Unique Ways to Keep in Touch with your Spa Clients Between Visits

One of the most difficult things you have to deal with as a spa manager is keeping the lines of communication open between your spa and your clients between visits. Attracting and maintaining returning customers should be your ultimate goal if you want to remain successful. However, this can be a challenge and coming up with new and exciting ways to get your clients back into the spa can be difficult.

One simple thing you can do is to send out birthday, anniversary, holiday, or thank you cards to your clients throughout the year. Along with a handwritten note from the spa manager or owner, include a coupon for free products or discounts on their next visit. Customers like to feel appreciated, so personally reaching out to them on special days will get you noticed and will keep you in their minds.

You can also have special customer appreciation days several times throughout the year and invite special clients in for complimentary massages, prizes, food, and drinks. Rather than just mailing out advertisements that get tossed in the trash immediately, give your clients incentives to open your mail by offering special discounts that make your clients feel valued.

Compensation for Spa Staff: A Look at Different Options for Therapists and Aestheticians

Deciding how to pay your spa employees in order to best benefit the spa while also keeping your staff satisfied can be a difficult balancing act. While you want to make the spa as much money as possible, you also need to remember that your employees are there to make money too and if you are not fulfilling their needs then you will create a negative atmosphere and a continuously revolving door.

There are different ways to pay your staff, including hourly, salary, commission, performance-based, or even team-based profit sharing. All these methods have positives and negatives, so choose what works best for your spa.

In order to keep your employees vested in your spa’s ultimate goals you might want to invest into theirs. Offering health insurance, paid vacations, and a retirement plan can go a long way. You might want to offer other benefits, such as education assistance, credit union affiliation, or daycare assistance.

You can also offer bonuses such as free spa treatments, appreciation parties, performance awards, or weekly training sessions to improve their skills and knowledge. All of these efforts will benefit both the spa and the employees by creating a positive, motivating, and empowering work environment.

Let Go of the Past: The Spa Industry Changes So Fast - Managers Must Keep Up or Get out of the Way

The spa industry is a fast-paced, exciting, and ever-changing business. Spas are rapidly moving from being considered the occasional luxury to a necessary part of everyday life for a wider range of clients. No longer are spas reserved just for the elite. Today the spa client includes the working class, the stay-at-home mom, the blue-collar dad, and the stressed-out teen, so you need to come up with new ways to accommodate this new and diverse clientele.

However, many spa managers don’t understand that with this new acceptance of the spa lifestyle they need to keep up with the latest trends and treatments in order to meet the demands of evolving attitudes. Spa managers should let go of past assumptions about clients and services and keep up with the hot products and services or else they will be left alone in the dust.

It’s more important than ever to keep up on the latest spa trends and truly understand what the client wants and expects from their spa because if they don’t they will find that their competition will be more than happy to accommodate their potential and current clients’ needs.

Why Spa Management Training from ISM Can Quickly Advance your Spa Industry Career

Becoming a successful and effective spa manager is something that takes experience, skill, and training. While experience and skill will develop and grow over time, the level of training that is needed to advance your spa management career can often be difficult to find. Fortunately, ISM makes it easy to obtain the necessary training needed to become a successful spa manager in a fast and convenient program run by experienced and qualified trainers.

Whether you’re new to the spa industry or have been working in the field for years, ISM can quickly give your spa management career that added extra boost it needs to flourish. A spa manager is required to have a unique set of skills and knowledge to be successful and ISM can teach you those skills in the comfort of your own home and at your own individual pace.

With ISM you will learn how to hire and maintain employees, set spa goals, work successfully with clients, plan for short and long term profitability, create high level marketing campaigns, and apply specialized business management skills to your spa business in order to attract, maintain, and keep clients while also making the most profit.

Retail Sales Management in Your Spa: Gift Certificates are Hot - Is Your Spa Cashing In?

Gift certificate sales can provide a continuous flow of steady income to any spa throughout the year, but can also significantly boost profits during the holidays. These sales can account for nearly 25% of your spa’s total sales, increase new client traffic, and lead to regular return business.

In order to make the most of your gift certificate sales, sell them for a specific individual service or for a specific dollar amount that can be redeemed over multiple visits. Once the gift certificate is redeemed for services, have any credits applied towards product sales.

If you choose to sell gift certificates that can be applied to specific spa packages, try creating smaller packages for shorter times to make scheduling easier. Rather than discounting these special packages, you actually want to charge a little more for them because people are more likely to spend more money when purchasing gift certificates.

Also, make your gift certificate sales as easy and convenient for your customers and staff as possible. This might include making them available online, selling them through a third party service, programming them into your POS register, or training your staff in the process ahead of time before the holiday rush.

Retail Sales Management in Your Spa: Moving Product 'Duds'

Oftentimes, some of the best spa products don’t sell for reasons other than quality or effectiveness. Sometimes these spa product duds are the victims of staff familiarity and shelf isolation!

Many products don’t sell simply because your staff is unfamiliar with them. They may become attached to certain products and push them solely based on familiarity. Instead, make sure your staff is familiar with all of your products by creating tester bottles and conducting weekly training sessions to educate them about new products.

Shelf isolation is a common problem with most products because they tend to get lost in the displays. So, you need to regularly rotate products and create high-visibility displays out of product duds and place them in easily accessible locations. Rather than marking products down, create excitement about these slow moving products by placing them out in the open and making signs that say “new product” or “featured item” to get clients interested.

Creating a sales competition for product duds is another great way to stimulate sales and get your staff excited. Have a contest each week and award prizes for whoever sells the most of the featured weekly products, in addition to their regular sales goals.

Have a Favorite Day or Stay Spa?

We Want to Hear About It! You May Win a Spa Gift Certificate

Every day spa or stay spa has its own unique offerings that make it special. By developing the latest pampering techniques, a spa can set itself apart from other spas and give clients something to come back for over and over again.

Do you have a spa that provides outstanding services that make you want to keep coming back for more? If you have a favorite day spa or stay spa, we want to hear all about it. Tell us why the spa you go to is healing, soothing and enjoyable and you may win a spa gift certificate to apply to your next day of treatments.

Our Spa Story "What's Your Favorite Spa Spot" contest is running from November 1 to March 31. Each entry you write about a favorite spa you have visited will garner an additional contest entry. At the end of the contest period, the best post entry will win a $100 gift certificate, compliments of Spa Story, which can be redeemed at prestigious spas worldwide.

With that type of inspiration, why not write all about your favorite spas and what makes them so wonderful for all of our readers? It gives you an opportunity to share valuable spa information with other enthusiasts, read their opinions about spas and get a chance to win a $100 SpaFinder gift certificate.

Give us all the details about the best qualities of the spas you visit today and you could be the big winner of an exciting $100 SpaFinder gift certificate (compliments of Spa Story)!

ENTER YOUR STORY HERE