The client list is one of the most valuable things a salon owns, and one of the most underused. Most owners spend more on ads in a month than they spend on emailing their own clients in a year, and it shows.
Why email still earns its keep
Everything else you do to bring clients in is borrowed. Social platforms decide who sees your posts, Google decides who finds you, ads keep getting pricier, and any of these can dry up overnight without much warning. Your client list is different, though: you own it, the clients on it have asked to hear from you, and reaching them costs almost nothing beyond the time it takes to write.
The maths of a salon rewards this heavily. Getting an existing client back through the door is far cheaper than winning a new one, and the clients who hear from you between visits are the ones who don’t drift off to whoever emailed them last.
Email also has staying power in a way most channels don’t. Whichever social platform is on the way out next, whichever ad format stops working, your client list will still be there earning its keep.
Build a properly consented client list
A list you can’t legally email isn’t really a list at all, so before anything else, it’s worth getting the consent piece right.
Under GDPR, marketing consent has to be freely given (never a condition of booking), specific (email, SMS, or both, the client picks), informed (they know what they’ll receive), unambiguous (no confusion about what they’re agreeing to), and affirmative (a positive action, never a pre-ticked box). If any of that isn’t true of your current sign-up process, it’s worth fixing before your next send goes out.
Who’s actually responsible for collecting that consent depends on where the booking came from. When a client books through a marketplace like Treatwell or through the book now buttons on your website, the platform handles consent for you and it flows into your client list automatically. For anyone else, the walk-ins, the phone bookings, the clients you added to your list yourself, that consent is on you to collect and record.
The trick is to capture consent where the conversation is already happening rather than treating it as a separate task. That means on your booking forms, at checkout, and on the client list template when you import existing clients (most templates, Treatwell Connect’s included, have a marketing consent column built in). Whichever route you use, keep a note of when the client gave consent, how they gave it, and what you told them at the time. If they ever query it down the line, that record is what protects you.
Know the two types of email your salon sends
Every email your salon sends falls into one of two buckets, and the rules for each are quite different.
The first bucket is transactional: booking confirmations, reminders, patch-test prompts, and review requests. These exist because a booking exists, they’re part of the service you agreed to provide, and they don’t need separate marketing consent. Any decent salon software sends them automatically once you’ve switched them on, and if yours doesn’t, that’s a bigger conversation than this article.
The second bucket is marketing: newsletters, seasonal offers, promotions, “we’ve missed you” sends to clients who’ve drifted. These need explicit marketing consent, and they’re where the rest of this article lives.
Most salons already have the transactional layer humming along nicely. It’s the marketing layer that usually needs the work.
Segment your list before you send
Sending the same email to every client on your list is the fastest way to teach them to ignore you. Your regulars don’t need the first-visit discount, your colour clients don’t care about your new manicure range, and the client who hasn’t been in for six months needs a very different email from the one who came in last Tuesday.
Segmenting your list fixes this, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. Three simple splits cover most of what a salon actually needs.
By treatment. Colour, cuts, spa, hair removal, nails: each group cares about different things. Colour clients want refresh reminders and aftercare, spa clients want seasonal packages, and cut clients want to hear from you around the time their fringe is getting in the way.
By behaviour. How often does the client come in, and when did they last book? In Treatwell Connect, the Clients section filters let you pull, say, everyone who last visited more than 90 days ago in a couple of clicks, which is exactly the group a win-back email should go to.
By how long they’ve been coming to you. New clients need a proper welcome, regulars need to feel valued, lapsed clients need a real reason to come back, and VIPs (the small group who books often and spends well) deserve first access when your calendar opens up for busy seasons. Treatwell Connect’s client filters do the heavy lifting here too, since visit count and last-booking date together tell you most of what you need to know about where a client sits.
For most salons, this level of segmentation done in Treatwell Connect is more than enough. If you ever outgrow it, dedicated email tools handle behavioural automations and multi-step sequences, but most independents never need to go there.
Email marketing campaigns worth running
Once you have a segmented list and clean consent in place, the question becomes what to actually send. In Treatwell Connect, two tools handle this in different ways, and picking the right one for the job saves time.
Inside Treatwell Connect, the Campaigns section (under the Marketing tab) is the tool for broadcasts to your full opted-in list. Campaigns lets you set up promotional discounts (off-peak deals, last-minute offers, seasonal promotions) and send an email announcing them to your full opted-in list. Treatwell Connect handles the send, respects opt-in status, and won’t message the same client twice within seven days, which stops accidental over-sending before it happens.
In the Clients section, Send an email is the tool for targeted sends. You filter your list first (by opt-in status, last visit date, or number of bookings), then compose the message with subject line, header, body, booking button, and signature. Reach for this one when the message is meant for a specific group rather than everyone.
A working monthly rhythm doesn’t need to be elaborate. Here’s what a solid year of sends looks like:
- Seasonal openers. Spring refresh, summer holiday prep, autumn back-to-work, winter gifting. One thoughtful send per season beats four rushed ones.
- Birthday sends. If your template captures date of birth, use it. A small perk on or around a client’s birthday is low effort and lands warmly.
- Rebook nudges to lapsed clients. Filter for anyone who last visited more than 90 days ago. A gentle “we’ve missed you” with a booking link often works better than a discount.
- New team or new treatment announcements. When you’ve hired a stylist or added a treatment, tell your clients. Most won’t have noticed otherwise.
- Off-peak fill-ups. If Tuesday mornings are slow, a short “we have space this week” email can fill them. Save the discounts for the genuinely slow stretches.
The temptation with every send is to over-produce it, but that instinct is usually wrong. A short, well-timed email from someone the client already trusts beats an elaborate one they never open.
Write emails clients actually open
The best-designed email in the world doesn’t work if nobody opens it, so a few disciplines make the difference between opens and deletes.
Subject lines have to work on a phone screen, because that’s where most clients will read them. Phones cut subject lines off after about 25 to 35 characters, which means five to eight words in sentence case is roughly the sweet spot. Skip the ALL CAPS and the strings of exclamation marks too: they cue spam filters and they make clients scroll past. Your spring colour refresh, on us lands better than HUGE DISCOUNTS THIS WEEK ONLY!!, every time.
Alongside that, aim for one clear action per email. If you want them to book, ask them to book; if you want them to buy a gift card, ask them to buy a gift card. Two competing calls-to-action in the same email halve the response on both, and the button text needs to match what happens when they click it. A See more button that opens a booking form is a small betrayal, and clients notice.
Relevance also matters more than frequency. The two things that push clients to unsubscribe are getting too many emails and getting emails that aren’t for them, so if you segment properly and only send when there’s something worth saying, the frequency question mostly answers itself.
Above all, sound like yourself. Your emails should read the way you actually talk in the salon: warm, direct, no jargon. If a sentence sounds like it belongs in a chain-store voicemail, rewrite it.
Design and mobile basics
Design for the phone, because that’s where your email will be opened. In practice, that means a single column layout rather than anything multi-column, since multi-column emails don’t display well on phones and force clients to pinch and zoom to read them, which almost nobody bothers to do.
Beyond layout, make sure your buttons are big enough to tap without fumbling and that every image has alt text, so the message still lands even if the images don’t load or the client is using a screen reader.
Before you hit send, test the email on your own phone. If you drift off partway through reading it, your clients will too, so fix whatever made you drift and then send.
Measure what matters
Once a send is out, it’s worth paying attention to what happens next. You have more signals in front of you than you might think.
Watch the calendar in the days after a send. Does it tick up? Are Tuesday mornings a little fuller than they were last week? Do slots book that had been sitting there? A send that lands well shows up in your calendar before it shows up anywhere else.
Listen for it in the chair. Regulars will mention the email if it caught them. “I saw your thing about the summer package” is worth more than any open rate. If nothing lands verbally over a few sends, look at what you’re writing rather than how you’re sending it.
Watch your list size. Every time you send, some clients will unsubscribe. That’s normal and healthy. What isn’t healthy is a run of sends where the list keeps shrinking faster than it grows. If that starts happening, either your content isn’t right for the segment or you’re sending too often.
Notice what’s missing. No complaints about frequency, no confused replies asking what an email meant, no clients asking to be taken off the list twice.
Keep your list healthy
Email lists decay over time. Clients change addresses, some stop opening, others drift out of your orbit entirely, and left alone the list slowly turns into dead weight that starts dragging your deliverability down with it.
To keep things healthy, respect the frequency cap. In Treatwell Connect, you can’t send a marketing email to a client who’s had one from you in the last seven days, and it’s worth taking that as a guide rather than a licence. Even your most engaged clients don’t want to hear from you twice a week.
Handle unsubscribes cleanly too. When a client unsubscribes, their status updates automatically, and it’s not worth trying to work around it. Someone who’s asked you to stop hearing from you and then hears from you anyway is a complaint waiting to happen, and a GDPR breach on top.
Every so often, run a re-engagement send before you prune. For clients who haven’t opened anything in six months or more, one clearly-framed email works well: we haven’t seen you in a while, still want to hear from us? The ones who respond stay on the list; the ones who don’t are the ones you can quietly let go.
Finally, refresh contact details once a year by asking clients at their next visit whether their email is still current. A quick verbal check catches the address changes that would otherwise mean lost contact.
Your 30-day rollout plan
Four weeks is enough time to get a working email operation running, and it doesn’t need to be fancy, just consistent.
Week 1: consent audit and list clean. Start by checking your client list. How many clients have opted in to marketing, how many have an email address on file, and are your direct clients (walk-ins, phone bookings, ones you added manually) all showing the correct consent status? Fix anything that’s off before you send anything. Going forward, get in the habit of collecting an email address at every new client’s first booking, and when a regular walks in without one on file, take the moment to add it. Every missing email is a client you can’t reach when there’s something worth saying. This is also the moment to import any client list you’re still holding elsewhere. In Treatwell Connect, any file format now works: drop your list in, and if it’s not on the standard template, the team will format it for you within three working days.
Week 2: send your first campaign. In Treatwell Connect, head to the Campaigns section under the Marketing tab. Set up a simple promotion (an off-peak deal or a last-minute offer works well as a first pick), then send the email campaign that goes with it. The point of this week is getting the first send out of the door rather than agonising over perfection.
Week 3: build a targeted send. Go to Clients, apply a filter (clients who last visited more than 90 days ago is a good first target), and use Send an email to write a short “we’ve missed you” with a booking link. Targeted sends outperform broadcasts almost every time.
Week 4: read the signals. Has your calendar been busier in the days after each send? Have regulars mentioned the email in the chair? Has your list stayed roughly the same size, or is it shrinking? Those signals tell you what to keep, what to change, and what to try next month. Set a rhythm you can actually sustain: one campaign send and one targeted send per month is a strong baseline for most independents.
After four weeks you’ll have a working operation, a proper sense of what your list responds to, and enough data to decide what to do next.
Open the Marketing tab, send one email
You don’t need a strategy document to start. Log into Treatwell Connect, open the Marketing tab, and send one email this week. The client list is already yours, the tool is already there, and the results follow the sending.
Not on Treatwell yet? Getting set up takes about three minutes.
FAQs
How often should a salon send marketing emails?
Aim for one to two marketing emails per month to your general list, plus targeted sends to smaller segments when there's a specific reason, whether that's a promotion, a seasonal opener, or a win-back to lapsed clients. Let engagement guide you: if unsubscribes climb, you're sending too often or too broadly.
What's a good open rate for salon marketing emails?
Salon marketing emails typically outperform broader industry averages because clients have a direct relationship with the business. If your open rate is below 15%, look at your subject lines, your list quality, and how often you're sending before anything else.
Should I buy an email list for my salon?
Never. Bought lists breach GDPR, damage your sender reputation, and reach almost nobody who's actually interested in your salon. Build your list from real clients who've consented to hear from you.
Can email marketing work for a small salon with a small list?
Yes. Smaller lists usually see higher engagement rates because the clients on them are more directly connected to the salon, and automated reminders and campaigns work the same way whether your list is 200 or 2,000.
How do I send targeted promotions to specific client segments?
In Treatwell Connect, go to the Clients section and apply the filters you need (opt-in status, last visit date, or number of bookings), then use Send an email. That way you're writing a specific message for a specific group rather than broadcasting to your full list.
Does Treatwell Connect send marketing emails?
Yes, using two tools. In the Marketing tab, Campaigns lets you set up a promotional discount (off-peak, last-minute, seasonal) and send an email announcing it to your full opted-in list. In the Clients tab, Send an email lets you write custom messages and target them to a filtered group.
What consent do I need to send marketing emails to my clients?
For direct clients (anyone who didn't book through the Treatwell marketplace or book now buttons on your website), you need explicit marketing consent that's freely given, specific, informed, unambiguous, and affirmatively opted in. No pre-ticked boxes. Bookings through either route have consent handled by Treatwell and reflected in Treatwell Connect automatically.
