SMME EP406 Gearing Up for Gift Card Sales in December

Daniela Woerner20min

Speaker 1

00:00

Welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy, a podcast for spa owners who want to step up their leadership and business skills and step into the role as spa CEO. I'm your host. Daniela Woerner, CEO of Addo Aesthetics and Founder of the Growth Factor Framework Program, where we teach, coach and guide spa owners in scaling their spas to the next level of growth and unlocking freedom in their life and their business. I'm so glad you're here now. Let's dive into the show. Hello, my dears. Daniela here and welcome to the Spa Marketing Made Easy podcast. We are going to get into it today with gift cards. And this is the time of the year when gift cards do incredibly well in Spa, and they can be that cash infusion that your business truly needs to start the year off with ease. That's my word of the year, by the way. So if you are one of those people that picks a word each year, mine for 2025 is all about ease, ease and profit, and I just decided I'm adopting them. Now it's November, it's still 2024 doesn't matter. I'm adopting ease and profit. Now I'm happy to share those words with you too, if they feel aligned for you. I mean, I don't know about you, but when I think about 2024, ease is not the first word that comes to mind, but it for me, it is something that I'm actively working towards in my life, taking baby steps to get there little by little. So for me, running my business with ease means honoring the boundaries I have for myself. And so often we know what those boundaries are. We know what we need to allow us to operate at our highest level, but we are the first ones to break those boundaries. Why do we do that? Why do we do that? So whatever role you're playing right now in the esthetic space, whether that is CEO, provider, manager, my guess is that you're overdoing it. You're burning the handle at both ends. You're tired, but you have drive, you have passion, you have ambition, you have big goals that you have set for yourself and your career. And so you think, if I just work a little bit harder, if I just squeeze in one more patient, if I just respond to one more DM, I'll finally be able to, you know, insert whatever thing. But here's the secret, my friends, you are never going to be able to finally do whatever that thing is that you are working towards until you honor your boundaries for yourself. That bar is gonna just keep being just barely out of reach, but when you finally care for and honor yourself and your needs, it is incredible. What is possible if you're doing this much now, when you're tired and you're overwhelmed, imagine what is possible for a rested, grounded, secure version of you. Everything. Everything is possible for you. So how do you get there when you don't see a way forward, a way out of this chaotic season of life that sorry, but you have created for yourself, and I'm right there in that boot with you friends, one step at a time, one aligned action at a time and at a very tangible place. A, I guess it's more of like a, how do we see this tactically and what we're doing? It's in our marketing. Okay? So when we are reacting, we're throwing marketing strategies and promos together last minute, right? It's Oh, Black Friday is coming up. I'm gonna it's three days before, and I'm gonna just whip something up because I saw somebody else doing something cool. Okay, when you're operating with ease as the best version of yourself, you have the self awareness and the self control to honor the plans that you made for yourself and your business, because you spend a lot of time and energy creating those plans from an intentional space. But right now, maybe you find yourself somewhere in between. You're not yet in the place where you're putting together your annual marketing plan, a plan that you actually honor, but you also are not in that space where you're just wanting to whip something up the week before. Well, it's November, right? It's the beginning of November, Black Friday. All that stuff will be here in a blank so what I want you to do right now is get your gift card strategy for December. Mapped out, finalize it right now, do that from an intentional space so that you can start taking one little baby step towards ease in December. December is the busiest month for gift card sales in Spa. All right, so let's take that step towards ease together. All right, so when it comes to gift cards, there's a few things that we need to align on first, okay? So there are federal and state laws around what you can and cannot do with gift cards. A lot of this has to it's around expiration dates, so I want to make sure that you understand the laws of your state, and also the federal laws. Before you go, you know, create some kind of gift card promo where you're like, making it expire after one year, something like that. Most states, I believe it's a federal law. You have to look this up, right? I'm not an attorney, but most states won't like gift cards expire for a minimum of five years, okay? And certain states, they can never expire. So look up federal gift card laws and then look up gift card laws in your particular state. Okay. Second thing, consider having a liability account for your gift card revenue. So this is really it depends on how you manage cash flow. This may or may not be a beneficial thing for you, but I have worked with plenty of estheticians, plenty of nurses, plenty of practice owners who are not fans of gift cards because they're doing their daily reports. And when those gift cards actually come in and be redeemed, there's no cash coming in, and they're like, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm working and I'm making no money. Well, my friend, you did actually collect the cash. You just didn't have to do the deliverable. So the way that many accounts will actually manage this is by having a separate bank account that all of the gift card money sits in. So if this is a kind of cash flow strategy that you are going to be doing, I would highly recommend a high interest savings account. So right now, there's a lot of savings accounts where you can earn between 4.5 to 5% on cash sitting in a bank. So let's say that you have $100,000 in gift card liabilities you have that reserved in an account that you're earning 5% on, you're going to earn $5,000 a year from that liability account. Okay, so what we're going to do with these accounts is we're actually going to transfer the cash from the liability account over into your operating account once the service has been performed. Does that make sense? So let's say you have that 100,000 in there of gift card liabilities, and someone comes in and receives a facial that's $150 facial you're going to transfer that $150 over into your operating account. Now I would not recommend transferring, you know, service by service. I would calculate this up and do it on either a weekly or a monthly basis, transferring that cash into your operating account, but you move that over so that as the deliverable is performed and the cash is going into the account, okay, all right. And bonus tip, make sure that you are doing your absolute best to have an idea of who the gift card is intended for that way. That gift card doesn't just sit out there. If it's sitting out there and not being redeemed and it's been a year or it's been two years, you don't want it to be two years, but if it's been a long time, you want to reach out to them, you want to invite them in. You want to let them know. Hey, can I get your service booked for you? You've got a gift card that we've got on file, and trust me, you as the practice owner or the provider, you want to get those cards redeemed, because that's an opportunity for you to upsell, to cross sell, to sell retail, and, most importantly, to build a deep relationship with your patient or client. Okay, so all super important things, but let's take a minute now and dive into the different types of promos that you can offer with gift cards. So the two most common that we're going to see are either discount or value add. So if we are discounting a gift card, then we are going to say, buy $100 gift card, and then you're going to pay $80 for that gift card, but it's actually going to be valued at 100

Speaker 1

09:53

value add is buy $100 gift card, and the value on that gift card is 120 Money, okay, so test them, see which one works better for your patients or clients. All right, but discounting tends to be what I see the most successful people get really excited with the $100 gift card for $80 so but again, test it out. See what works for you in your practice. Now I want to talk about spa bucks or spa vouchers. If you're someone that you're trying the buy 100 give 100 which is buy $100 gift card. We are going to give you five $20 vouchers. It's because of that gift card language that we were referring to in the beginning. It's really important to make sure that you're using that you are calling this additional $100 that you're getting as vouchers or as spa bucks, so you don't have to abide by the same gift card rules, all right, so that $100 gift card that the individual purchases is a gift card and does have to follow The gift card rules, but those five vouchers and these are different $20 vouchers. You want to make sure that on the back of that voucher, it says good towards services only, no cash value limit, one per transaction. It can have an expiration date, cannot combine with other promotions, so you want to make sure that you have all of those pieces on there. Okay, all right, let's see. I want to touch on corporate gifting, and this is something that, again, works really well for some practices and totally flops for others. It's, you're gonna get a lot of no's with corporate gifting, but if you get a yes, it can be a windfall. It can be absolutely incredible. So what corporate gifting is, is you going to a large corporation and negotiating a deal where they purchase gift cards to your spa for their employees as a holiday gift. Now, the way that this typically works is based on volume. You're providing some level of discount. So let's say that if they buy one to 10 gift cards, maybe you give them a 10% discount. Maybe if they buy one two, you know you're going to kind of tier it. And depending on the number of gift cards or the dollar amount spent, you can decide, you know, what you want that to look like. You're going to get it down, I would say max to 25% okay, now for insurance companies, for, you know, depending on on the types of companies that you're going to that has budget to purchase, you want to put together some sort of one pager for them that outlines, you know, what the offering is. You want to make sure that you're building the relationship with the right person. You definitely want to have these packaged guys so, you know, those little jewelry boxes that are kind of the gift card boxes. They're thin, flat, maybe three by three. They have a little bow around them. You want to have something that allows the giver to actually have something tangible that they can give to the recipient. All right, so that's a really important piece, whether you're doing the vouchers, if you're doing the buy 100 give 100 and you want to make sure that, hey, you're going to buy one gift card. But each of these five vouchers, we're going to package them up like a gift and present it. You know, here is a gift that you can give to others. Okay, all right, let's talk about marketing. How are we going to market these things? Well, the main three are going to be social media, email and word of mouth. Okay, so your social media, you want to make sure that you are talking about gift cards multiple times in the week, and it's really great if you can have a way that they can purchase online. There's a little piece of software called many chat that I'm a big fan of. And you could create a real about gift cards and just say comment GC below, and I'll send you the link to purchase a gift card, comment GC below, and I'll send you whatever it could be, a discount code to get, you know, 20% off your $100 gift card. So when you do that on your social media, and you set up that little mini funnel that's going to automatically message people that are kind of, quote, unquote, raising their hands, asking for information, we're not spamming people. We're only messaging the people that say, Yeah, Hey, that sounds cool to me, and you can send them the link to directly purchase your gift card online. Really cool option too, I don't know, you know, depending on the software that you're using, you can say, I want to print this out, or I want to pick it up in store. Okay, so couple of options there, but imagine how you could really kind of expand your reach, if you do a really great gift card, real, give a lot of information, maybe put $100 boost that post for $100 for people who like your page and their friends you know, and keep it in a 10 mile radius, or something along those lines, and then you have that automated so that if someone comments, GC, they're automatically going to get the link. That is automation. That is the power of getting your information out all day, every day, right? Emails, don't just send one email, my friends, especially this time of year, spas, businesses in general, are probably sending 2345, times the amount of emails that they typically do. I mean, I know every year we talk about, oh, wow, when is it's, you know, holiday is just combing earlier and earlier. I think the pumpkin spice latte came out in August this year. And that's kind of like the marker of, like, okay, when does it fall? It was, like, the end of August. The Pumpkin Spice Latte was, uh, brought out at Starbucks. I know right now I'm filming this in October. There's already Christmas stuff up at Walgreens. I was there the other day. There's Christmas stuff up. So it's, you know, it gets earlier and earlier, which shows, obviously, you know, I kind of started this episode with it ease. Is not how we would describe this year. This has been a challenging year for a lot of people, and holiday q4 this is when a lot of businesses make their money, and so businesses are competing harder. They're working harder to capture the attention and earn the business of their clients. Okay, people are much more aware of how they're spending their money, and that means that if we just send out one email, it could so easily get lost in the mix. We want to make sure that we're sending out emails. We want to make sure that we're talking to our clients about these things. We want to make sure that we're calling, that we're texting, that we're we have signage up in our practices, all of these things, super important pieces of making sure that we are really doing our best to communicate these great offers with our clients. Okay, so if you're wanting some more inspiration, we did a podcast episode last year with Ashlyn. She's one of our growth factor students. She did over $71,000 of gift card sales in the month of December last year. And I remember her posting, it was like one week, she did over 40,000 in just one week. And I was like, Oh my gosh, this is absolutely incredible. I've got to share her story. Got to share what she's doing. So that is podcast episode number 363 so if you go to add esthetics.com/podcast/ep, 363

Speaker 1

19:20

you can find that episode there or just search on Apple podcast or Spotify. It is the gift card. Episode with Ashlyn again. Episode 363, check that out. All right, my friends, stay focused. Stay positive. Keep under promising and over delivering for your patients and clients. Honor your boundaries and allow yourself to operate at your highest potential, give yourself that gift you are incredible. Everything is possible for you. I can't wait to see what you do in December, and I will catch you guys on the next episode. As always, if you. Keep the conversation going. I want you to head on over to the Spa Marketing Made Easy Facebook Group, the number one free resource out there for estheticians focused on business building. We've got weekly marketing tips, a monthly goal setting and planning session, monthly aesthetician business book club, plus a community of 1000s of aestheticians committed to business building in the spa industry. I'll see you there.

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