Marketing advice for Spas, Salons and Massage Therapists

Soothing, Smoothing and Grooming Dad!

May 24, 2013

Next up, Father’s Day. Are you ready?

More and more men are heading to the spa for massage and other treatments. This is a very good thing for us, yes?

Designing a few Father’s Day service packages will make gift buying for the loved ones a breeze. As always, we recommend creating a series of packages with various price points and service combinations. Adding a nice takeaway lotion or potion will help reinforce the experience for those lucky men, and encourage them to enjoy your services even without a gift certificate as the motivation.

Gift buyers, they love to have solutions presented to them so they don’t have to think too much. You are in the perfect position to create delicious treatments to relax and rejuvenate the dads in the world. It’s time to work your magic!

We found an article about men and spas that we wanted to share. Enjoy!

Team SpaBoom

Joy of Spa News: Sparkling Summer Edition (Ready for you to tailor)

May 23, 2013

Joy of Spa News: Sparkling Summer Edition is now ready for you to customize. It is complete as is, but you are always welcome to make it yours by playing with the introduction, which follows:

Summer brings weddings, access to the great outdoors, and a great way to connect with family and friends. What does your summer look like? We hope no matter where you find yourself, you are able to embrace the bounty of fresh summer foods, sparkling conversations, and long, lazy afternoons spent daydreaming! Happy Summer everyone! Team Joy

Our Sparkling Summer edition of Joy of Spa News offers up wedding gifting ideas, delicious summer nutrition tips, summer skin pointers, and ideas on what to do during the warm months. This edition will launch over a three day period, June 9th-11th, unless you’ve opted to change the date it goes out. Be sure to make any changes prior to that date! (And be sure to send yourself a test email after making any edits, and remember that Events that encompass the date on which your email is sent will be included in the email as well.)

Note: The new articles that accompany this edition of the Joy of Spa News will appear magically before it goes out to your clients, even if you can’t see them in their entirety when you send yourself a test email. No worries, they’ll be in place! We promise! If the newsletter looks really weird, let us know and we’ll fix you right up.

We highly recommend creating Bridal and wedding promotions and service packages designed with everyone in the wedding party – and beyond – in mind, to accompany this edition of Joy of Spa News. Couples massages, great skin and hair treatments – they all fit, and can offer up a great solution during the upcoming season of weddings. Remember, the Joy of Spa News is branded with your spa’s logo and when your client clicks to read more, the website is branded with your logo, too! Not yet signed up to send a beautiful, branded newsletter to your clients on a regular basis? Now is your time to get on-board! Go to Setup, Basics to put Joy of Spa to work for your spa. (As always, give us a call if you need help turning on the Joy!)

Hitting Send Isn’t Enough

May 22, 2013

Thoughts to think as you employ email marketing in your marketing. Hint: Just sending them does NOT ensure you’re reaching your intended audience!

In Through the Outbox

May 20, 2013

Coming up with great promotions is the first trick. The second? Getting them out there where your clientele are spending their time. Watch for tips and tricks to broadcast your message far and wide!

Celebrating (and Creating!) Non-Hallmark Holidays

May 15, 2013

What to promote between those megastar gift-giving holidays every year? The list of options is long and limited only by your imagination. Join us for some pointers on how to create ‘holidays’ around the personality of your business, your clients, in your town!

Planning Pernicious Promotions

May 6, 2013

Ensuring your marketing year is nicely planned means less stress and more creative energy for your promotions. Join Dena and Janell as they lay out some simple rules to ease your planning along, and make this year your best strategized ever!

How Does Built-In Credit Card Processing Sound?

May 3, 2013

Credit card processing is now built-in with SpaBoom! File in “things that make life a whole lot easier!”

Beautiful reasons to love this new development:

Instant account creation

No monthly fees, actually no other fees of any kind. Just 2.9% + .30 per transaction.

The 2.9% plus your SpaBoom commission is deducted from the transaction right off the bat. The balance is deposited directly into your bank account.

Think you’re paying less today with your merchant account? Take a moment to add up card not present rates plus all the fees you actually pay, across all the different card types that you accept, and you’ll discover that this is a really great deal. Then think about all the time you will save!

How do you do this? Go into your SpaBoom account, choose Setup, then CC Processing and follow the easy steps! In fact, you can do it right now in 2 minutes. All you need is your bank account information handy.

Imagine arriving in the morning, with additional money in your bank account with absolutely no effort!

Questions? Give us call at 800.940.0458 or Email today! We’re here to help and are excited about providing a great, economical way to process your credit cards and simplify your life!

Your Blog: It’s Not War and Peace

April 30, 2013

Blogging for your salon or spa? Great! Watch this for tips to keep your blog real, relevant and something your visitors want more of!

SEO – Tips and Tricks (A Series That Never Ends!)

April 23, 2013

We believe periodic updates to the whole SEO effort are a good thing. Here are a few insights into recent events in the SEO world that you may find useful.

Get listed: Completing the registration process with getlisted.org is extremely important for your business. It provides a central location for you to view and confirm your information with search engines and listing services. Ensuring the accuracy and completeness of this information will improve your rankings on search engines as well as providing (potential) customers with detailed information on your business including hours, payment types accepted and even photos and videos of your business.

Confirming your information with search engines is important for local searches for several reasons. For one, when an authoritative owner has confirmed the information it gets a higher priority for being verified information. Secondly, confirmation of locations and keywords will improve your standing in local searches by providing Search Engines with an accurate location relative to the searcher’s estimated location, which is extremely important when doing a business search. Finally, Google and Bing will indicate whether you are currently open for business, which is important information for someone that may be looking to obtain products or services at the time of their search.

Keywords, the evolution continues: In 2012 Google released an update called “Penguin” designed to remove any benefits sites might gain by “link farming” and other techniques designed to game the search engine’s algorithm. The biggest side effect of this change for SpaBoom users is that it essentially deprecates the “Keyword” meta tag and its setting in SpaBoom. In order to get Google to see these keywords now, you should make sure that they are incorporated on your front page in natural language.

Providing keyword rich front page content is Google’s preferred way of learning about your site. The best ways to accomplish this will improve the information you provide potential customers and your Google Rankings, which was Google’s whole idea. We suggest adding information such as popular services, written directions to the business and areas served, even practitioners’ names if they have a reputation from other activities. You might also consider covering conditions or diagnoses that your services work for, or circumstances in which your services might be a preferable alternative or a complementary treatment.

As always, please feel free to give us a call at 800.940.0458 or Email with any questions. We’re happy to help!

Ready for the influx of clients around Mother’s Day?

April 18, 2013

Are you looking forward to a busy time around the annual celebration of Moms? Have you prepared special treatments, maybe added nicely wrapped gifts of lotions and potions to your retail offerings, and spiffed up the joint?

Maybe a visit from someone outside your salon or spa is what you need.

Bringing in an outsider who experiences your services from start to finish, who views your location as a stranger would, vs a staff member or someone much closer to the day-to-day, can provide very valuable feedback and ensure you’re delivering the very best possible to your clientele.

Your business is built on the details – what a client experiences from the moment they see your sign on the door until they leave, ideally relaxed and happy and looking forward to their next visit. Secret Shoppers provide a great way to obtain critical feedback, and if you use a friend rather than a service for this, you can simply offer them a gift certificate for services and let them enjoy treatments while they gather info to help you offer up fabulous experiences for your clients.

It’s a simple concept that works, and one that can also strengthen your team. Getting everyone on-board the ‘learning more about ourselves means we can improve and deliver even better treatments’ bus will engage your staff in the process. Everyone likes to feel like they’re playing a key role, and there’s no better way than to be inspired to be their very best, every service.