How Hair Candy Grew their Revenue by 528% Through Marketing and Sales Automation

Australian entrepreneur and founder of Hair Candy Shakira Dickson knows what it means to build a company from the ground up. As Hair Candy grew, her team was struggling to keep track of customer data with the systems they had in place. When she found ActiveCampaign, she quickly saw how the power of marketing and sales automation could help her and her team level up the business. 

A hairdresser by trade, Shakira started out seeing clients at home. “I started Hair Candy back in 2007. I was a hairdresser, and I wanted to start doing hair extensions. I built my business just working from home doing hair extensions for my clients until I built it up to the point where I could open a salon.” But she didn’t stop there. “We now have three salons in 3 different locations. We’ve got about 25 employees, so it’s quite a big business.” As her business grew, Shakira saw an opportunity for growth outside of the salon. 

Hair Candy had built a reputation for itself, so Shakira wanted more control over the products she provided to her loyal clientele. “I decided to start stocking my own hair extensions. I went to China and met with factories to find a good supplier and sort out my branding. We also do a lot of custom colors, so we work with the factory to make them exactly how we want them for our clients.” Because of Hair Candy’s reputation and the quality of the product Shakira created, demand for her extensions grew beyond her own salon clients. “I think because we built up a reputation, people kept asking me to buy the hair from us.”

Hair Candy has grown so much lately that they recently opened their own warehouse and expanded their business to include a sales team. With this growth, however, came challenges. 

Early success brought growing challenges

In the early years of the company, growth was organic, mainly coming through referrals and word of mouth. “One thing we realized was that while Shopify is great, it didn’t really have a customer management system that worked for us. So as our customer grace base was growing, it was really hard for us to monitor all of the clients we had in our system.” Shakira knew it was time to level up. “We had grown through word of mouth, but if we wanted to keep growing business, we would have to invest in advertising and sales. It wouldn’t have been possible to take the business to that next level only using Shopify.”

Finding the right sales automation tools for a growing business

Shakira wanted to make sure she had the tools she needed for her team to provide top-tier customer service, so she got to work finding the right solution. “I spent a long time researching different platforms to see what would work best. I tried a few, but I kept coming back to ActiveCampaign. I just felt like it was one of the easiest to use and easy to navigate just made sense to me.” ActiveCampaign’s high scores on review sites also played a factor in Shakira’s decision. “It also just had so many good reviews. So many people had said amazing things about it, and I kept seeing it recommended. It just seemed like the best solution for us.”

Hair Candy’s challenges and ActiveCampaign’s solutions

One of the big challenges Hair Candy was facing was being able to track conversations with their clients. Before ActiveCampaign, their tech stack only allowed them to take brief notes for each customer and transaction. “It was really hard for us to track our customers and to be able to keep up with new leads or customers we needed to follow up with. Sometimes you’d be writing histories for customers, and the notes box wasn’t big enough. We just found that it was really limited.” With ActiveCampaign CRM, Hair Candy can now track interactions with prospects and customers. Now, when the sales team responds to calls, they have all the information they need in one place to be able to provide the best possible service to their customers. 

In addition to the benefits of tracking customer communication through ActiveCampaign CRM, Hair Candy uses ActiveCampaign sales pipelines to keep track of their leads throughout the entire customer lifecycle. “We can see how many new leads we got that week, how many we’ve converted, how many people we need to follow up on, and how much money we’ve made through the sales from those leads. That’s one section that was really easy to set up and works really well in our business.”

Lead scoring and pipelines level up sales efforts

To enhance the power of the sales pipelines Hair Candy has set up, they’re also using lead scoring to help their sales team prioritize their efforts. In addition to the salons and hair extension sales, Hair Candy also offers online and in-person education to help hair professionals expand their skill sets. “Using lead scoring, we assign points to contacts based on what they’re interacting with. We can see who’s opening the emails and who’s more actively interested in what we’re sending. We can pay extra attention to follow up with those people that we can see are really interested.” This works especially well with their education services. “If we can see someone keeps opening the email because they are probably thinking about doing training with us, then we’ll give them a call to try to close the sale.”

Shakira and her team also save a lot of time on managerial tasks through automations. Certain customers that purchase from Hair Candy qualify as wholesale buyers. Before ActiveCampaign, the Hair Candy team had to manually verify each incoming customer and set them up as a wholesale account. Using the Zapier integration, they were able to automate the process. “Now it’s just one button click, and the whole process happens automatically. They get their wholesale discount on their Shopify record. They get their welcome email series. They get everything. It just made it really, really easy for the staff to just click a button, and it’s all done.”

Impressive growth thanks to powerful tools

The benefits Hair Candy has seen since implementing ActiveCampaign for Marketing and Sales are impressive. For starters, Shakira’s team saves 10+ hours a week on administrative work through automations. Additionally, the company’s contact lists have doubled in the last year. Most impressively, however, is the company’s revenue growth. Year over year, Hair Candy’s revenue grew by 528%. Shakira attributes a lot of that to ActiveCampaign’s sales tools. “A big part of that is being able to track our customers and follow up with them. I think if we were just waiting for people to come to us all the time, we wouldn’t be maximizing our sales. Getting organized and having everything easy to find has made such a big difference.”

What’s next for Hair Candy

Even with those impressive results, Shakira sees no shortage of opportunities for growth to continue. “I feel very confident in ActiveCampaign’s ability to scale with us as we grow. Having that organization, keeping everything organized, and knowing where to find the contacts and who needs to be followed up with gives you the ability to be able to scale.” While Hair Candy continues to grow, one thing is certain. “We realized this is amazing. We could never go back to what we were doing before.”

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