The profitability of spa businesses mostly depends on returning clients. Clearly, you want to find a way to get your clients to visit you more and spend more money.
Among plenty of methods for increasing retention, loyalty programs have been shown to be the most effective method you can implement without extra effort.
Why you should use a loyalty program in your business?
Everyone has had at least one experience where a regular client stops patronizing your business. Not the best feeling, right?
On the other hand, you have clients that have been with you since day one.
The purpose of a loyalty program is to create more of those clients and help you prevent repeat clients from leaving. The best clients are loyal – they cost less and visit more often, therefore, their loyalty guarantees future success.
Spa centers around the world are now using loyalty programs more than ever before. They are aware that by forming a program designed to directly increase client loyalty, they will improve their client retention rates.
When you set up your loyalty program in a proper way, you will be able to encourage clients to visit you more often. Moreover, you will directly affect your clients’ satisfaction, which leads to building a strong relationship with them.
And once you build a strong, healthy relationship with your clients, they are more likely to spread the good word about your business and recommend you to their friends, which clearly indicates that loyal clients are worth more than regular ones.
A 2018 Motista study proved that clients who are emotionally connected to a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value than regular clients and recommend you at a much higher rate.
Let’s take a look at the key elements of a successful loyalty program.
Key elements of a good loyalty program
Get to know your clients.
The goal is to find out your most popular services among clients, so you can use them in your loyalty program to make it more appealing.
So, how do you rank the popularity of each treatment?
Reviews are key! Clients who are interested in your services tend to rate your business online, where they commonly write about their experience with your staff and services – which you can use to find out what services are a hot topic in your business.
Business reviews are a good starting point, but why stop there? Clients overwhelmingly share their experience on social media, which is a great source of data. Check out a comment on your Facebook… tagged photos on your Instagram… and you don’t want to forget to use hashtags on Twitter.
If you don’t find this enough, there are numerous other ways, such as your employee’s experience with clients. Or even better, let your clients know that you are creating a loyalty program and want to hear their opinions.
Set polls on social media or send a friendly email to clients.
You will get valuable insight, and they will feel appreciated because you showed that you care about their opinions. This is what you call a win-win situation.
Defining the rewards and incentives.
Now that you have valuable knowledge about your clients, the next step is to decide the incentives you want to offer in your loyalty program.
The best choice for spa centers would be a ”points” program. This is the most popular approach because it is simple: clients earn a proportionate number of points by booking treatments. More bookings equal more points and more points equal bigger rewards, such as free treatments, big discounts, etc.
One thing to remember is to carefully analyze how many points are to be awarded for every booking.
You want your rewards and incentives to be appealing to your clients, but at the same time, you don’t want to drive yourself into bankruptcy with financially unsustainable rewards.
Also, keep in mind that while bookings are the main source of profit for your business, there is a lot more than your clients can do for your business in exchange for points.
Think about using loyalty program points to encourage people to leave you reviews on Google and Yelp.
Or – even better- give them points for referring a friend or sharing your business on social media.
Loyalty program ready? Let your clients know about it!
Everything ready? Now it is time to let everyone know.
How can you make a big announcement?
Email: Use an email blast to notify existing clients about a brand new loyalty program and invite them to start collecting points right away.
Social media: Make sure to use all social media platforms and notify more people about your loyalty program. You can make a big announcement to existing clients while also generating new ones.
Website: This is one more place where you definitely want to include a simple notification about the new loyalty program. It is the same situation as with social media, as both potential and existing clients visit your website. It would be a waste to let the effort you put into creating an amazing loyalty program go unnoticed.
In your business: This is the most overlooked method. Yes, you covered the digital part… and you did an awesome job! But, don’t forget this important part: set large posters in different places in your business and even directly ask them if they heard about your loyalty program.
Need more bookings? Check out The best way to get more massage bookings: Easy and affordable way, broken down into 5 steps.
Managing and tracking loyalty programs.
Forming a loyalty program is one thing, but maintaining and improving it is a much more complicated process, as it becomes more complex over time.
How do you know if your loyalty program is working? How do you know when and in what way to improve it?
Tracking plays a huge role in discovering that kind of information.
If you are a hands-on type of business owner, keeping track of your program by yourself is the way to go – if you have enough free time, of course.
As mentioned earlier, the best approach for a loyalty program is the points program. It is a fail-proof approach that a lot of businesses use.
How do you keep track of these points?
The most common method is – loyalty cards. Here are some of the pros and cons of using loyalty cards to track your loyalty program.
Pros
- Affordable: It is one of the top inexpensive solutions you can get.
- Simple to create and implement: There are actually many companies that offer to do the whole service (creating gift card software, printing the cards, etc.) for a fixed price.
- Commonly used and proven method: Clients already have experience with them and tend to use different loyalty cards on a day-to-day basis.
Cons:
- Time-consuming: Your staff will have to spend a significant amount of time registering clients, keeping track of each booking, etc. Also, there is always the chance that a client might lose his/her card, which is an additional burden on your staff.
- Loyalty cards are small physical items and clients are known to lose them or forget to bring them to your business. Also, people carry a lot of different types of cards with them all the time (ID, driver’s license, credit card, membership, etc.), and adding another one to the pile is not practical at all.
- Clients tend to lose track of how many points they’ve accumulated, which brings unnecessary obstacles in your relationship with them.
If doing all of the work yourself doesn’t seem appealing, you should consider using tools that are specially designed for managing loyalty programs. These tools will do all of the work for you, which would give you more time to focus on something else, or just simply have some free time.
So, how do you choose the right loyalty program tool?
The key features are:
- Possibility to create and customize the offers in your loyalty program to the fullest extent
- Ability to track the points of each client with the click of a button, which would relieve your staff of unnecessary tasks while also minimizing the chance for human error
- Makes it easy for your clients to earn points and redeem rewards
- Good protection from your loyalty program being abused
- Available free trial so you have enough time to test if the tool fits your business
Need a loyalty program solution that will work for your spa business? Check out why local businesses use Referrizer.
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