair salon version of the toolkit. Sales took off immediately to a hungry market already primed after months of waiting.

In August, with another full-time staff member on board, they started a newsletter service called Lip Goss for salons and spas to send to their clients (www.beauty-salon-marketing.com/lipgoss.html).

In September 2006, they launched the Million Dollar Spa Blueprint in a JV with one of their early toolkit owners who had gone on to win the 2006 Spa Establishment of the Year (www.million-dollar-blueprint.com).

A high-level, severely restricted mentoring program is slated for launch in February 2007.

And, of course, a complete how-to coaching and consulting course for info-marketers wanting to replicate the same system for other niche markets.

“It was—and remains—chaotic,” says Greg. “But I like chaos. As Dan says, ‘Clean up the mess later.’”

And they’ve increased prices again, by 40 percent. “Once again, it doesn’t seem to have had any downward effect on sales,” Greg says.

Opportunities

The business is actively seeking out info-marketers who can take the products and the complete marketing system that goes with it to markets in North America.

If you’re an info-marketer and want a bolt-on, proven business-in-a-box for a clearly defined and easily identifiable niche market with little or no competition and an already-done system of lead generation and follow up, talk to Greg or George at +61-8-9388 4727, fax +61-8-9388 4722 or email greg@salon-marketing-secrets.com.

“And, of course, we could always do with more online affiliates,” says Greg.