For many business owners in the professional hair and beauty industry, measuring marketing results can be complicated. Have new bookings come from that email campaign sent last week? Are people talking more about a product because they heard about it from friends, or saw it on your Meta Ads? What’s the best creative to use for each marketing channel?
With Phorest’s On Behalf Marketing (OBM) solution, the magic is in the data, bringing clear, measurable marketing insights to both businesses and brands. Through insightful data in the Phorest marketing suite, OBM allows you to see the basics, like how many people were reached in an OBM campaign, as well as the deeper data, like how they interacted, responded, and took action.
Over the past year, we’ve run several OBM campaigns across the globe, generating bookings, revenue, and brand awareness for the businesses using them. In this blog, we’ll break down the data insights we’ve gathered from 2025, showing you how adopting OBM for your business could change things for the better.
First Up: The OBM Breakdown 2025
2025 was a bumper year for OBM, with more Phorest businesses opting into more co-branded email campaigns than ever before. 2025 saw:
- 7 of the world’s leading hair & beauty brands partnering with Phorest to offer OBM campaigns
- 530 salon, spa, and clinic businesses opting in to the solution to send these campaigns
- Almost 4 million emails delivered to salon, spa, and clinic clients
- 20 OBM campaigns sent
Together, these figures highlight the scale at which OBM is now operating across Phorest businesses, turning it from a one-off initiative that brands were simply testing back in 2023 into something that’s integral to the marketing efforts of the world’s leading hair and beauty brands.
Digging Deeper: OBM Engagement Rates
To understand the real impact of OBM, it’s important to look beyond reach and dive deeper into engagement rates. Metrics like open rates, click rates, and click-and-book rates help explain not only how many people received the campaigns, but how they responded to them.
A Quick Overview:
- Open rate reflects how many recipients opened an email, showing the relevance of the campaign and the subject line
- Click rate indicates how many recipients engaged with the campaign’s content, showing interest beyond the inbox.
- Click-and-book rate shows when a recipient of the email takes action and actually books an appointment
Across OBM campaigns in 2025, we saw the following average engagement rates:
- Average open rate: 47.42%
- Average click rate: 1.57%
- Average click-to-book rate: 9.40%
When compared to typical industry benchmarks, which average around 29% for open rates and 1.7% for click rates, these results show consistently stronger engagement. Why? Because when trusted brands, consistent messaging, and professional execution combine, engagement gets stronger and outcomes become more impressive.
The Importance of Creative in OBM Campaigns
Behind every successful OBM campaign is a close collaboration between the brands we partner with and our own team of Phorest’s in-house marketing experts. By working together to ensure messaging, visuals, and timing are up to scratch, OBM campaigns feel professional, aligned, and relevant to the audience receiving them- meaning more engagement across the board.
This approach helps brands show up consistently within salon, spa, and clinic communications, building familiarity and trust over time.
Our strongest-performing OBM campaigns from 2025 share a few key traits:
- Service-led messaging drives the most bookings
Campaigns focused on treatments/services and visible results consistently outperform product-only promotions. - Benefits matter more than features
Clients are more likely to book when messaging clearly explains the outcome they’ll see. - Short, focused emails convert best
Simple layouts, strong visuals, and one clear booking CTA outperformed longer, more complex emails. - Segmentation boosts performance
Behaviour-based targeting (like clients with upcoming bookings) significantly improved engagement and conversion. - Consistency builds results over time
Brands running regular OBM campaigns see stronger engagement, increased trust, and more consistent booking behaviour than one-off sends.
Together, these elements help OBM campaigns feel less like explicit marketing material and more like a natural extension of the communication that salons already have with their clients. It’s in this space that the magic happens.
What the Participants Have to Say
Feedback from the brands and Phorest businesses who participate in OBM campaigns reinforces what the data already shows. Participants consistently highlight the value of having professionally created, co-branded content that feels aligned with their audience and easy to implement, while still delivering measurable results.
“[After sending an OBM campaign], we had clients coming in asking about our [brand name] glossing services because they saw them in the emails…that demand led us to expand our retail selection because we knew clients were interested.” -Denise, OBM Participant & Owner of Salon Cora, USA
Read more about Denise’s experience with OBM here.
Interested in Learning More About OBM?
For salons, spas, and clinics:
If you’re looking for a simple way to run professional, co-branded campaigns that support engagement and bookings, OBM can help. Click HERE to get started.
For brands:
Want to reach engaged salon, spa, and clinic audiences through trusted, co-branded marketing campaigns made in collaboration with our marketing experts? OBM offers a proven partnership model. Contact our partnerships team HERE to explore a collaboration.
