RUNNING a day spa is a bit like selling ice-cream. You need to sell a
dream and you have to learn how to deal with the peaks and troughs of
demand. From The Australian Entrepreneur September 30 2005.
For business partners Sue Homewood and Jacqueline Johnston, managing the ebbs and flows of their business in South Melbourne, Bodyfreedom Urban Retreat, was the recipe for success.
In less than two years, the business moved from one room at home to a standalone building with 11 treatment stations and a yoga room. Oh, and Dannii Minogue visited recently.
The business was the brainchild of Johnston, a qualified intensive care and trauma nurse who had studied holistic health in the US and massage in Australia.
With few overheads, it was simple to run part-time. A friend designed a brochure and after a one-off leaflet drop locally, Johnston began to build a list of clients.
She says: “I just did a letter drop locally and the number of people who picked up on it was fantastic. It really cascaded from there. It was word of mouth. I didn’t need it to be too big because I was still nursing and then I decided to study beauty as well.”
Soon she was booked out six weeks in advance. She says: “It was pretty full-on and it was as busy as I could have it.”
In late 2002, Homewood took redundancy from Dutch bank ING, rather than move to Sydney. Johnston persuaded her to join the business.
Homewood, a rising star in superannuation, brought her business administration skills to Johnston’s shoeboxes full of receipts. She sorted out the tax and roughed out a plan for expansion.
With no marketing funds, the duo turned to email and a simple brochure. It was the first step towards moving to a new dedicated building.
The mailing was nothing fancy, simply created with Microsoft Word and a crude Microsoft Access database. What it did was to give their clients news: they’d expanded and packaged a menu of treatments. The first offer was the dream “Bodyfreedom facial”, where clients would be pampered. They would sip champagne while their feet and body were exfoliated and massaged.
Homewood says: “As soon as the email went out we just got inundated. The phone just started ringing straight away. People starting coming to the door and buying gift vouchers.”
The next email was tailored to post-Christmas trauma – the detox scrub and wrap. People passed on the emails as they would word of mouth, according to Johnston.
By the time the duo moved into their new retreat in July last year, the client list had grown from 250 to 600 and they had a database of 300 email addresses.
“That’s what really got us into the email marketing,” Homewood explains. And now the emails are becoming more strategic.
“We now know very much the peaks and troughs for the year.” It varies with the season, weather, events, school holidays and even the day of the week or hour in the day.
One year later, with 2000 customers and 1200 email addresses, the mailing list has to be managed carefully.
Emails are tailored to life-cycles, seasons, events and the peaks and troughs of demand as well as demographic groups of clients. They are sent in batches of 200. This does two things, says Homewood. It ensures that the reception desk isn’t overwhelmed by telephone calls. And it allows her to test-market new packages and promotional offers.
The discipline is to ensure that no client receives more than one contact within a four to six week period.
Pregnant women are targeted for special massage treatments and yoga classes and new mothers for mother/baby massages and yoga classes.
About a third of clients are men.
And a Father’s Day email featuring the “manly cure” dragged men in, even if they weren’t dads.
Pre-Christmas featured a “grooming quickie” targeted at the time-poor, party-rich. For the time-rich there was the leisurely Summer Indulgence.
For Homewood, there will be no more letterbox drops. Every dollar spent on marketing has to be translated back into business to cover the building and staff overheads. She says: “We can’t afford the printing. It’s just too expensive.”