Email marketing can work great to fill your last minute appointments, if you do it right. You know that I like to use what I call Client Problem Solving Marketing methods. I try to solve client problems with my marketing, and try to create marketing that is valuable to my clients.
Well, here is a perfect example of marketing method that successfully blends both of those into it.
One day at my business I decided I wanted to figure out a way to get our last minute massage appointments filled.
I wanted a way to let clients know about those appointments. I figured email would be the way to do it. I wanted to send an email every day that told what last minute appointments were available. But here is a golden rule with email marketing - you must get your clients express permission to email to them. And not everyone will want to receive an email from their massage therapist every single day.
I quickly realized I needed to turn this email marketing into something valuable so that clients would like to receive that email.
So I asked myself the question, "What kind of person would benefit from this, and what problems could this service solve?"
I already had the answer. I had listened to my clients and I knew that many of them were unable to schedule in advance because their own schedule did not allow for it. They were the clients who always called last minute and had a hard time getting in.
What type of clients were these? They were often business professionals with erratic schedules. Many of them were real estate agents. There were several lawyers and doctors like this. There was also a group of people who just did not like scheduling ahead. Well, professionals use email regularly.
So I had a big realization. For a specific type of person, this "advertising" would actually be a service. It would be valuable to them. If they could get a little tiny email every day that let them know what was available, that would make it easier for them to get a last minute massage on their schedule.
I positioned this email marketing as a service designed for people who have a hard time scheduling ahead because of their own irregular schedules. I positioned this as a benefit exclusively available from our business.
I built an email list of people who wanted to receive this service and every night before closing I would send out an email of the open appointments available the next day. Most folks would read that email the next morning. And do you know what? People loved it. And it worked great. We received constant comments about how handy this service was, and how it helped these folks out. We even got new clients just because we had this service.
Take a close look at how amazing this email marketing really is. We managed to send hundreds of people a daily reminder to get a massage in the form of this email. That is like the holy grail of marketing, being able to remind them every single day while not annoying them. We turned marketing into a valuable service, solved a client problem, and actually built business from the marketing itself. And people loved it, and told other people about it. By taking the effort to create valuable marketing and by looking to see what problems could be solved with it, we made it very successful. It would not have worked nearly as well if we did not position it in this way.
We put a ton of thought into every detail and carefully crafted the entire email marketing effort. We gave the service a special name like "Last Minute Massage Club". We only talked about the benefits to the clients. We had a signup sheet on our desk and on our web site. We emailed every new client an introduction to the program and suggested that they only sign up if this was a service that would help them. We told them that we did not want to annoy them with a daily email unless they valued it.
After awhile I noticed another category of people who could really use this service. There are always people who want to get more massage, but they just never remember. So I also positioned this service to them, suggesting that it will help them remember to keep getting the massage they need and want. This worked great also.
Be careful though when using this email marketing method. Don't try and do this if you are not already pretty busy. This program is all about getting that last minute massage filled. If every day you email a huge list of openings, it will serve no purpose. Because people can call anytime they want and schedule anyways. It will even hurt you, because people will see no reason to schedule ahead, and your bookings will all happen last minute - a stressful situation. And you don't want people to get the idea that you are not successful. So only use this is you want to fill in a few blank spots.
Have fun with this one! And sign up for my New Tips Newsletter to hear when I post a couple more new email marketing ideas I have.
- Galen
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