Day Spa Business Plan: How Jane Generated A Ton Of Referrals

Inner Circle member Jane Mason of Pure Day Spa in Caloundra was facing a double challenge: not only was her primary market tourists – her spa is in a hotel, with little or no walk-by traffic – but she’s in the heart of the area devastated by the Queensland floods this past January.

As Jane writes below, she had to take MASSIVE ACTION – and used some classic “Sales Thinking” to come up with a clever twist on the famous Queen of Referrals system in the Toolkit.

It worked brilliantly – and Jane has generously shared the marketing pieces she uses in this campaign with other Members.

“It is quite basic and the letter could most probably do with tweaking. I rolled this out to 4 of my top hotels, as at a recent meeting they all said they were struggling and to be honest so was I (and looking at closing the door).

MASSIVE  ACTION was needed. My salon has a 30/70 split in favour of the tourist due to us being inside a hotel and very little walk past. Although not directly flooded, a lot of my regular holiday clients are from Brisbane, Grantham, Toowoomba and the Lockyer valley.

The way it works is simple, I send the hotels 60 vouchers to the value of $25, which they can do with as they wish… Staff incentives, booking incentives, hotel Guests and residents.

When they run out they call and I take them some more. I keep track of the vouchers and at the end of the month the winning hotel gets a $100 voucher. Some of the hotels have gone to town with it, putting posters in lifts etc, others are a bit more discreet.

We gave out 240 vouchers in March and got back 67 (the girls also tried to upsell on the pedi’s so that in actual fact we didn’t give anything away).

The average spend per service $122.75. We have found that even if they don’t use the voucher the seed has been planted and they call us first without looking around town at what’s on offer.

We also had an offer that was value added that they couldn’t use the voucher on which the girls upsold (some were better than others at doing this). We have found that hotels that didn’t have them were phoning me to get in on the act so in April we have rolled this out to another 8.”