ONLY 3 Ways to Increase Medspa Sales

ONLY 3 Ways to Increase Medspa Sales
It’s time for some of what I call ‘Accurate Thinking’. If you’re in the same situation as this salon owner, lean closer, dear reader.

There are only THREE ways to increase revenue.

That’s it, three. no more, no less. No matter whether you’re a huge multi-national, or a corner deli. Here they are:

1. Get more customers. 2. Increase what each customer spends with you. 3. Increase your prices.

Folks, it ain’t rocket science. Business is actually very simple. People make it complicated. Profit is nothing more than the difference between your revenue, and your costs. If your costs are high, either reduce them, increase your prices, or better, a combination of the two.

(However, do NOT reduce your marketing spend. Increase what you spend on marketing – it is the ONLY thing that brings customers in?. and that includes referrals, which is just word of mouth marketing.)

Med Spa Marketing 101

Confused by what’s marketing, and what isn’t? People tend to make things more complicated than they really are, so I feel it’s time for a refresher course on the absolute basics of direct response marketing for salons and spas.

First of all,

What IS Marketing?

It’s not just advertising, or direct mail, or Public Relations, or TV, or radio? or any of those things in isolation. It’s actually VERY simple, folks:

Marketing is ‘any activity which brings a customer to you with a pre-disposition to buy from you and only you, at the price you wish to charge?”

As Ray Kroc, founder of McDonalds, used to tell his staff, clean toilets is marketing.

So let’s start Lesson #1 with something everybody can understand, a form of marketing almost everybody does – a plain old space ad in the printed media such as Yellow Pages or the newspaper.

As you know, Inner Circle Members all over the world bombard us with ads, flyers and sales letters they want us to critique, to knock into shape. And the biggest single mistake most make is burdening their ad with too much work to do.

Eg., they want their ad to sell ‘off the page’, expecting their $250 ad will somehow, miraculously, sell a bunch of high-priced body wraps or microdermabrasion courses. But just in case that doesn’t work, they also include a whole slew of other products and services, like “Ask us about our facials, manicures, pedicures, hot stone massages?” etc etc.

Here’s an example: a hotch-potch of nothingness, meaningless ‘motherhood’ statements, unreadable italic text, and no offer whatsoever that asks the prospect to do anything?. let alone pick up the phone and call!

Here’s the thing:

Confuse Your Prospect, and He/She Won’t Make a Decision

In any kind of marketing, you need to put ALL of your effort, energy and copy towards a single purpose.

Decide before you advertise – as part of your Sales Thinking Process – exactly what you want your prospect to do. And then give them no choice but that. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to sell a big-ticket item or service ‘off the page’, i.e. expecting a single ad to sell a high-priced service in a single step.

So if you’re trying to use say, a newspaper ad to sell a big-ticket item – and that’s probably anything more than $200 – your ad is going to struggle to do that.

(You might get a handful of people actually pick up the phone and call you. But for every call, there might be 10, 20, a hundred who almost pick up the phone – but don’t quite.)

Better: use the ad to give something away – it’s sole purpose is to get the prospect to raise her hand and say ‘Hey, I’m interested in what you have to sell – but I’m not yet convinced enough to give you my money yet.’

Selling a big ticket item is often going to need a multi-step process.

1. Generate the lead with a freebie offer.
2. Get the prospect to come in for the freebie.
3. Give the freebie service.
4. Use that time to sell the prospect on the benefits of the full course or service.
5. Close the sale with a compelling, unbeatable, value-added offer.

When you advertise you MUST

1. Decide whether you have a 1-step or multi-step sale to make.
2. If multi-step, recognize you are advertising to generate leads and do nothing else that takes away space, time attention from that task.
3. Feature your freebie offer up top and early – don’t hide it. Eg, “LADIES! FREE ‘HOLLYWOOD STAR’ (INSERT YOURS) TREATMENT VALUED AT $X – FIRST 17 CALLERS ONLY!”
4. Make the offer as exciting and valuable as possible.
5. Give multiple ways to respond, emphasizing the one you would prefer, eg phone first, then website. Whether you should push as many as possible to the web is debatable. Yes, sending people to the web gets you their email address and name – presuming you have a name-capture device. (see www.beauty-salon-marketing.com for an example of one). But the phone is always handy, a computer may not be.

The KISS Principle

The KISS Principle – Keep it Simple, Stupid

No matter the city or location, medspa and laser skin care center owners all say pretty much the same things, talk about the same challenges.

There’s no point being grumpy about it. But marketing your Medspa doesn’t have to be confusing. Do the simple stuff first.

Here are the top complaints:

• “I want more patients, and I don’t know how to get them.”
• “I want my patients to come back more often, and spend more money.”
• And “I want to get ‘off the tools’ but I don’t know how.”

There’s a whole seminar, a dozen books and several university degrees in every one of these questions, but for clarity, let’s just deal with the top two. The faster you find answers to those two, the easier it is to find an answer to #3.

First, some basic Marketing 101.

There are only TWO types of people: Clients you already have, and ones you haven’t met yet.

And it’s a mystery to me why so many business owners spend ALL their time, energy and money, busting a gut to constantly find new customers, while ignoring the farm in their own backyard.

For years a prominent hair replacement surgeon has paid every month, to advise her on marketing.  This surgeon is spending many tens of thousands of dollars a year on newspaper and Yellow Pages advertising to attract balding guys willing to pay an average of $14,000 to get their mojo back.

But the business has the names and addresses of over 8,000 guys who, over the years, have put their hands up and said ‘I’m interested?’ – and haven’t signed up.

Astoundingly, the surgeon doesn’t spend a single dollar on so much as a monthly newsletter to these highly-qualified, very warm leads. And yet we KNOW that if you market to people regularly, with a worthwhile, interesting newsletter, 80% of them will buy from you over a two-year period._

Do the numbers: if only ONE PERCENT of them signed up in a whole year, that’s EIGHTY customers @ $14,000 average = $1,120,000! The whole business only does about $2 million annual sales!

Talk about ‘acres of diamonds’!

So, let’s keep it simple. Here’s a very basic framework/schedule – the bare minimum requirement – for marketing to both get new patients, and get your existing/new patients coming back.

To Get New Patients

1. an ACTIVE – not passive – referral program. It’s a systemised, generous referral program designed to get your best patients referring their friends and colleagues. (Why ‘best’ patients? Because people tend to hang around with people like them. If you want impoverished, penny-pinching patients, sure, ask those patients to refer their friends.)
2. Lead-generating mailbox flyers, newspaper ads, street signs and window posters. Essentially, lead-generators involve making an introductory offer of some kind of FREE service – with restrictions on numbers, days available etc, to drive them in on days when your appointment book is empty anyway – with the purpose of getting the prospect’s backside in your chair or treatment room for an hour or two. That’s when you sell to ‘em, not off the page.

Why would you offer something free? Because, silly, you know that an average patient is worth $X to you in a year? and you know if you get ten new prospective patients in the door, you’ll keep say 5 of them for the long term. Five times $X = ?

You need to know your numbers!

To Get Current & Past Patients Coming Back: Here’s the very basic stuff.

1. Regular (Monthly!) newsletter. Anything less than monthly is a waste of time. There is a whole seminar just in newsletters. It doesn’t have to be glossy, ‘professional’. In fact, the more it looks like it’s been hammered out on an old typewriter on your kitchen table, the better. Personal stuff, about you, your kids, your staff? and with an offer in it. Simple, single sheet of double-sided paper, an envelope and a stamp, and the job’s done.)I cannot stress enough the value of a regular newsletter. They always produce sales, always bring in more than they cost. And they keep your patients close. And they generate referrals.
2. ‘Raise the Dead’ letters: go to your database, pick all the patients you haven’t seen for three months or more?and send them a letter with an offer in it. And for those who don’t respond, send them another letter. Do this every three months.
3. New Patient Letters. If they don’t immediately re-book, every first time patient should be receiving a series of follow-up letters, offering them a Gift Voucher to re-book NOW.
4. Memberships. Want your patients to pay a year’s worth up front? Or commit to a regular credit card payment every month? A member of your ‘Premium VIP Club’ who’s paid for a year of services up front isn’t going anywhere else. Plus, once they’ve spent the money, they’ll soon forget about it?.and spend more on products every time they come in.
5. In-Spa special promos. One smart spa owner produced a series of big posters offering a range of value-add services ranging in price from a couple of hundred bucks right up to $500 or more. These offers were placed all over the spa.  And for a month, the staff talked them up, holding people back till the beginning of the following month. They sold over $16,000 worth of these packages in a matter of days. And the more expensive ones sold best!

There you have it. If you employ only that handful of strategies, do it regularly, do it well, you cannot fail.

Increase Your Sales

Increase Sales for your Med Spa with low cost marketing strategies. The absolute cheapest way to immediately boost sales is to market to your existing patient base. However, if you are not properly capturing your actual patient contact information, then your effectiveness in marketing additional services to them will be limited. All you need to do is send a simple series of three letters, and you will be amazed at the response. Of course, it has to be the “right” letter, but anything you send them offering a special or seasonal promotion will do the trick with reasonable effectiveness.

Don;t forget marketing to your “almost” patient list. These are folks that have contacted you, but for one reason or another have never purchased any services from you. If you are not properly capturing prospective patients personal contact information, then you have no way of taking advantage of this incredibly effective marketing technique.

The Medspa Platinum Success Program focuses on both of these marketing campaigns, and even provides templates so you don’t have to think about how to accomplish this, you just put your own medspa or practice name and contact information in the letter, and send it to your patients! It doesn’t get any easier than that.

For more information, sign up for your own 30 day test drive of the Medspa Platinum Success Program, including the Medspa Marketing Toolkit.