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Are you considering starting your own Day Spa? Or, do you already own one and want to know how you can make your Day Spa business more successful? It never hurts to gather information from a variety of sources. Here we’ll start with some of the basics and move right through to suggestions that you may not find anywhere else.
Day Spa Marketing 101
Day Spas sell more than just massages and skin treatments. A Day Spa exists to change the way its clients feel. They sell a moment of respite. Of calm. Of self-love and self-care. A sense of worthiness. And it all starts with creating an atmosphere where everything seems perfect, so the client doesn’t have a worry in the world or a negative thought in their head.
There are many ways that successful Day Spas create this atmosphere. It all starts with engaging the four other senses in anticipation of the fifth; touch.
All Day Spas play relaxing music of course and include the sound of running water perhaps with a small water feature. Delicious aromas already permeate from the various massage oils, infusers and other products used in the course of your work. However, some thought may be given to allowing clients to select from a small range of scented oils either for their massage or via an infuser. Serving a refreshing blossom tea will engage the tastebuds (we like the low caffeine teas specially formulated for Day Spas by Tea Blossoms).
Visually, the look of the Day Spa is naturally very important when setting a price that clients will be prepared to pay for your service. After all, you can’t charge a high-end price while looking like a two-bit joint. The colour palette sets the tone and needs to be calming, not dramatic. This is why many Spas don’t necessarily follow the latest design trends. Instead, nature can be a good source of inspiration.
But what if you’re doing all these things but you’re still not making money?
Troubleshooting
You may well have spent a small fortune on the design of your Spa to set a luxurious tone but that doesn’t mean it is kept that way throughout the day.
Whilst it is important to ensure that staff are productive at all times, it is equally important that they are in the right frame of mind. They need to be emanating a deep sense of calm which just cannot be faked if they’re stressed out. We suggest that staff downtime is used to carefully wipe down surfaces to keep them free from dust and germs. This is a quiet activity that is best done slowly and methodically.
Processing towels on the other hand can be quite stressful due to the sense of urgency as towels run out. Piles of dirty towels create a terrible mess, take up a lot of space and generate a sense of overwhelm. Lint from dryers covers everything. The sound of a washing machine or dryer running can be pervasive, even at low levels. Laundry Point can help you process your towels whether you are a big or small operation, even hand rolling at no extra cost so that you can use your towels as display and put floorspace to better use.
Making more money out of the same floorspace
Floorspace in a Day Spa needs to be utilised with maximum efficiency. So, an important balance needs to be found. On the one hand, an absolute maximum of square inches should be generating money as either a consultation room or retail space for selling products. On the other hand, it is important not to look cluttered and a calm waiting room needs to be provided for before and after a session. So how best to divvy up this all-important space?
The best place to start is by firstly understanding how many square meters of floorspace your Spa has. Your landlord should be able to provide this if you’re unsure. Next, work out exactly how much you pay per square meter per month in rent. Don’t forget to include your outgoings such as Council and Water Rates in this. So,
(Rent + Outgoings) / Total Floorspace in Square Meters = Cost Per Square Meter
Now take a look at your utility rooms. These could include your storage rooms, lunch room, staff only toilets and laundry area. How big are these areas? Not sure? If all else fails, grab a measuring tape and measure each room individually. The length of each room X the width of each room = number of square meters per room. How much are these areas costing you per month in total using our previous cost per square meter price? Write the number down.
Next, consider ways you could put this wasted space to better use.
Can you reduce the amount of storage space you need by displaying rolled towels instead? We think stacking these Ikea wine racks to house towels instead of wine is a beautiful and incredibly cost-effective way to bring towels out of your storage room and put them on display. The best thing is, shelves like this don’t get dusty as they are in use. You can also leave the back off and make a wall out of these racks to cleverly divide spaces that don’t need to be soundproofed or completely hidden. For example, can you create a break between a reception area and the hallway to the consultancy rooms?
While you’re dealing with towels, consider your laundry room. It takes up a lot of space (not to mention involves running costs as well). In fact, the room is often large enough to transform into an additional consultation room without moving walls around if you stop processing towels on site.
What other space saving ideas can you think of?
Now it’s time to get the calculator out again. How many additional consultation rooms could you create if you rehashed your utility space? How much additional revenue would your business earn from these new consultation rooms? Now take away the increased cost of outsourcing your laundry service. How much better off would you be?
New Business
You’ve got more rooms but you need to bring in more business to fill them.
Surely it goes without saying in this day and age that you need to invest in a nice website so that you are projecting the right image when a prospective customer is looking for a Day Spa online! Consider other features such as being able to book online instead of over the phone. Simply invest as much as you can afford because all online activity links back to your website and you need to make the right impression to bring in new customers.
Many small business owners feel overwhelmed by online advertising and so pay other people to do it for them. But it is expensive for small businesses to outsource this task. We believe this is often a waste of money as such companies can do things that get hits on your website but don’t actually result in sales in order to justify their existence. Just $10 a day (or up to $100 a week) should be more than enough to invest in a Google AdWords campaign, especially if you don’t have to pay the fees of a company to do it for you. Here are just a few tricks to help you get the most out of your budget:
- Be specific. Focus on Phrase Match or Exact Match of high-ranking keywords and include the city. For example, try “day spa Melbourne” instead of a broad match of just day spa.
- Be realistic. Set your location to postcodes around your Spa so you’re not wasting budget on people who won’t travel from the other side of town. The trick here is to cast the net wide enough but not too wide. About 10-20 postcodes should do.
- Be creative. AdWords have a tool that allows you to put in 20 different headlines and 5 different descriptions, then it will test different combinations to see which works best and run just those. You can learn a lot about your customers by seeing what it comes up with.
- Be patient. Spend just 10 minutes each week looking at the “Search Terms” that people used to find your store and tweaking your keywords accordingly. Did Google serve ads to people who were looking for a “pool spa”. If they were wrong as in this instance use the negative keyword tool to ensure that any time the word “pool” is included in the search an ad is not shown so your budget isn’t wasted. In this way, the longer you have been advertising for the more and more cost effective your advertising becomes.
Social media such as Facebook and Instagram are invaluable free tools you can use to promote your business. You can feature a product such as a moisturiser, a treatment such as a particular type of facial, a staff member who specialises in a particular area and so on. You just need a picture and a short blurb on who or what it is. Even spending a couple of hours to create one post each week will make all the difference. Also, have your clients “check in” on Facebook and review your service for $10 off their next session and so on.
Lastly, give your suppliers a call and ask them to link to your webpage from theirs to help the Google crawlers find you so that you start to rank highly in organic listings. Are there any other websites you can think of that will link to you? It never hurts to ask!
So, there you have just a few tips that you can cheaply implement to make your day spa business successful. So, what are you waiting for? There is no better time to make more money that right now. Contact Laundry Point today to find out how they can help you turn your towel problem into more profit in your pocket.