Online booking can increase your spa or salon revenue while you do nothing. Here’s how.
How can you increase your spa revenue without lifting a finger and doing next to nothing? By implementing online booking, if you don’t already have it. And, if you do have it, make sure your spa is fully optimizing this functionality.
Here we will go through a few of the ways in which implementing online booking functionality will increase your revenue. (For more on how to optimize if you already have it, download our whitepaper, The Self-serving spa, an online booking whitepaper.)
Three ways online booking will increase your revenue without you having to do anything:
You will make money in your sleep
…or just enjoy your life outside of work. Internal research on our own data at Book4Time showed us that 9.6% of customers are booking appointments outside of business hours and that 6.1% of revenue is booked when the spa is closed. For the average spa with a potential to do $1.5M in annual revenue, this represents $91,500 in lost business when the spa is closed.
Time is a precious commodity to your customers. When Amazon analyzed its sales ratio to its web performance, they found that with every page-load delay of 100 milliseconds there was a one per cent reduction in conversions – that’s fractions of seconds. Similarly, Walmart saw a two per cent increase in conversion rates for every one-second improvement in page-load times on their e-commerce site. You can’t expect people to wait until morning for you to be open. They won’t.
You can stop paying staff to do something that should take care of itself
Your phone booking system costs you – a lot. Book4Time’s research team has found that, on average it takes approximately 10 minutes for the front desk to book an appointment. If you have to manually book 5000 appointments a year, evenly across 365 days that means your offline booking process requires approximately 2 1/2 hours a day – or 833.3 hours a year – in employee labour alone.
This time could be put to better use on other tasks, like guest services and upselling. Online booking facilitates business efficiencies, streamlines data entry and payments, and reduces excessive time spent fixing errors or dealing with lengthy phone calls. It also allows larger organizations to plan staffing schedules more accurately and to consolidate bookings in a central location.
People will use those discount codes
Discount codes and coupons go unused much of the time. People often intend to use them, but they don’t get around to it, and they are even less likely to do so if they have to take the added step of calling in to redeem a code or coupon. When a customer has a coupon or discount code, the first place they will go to look at what is on offer is online. Offering the option to book an appointment for the service right then and there is simply good customer service, but it’s also the best way to capture that business.
Similarly, if a customer finds their way to a spa’s website through social media, offering the option to book online is the logical thing to do.
Those are just three of the ways implementing online booking can increase your revenue. For more on how your current booking process is costing you, download our whitepaper, The Self-serving spa, an online booking whitepaper.
Book4Time offers a secure cloud-based spa software solution to help spa and salon management handle online spa booking, spa reporting, and much more all in one place. Learn what all the hype is about. www.Book4Time.com
