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Introduction
SMS marketing is an effective tool for both attracting new clients and convincing customers to return.
It enables more personal communication between businesses and clients, which is critical for customer-focused businesses like day spas. Furthermore, it can optimize your business through feedback and better scheduling, giving you more time for the additional clients it brings in.
Here are 5 ways SMS marketing can bring in more clients to your day spa:
5 Tips to Attract More Clients to Your Day Spa Using SMS Marketing:
1. Customer Care
Staying in touch with customers via text message is a great way to show an extra level of care for your clients. Following up after a treatment to check on the results of their therapy increases customer satisfaction and the chance of a return visit, especially with new customers.
Furthermore, SMS enables you to offer additional support to your long-term clients. For example, if you are providing treatment for a specific health issue or your customer has discussed their needs and problems with you, they can appreciate a text with more information on managing the issue at home or recommended further therapies and treatments to address it.
Similarly, if your day spa also sells products to your clients, this can be a great way to give them additional information on using those products, and providing fast support if they have any issues or questions.
2. Answering Queries
Besides supporting your existing clients, texting can also improve your communication with potential customers. New clients often have a lot of questions about your treatment options before they decide to book an appointment. While it is great to be able to talk to new customers about their needs, this can take up a lot of your time, and can lead to a poor experience if they are unable to reach you.
Enabling leads to contact you via text makes it easy for them to send you their questions and get a response as soon as you are able to reply. This is often a faster and more reliable way to ask questions than for leads to spend their free time trying to call you.
Furthermore, you can also use automated responses to answer frequently asked questions. Instead of texting the same information to dozens of potential customers, simply set up automated replies to specific keywords or create personalized templates to send. Alternatively, creating a chatbot enables your business to provide more in-depth answers and customer support even outside of work hours.
3. Discounts and Referrals
Customers love to share great experiences with their friends and family. The average consumer is 4 times more likely to check out a business based on a personal recommendation, and you can further increase that chance by offering SMS referrals.
Your regular customer’s friends have already been hearing about how great your spa is. Texting them with a discount code can help provide the extra motivation to get in touch and book an appointment. For example, Herndon Nails & Spa give customers $10 off their next appointment for texting referrals to their friends, giving both existing customers and their friends more reasons to visit.
In exchange for sharing the good word about your business, you can also offer your existing customers referral discounts when their friends get in touch. By doing this, your SMS discount system adds value for existing clients as well as new leads, making it an effective addition to your loyalty program.
4. Appointments
Missed bookings are a leading cause of wasted time and lost potential earnings for any appointment-based business, and day spas are no exception. In the UK alone, small and medium businesses lose more than 40 million minutes a year to missed appointments. SMS is a useful tool for tackling this issue.
A scheduled text is the best way to remind clients about an upcoming appointment. Besides ensuring clients remember to show up, this can also help to avoid last-minute cancellations or changes. Sending SMS reminders with the booking time and cost can eliminate almost a quarter of all your unattended appointments. You don’t have time to call every client and they might not pick up, and reminder emails can go unnoticed for days.
Not only is texting an effective way of cutting down your no-show bookings, it can also be automated to save time and optimize your schedule. Integrating an SMS marketing app with your scheduling system can let you send automated reminders in advance of scheduled bookings, as well as enable cancellations and changes via SMS to automatically update your schedule with the latest information.
You can even use automated texting to fill those last-minute vacancies, by texting your SMS subscribers with a short-notice discount for the timeslot. The average mobile user checks their texts 190 times a day, making this an ideal way to fill those last-minute cancelled bookings.
For example, The Sun Centre uses text to let their most loyal customers know when their new sunbed is available, maximizing their use of the equipment they invested in.
5. Collecting Feedback
The best time to ask for feedback is right after a client’s booking, while the experience is still fresh in their memory. Texting is a great way to ask for this rapid feedback, as clients will see your text immediately and it can be scheduled to arrive right after an appointment. Scheduling feedback texts is vital as timing has a big impact on response rates. You can increase your response rate by 10% just by scheduling the text for a week day, while scheduling a morning text increases chances of a response by a further 5%.
Because of this, SMS is a very useful way to gather a lot of simple feedback quickly, such as asking for a satisfaction rating out of 10. It can also be used to encourage more clients to leave an online review or testimonial. Besides giving you more opportunities to improve your service, online reviews are one of the most important factors potential customers consider. 90% of consumers will read online reviews before visiting your business.
Conclusion
As a tool enabling better client communication, SMS marketing has a vital role to play in the future of spa and salon industries. Texting adds value and convenience for customers and improved efficiency for day spas.
As a result, it has many potential uses to bring in new clients. From offering additional support to your existing customers to creating appealing discounts and referrals or collecting more feedback, texting enables you to attract more clients by improving your customer experience.