How to Gain and Retain Clients with Spa Marketing Software

Offer more personalized experiences at scale through the power of automation

Whether you’re just opening up your first location or expanding your spa empire, chances are you’re an extremely busy person. If you’re not running ragged trying to manage your business and keep clients happy, you’re cutting videos and posting before and after photos to every social media account under the sun.  

Stop trying to do it all alone! Spa marketing software uses powerful automation and data analysis tools to help you optimize the client journey — from acquisition to retention — to its fullest potential.  If your spa already has marketing software, here are some features you should lean on to help grow your business. If you don’t have it, here’s why you should make acquiring a client experience solution that includes spa marketing capabilities your number one priority.

Automate your marketing, optimize your results

It’s a classic contradiction — clients want marketing to feel personally tailored to their interests. They want personalized emails that reference services they’ve received and text messages reminding them that they haven’t been to the spa in a while. However, offering that personal touch by hand is extremely time and labor-intensive, especially as your business scales up. Choosing spa marketing software that includes automation tools will help you bridge that gap as much as possible.

Client experience platforms like Boulevard combine marketing and account management capabilities to allow you to include personal details — like client names and upcoming appointments — in your text or email marketing campaigns. You can also create audience segments to hone your spa marketing strategies further. For example, you could filter your clients into a list of those who haven’t visited your spa in six months and target them with a special promotion to bring them back through your doors. These tools also capture a wealth of data, like email or text open rates, clickthrough rates, and conversion rates, to help you lean into spa advertising that works best for your business.

Personalize the client experience from end to end

Once you’ve brought clients in with personalized marketing, your spa marketing software can help you provide service that makes them feel like royalty. Rather than juggling information about the client’s skin or health conditions, favorite products, or preferred specialists in your head, you can use your software to keep track of this data across the entire client journey. 

Creating and cultivating client profiles ensures that your spa caters to all of your clients’ needs. These profiles will allow you to track the steps of their latest skin regimen or make new service or product recommendations, regardless of which location they visit or which specialist attends to them. Keeping those profiles up to date lets you tailor special offers or appointment reminders to their specific needs. 

Boost client loyalty with customized packages and memberships

Loyalty programs are a win-win: they keep clients engaged and happy with your spa’s services and incentivize clients to choose your spa over the competition, boosting their lifetime value over the long term. 

However, you don’t want to spend time manually tracking whether your clients are members or if they have offers to redeem, so lean on your spa marketing software to take care of the hard work for you. Built-in loyalty program tools stay on top of the rewards your locations offer and client point balances, keeping them consistent no matter where they’re redeemed. You can also track usage and redemption over time to find out which rewards and services get the best response from repeat clients, allowing you to optimize engagement rates and make it more enticing for your biggest fans.

You can also foster loyalty with custom offers for a variety of reasons. Birthday coming up? Send out a 10% off coupon so they can treat themselves on their special day. Client hasn’t been to the spa for a while? Create a package that combines their most requested services to entice them back into the office. Slow day? Generate limited-time offers through your marketing suite and push them to your dedicated clients to keep your schedule stacked.

Reduce the friction between clients and their first appointment with online booking

Your best chance for gaining new clients is to reduce the time and actions needed between seeing an ad for your spa and making an appointment as much as possible. While you should absolutely continue to take appointments over the phone or through walk-ins, that’s not how modern clients want to engage with self-care businesses. They want to be able to book appointments with the same ease that they chat with their friends or share stories on Instagram — and you need an online booking system that can support those needs.

Spa marketing software can connect those dots for you. It’ll help you create an online form that allows new and existing clients to select appointment times, services, and locations, pre-pay for any necessary fees, and lock in that appointment on their own terms. For example, Boulevard can link with your scheduling processes to automatically assign employees and fill gaps to keep operations running at peak efficiency. Boulevard can even boost the volume of online bookings by up to 28% because it’s fully customizable to your brand and optimized for mobile and desktop platforms. 

Online booking doesn’t just increase the likelihood of booking that first appointment — it makes it even easier to retain those clients over the long term. According to our Official 2023 Salon Industry Client Retention Report, nearly 80% of clients who booked their first appointment online will return for their second. That’s an almost 40% increase over retention rates from walk-in bookings.

Integrate spa marketing software with your current infrastructure to minimize lift

If you’ve already got a setup that works for you, you shouldn’t have to reconfigure your entire infrastructure just to add spa marketing software into the mix. Look for systems that integrate with the software you rely on the most to help squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of them. For example, Boulevard integrates with dozens of solutions, from accounting software to web-based storefronts to AI-powered business assistants, keeping business-critical data flowing throughout the client experience.

The most important thing to remember is that your spa marketing software is designed to automate away the menial aspects of managing operations and getting the word out there. That way, you’ll be able to spend more time providing that extra special touch once clients walk through your doors.