Let’s be honest for a minute: spa profit margins can be thin, even though many of us are in the business of providing serious luxury services.
You can’t afford to leave money on the table, but you’re probably doing exactly that.
Increase spa revenue with these three methods that actually take little to no ongoing effort on your part.
Turn-Away Tracking
You’re probably losing more revenue than you think from turning away customers. On average, a spa loses about 15% of a day’s business from turning away. So, if you lose 15 out of 100 appointments a day at $150 dollars on average, that’s $2250 a day. For a spa that is open seven days a week and closed only at Christmas and New Year’s, that’s a total revenue loss of $816,750 — or more than three quarters of a million dollars.
A regular customer might come back, but first time customers who are turned away are unlikely to return. You will permanently lose that business. Dealing with this manually is cumbersome and ineffective; it means manually logging the reasons for turn-away and trying to make appropriate scheduling or facility changes.
Spa management software, on the other hand, can collect this data for you, automatically logging the reasons for every turn away and creating analytics reports where managers can see what’s happening. Once you know why you’re turning away customers, you can then optimize your scheduling and facilities to accommodate the clients you’re losing.
For example, if you’re turning away facial business at a certain time of day because you’re too busy, or massages because people are requesting a certain therapist, you can staff more facialists, or give more hours to that therapist, to meet demand and add to your revenue.
Yield Management
Yield management is the process of adjusting the price of a product or service in response to market factors like demand or competition. It’s a common practice of airlines, who were the first to implement it back in the 1980s. When the plane is filling up fast, prices increase. When it’s not, prices are lower. It’s most commonly applied when there is limited or finite capacity, like seats on the plane, or in the case of a spa, the availability of service providers.
A successful yield management system will optimize intake, minimize downtime, increase revenue, and improve efficiency. American Airlines reportedly credits yield management techniques for a revenue increase of $500 million per year, while DELTA says it generated additional revenues of $300 million per year. Marriott Hotels, meanwhile, credits yield management for an additional $100 million in revenue per year.
With a spa management software that offers yield management capabilities, you can set the
parameters for the software to adjust your prices automatically. When demand increases, your prices will automatically do the same. When demand drops, so will your prices.
You can also adjust pricing in other ways, such as charging different prices for advanced reservations vs. walk-ins. But you should do some research to find out what your customers will embrace. Robert Shumsky, Professor of Operations Management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and an expert in yield management, told Book4Time in an interview that yield management should be done using data and market research, rather than just making things up as you go along or copying what your competitors are doing.
Online and Mobile Booking
If your spa doesn’t have online and mobile booking you are definitely leaving money on the table.
While people are spending increasing amounts of time on their phones (the average American spends more than three hours a day using their smartphone), we’re using them less and less to make actual calls.
Research released in June 2016 found that shoppers were making more than half (51%) of their purchases online, compared to 48% in 2015 and 47% in 2014. More recent research found that experts expect global ecommerce sales to break the $3 trillion mark in 2019, and that
51% of Americans would rather shop online than in brick and mortar stores. This upshift is driven by the millennial generation.
ISPA’s Consumer Snapshot Volume VII, Millennial Perceptions and Preferences, found that a majority of millennials are spa goers and that nearly half of them did not book their last appointment by phone.
When asked, “Thinking about your most recent visit to a spa, how did you book an appointment?” 40% of respondents booked by phone and 17% booked in person. Of the remainder:
- 24% booked via website on a laptop or PC
- 7% booked via social media
- 4% booked via mobile app
- 8% booked via website on a smartphone or tablet
That’s a total of 43% of millennial respondents who used web or mobile technology, rather than a phone call, to schedule their appointments.
Moreover, research by OpenMarket found that, given the choice between only being able to text or call on their mobile phones, 75% of millennials would rather lose the ability to talk versus text, and 76% said they prefer texts over calls from companies. Fifty-three percent said they prefer to text over calling in general, and 19% never check voicemail.
Millennials are the fastest growing market, and they don’t want to call you. If they can’t book online or by mobile, they’ll just go elsewhere.
It’s easy
Implementing these changes is easy, and once they’re made, your software will be doing all the menial, everyday tasks for you.
Can you afford not to do these simple things?
Spa Executive magazine is published by Book4Time, the world’s most innovative spa, salon, wellness, and activity management software. Learn more at Book4Time.com