The extra lip scrub or head massage may not seem like much, but add-on services play an essential role in increasing spa revenue, as well as improving the overall guest experience a client receives. While most spas offer enhancements, many are not maximizing the percentage of clients who purchase additional services. The missed opportunity for added revenue through add-on services can be attributed to multiple factors, including the types of enhancements offered, marketing tactics, and the language staff use to present the add-on treatments.

To explore add-on treatments and how they can boost revenue for your spa business, let’s start with discussing the trending enhancement treatments which target our current types of clients.

TOP FIVE TRENDING ENHANCEMENTS

Flash Beauty Treatments: With their busy lives, clients can be in a hurry and seek treatments for instant gratification. Offering quick, waterless, miniature facials allows the client to experience multiple skin care products they wouldn’t have encountered without receiving a full facial. They can also be performed virtually anywhere, including at a cosmetic station or in a retail space, and offer a fast way to provide incredible looking skin without a lot of time or significant financial commitments.

Deluxe Scalp Treatments: Perform a deluxe scalp treatment with warmed oil you also carry in the retail area of the spa. Take the scalp treatment to the next level with a steam capsule over the hair to infuse the ingredients further into the scalp and follicles. This service can be added to virtually any service, including massage, aesthetic, and salon services.

Age Management Hand Treatment or Hydrating Foot Treatment: This service can also be added onto virtually any service by simply:

• Applying a sugar scrub to the hands or feet
• Removing with a hot towel
• Applying a mask or wrap to the hands or feet and wrapping in warm mitts
• Removing with a hot towel and applying an antiaging body lotion or oil

Back Treatments: For massage therapists and aestheticians, this is an excellent opportunity to extend the benefits of a facial to the body, treating body breakouts, sun damage, and dryness. The treatment can be as simple as performing exfoliation or scrub, applying a purifying mask, and finishing with a body lotion application. A perfect time to feature this treatment would be during swimsuit season or throughout the holidays.

Eye and Lip Treatments: Considering most consumers are concerned with aging around the eyes and lips, it makes sense to keep this as a staple offering on the menu. Elevate these services with a microcurrent device, jade rollers, and cold globes, as well as advanced Hungarian massage techniques, to provide an instant lift. Incorporating these additional modalities into the treatment ensures the client feels they are receiving a service they could never perform themselves.

Many of the products utilized for these add-on treatments should also be carried in retail, as an additional goal of providing add-on treatments is to increase retail sales.

TOP 5 MARKETING TIPS

How you feature, promote, and market the enhancement services have a huge impact on sales success. Here are some savvy marketing tips to help your spa raise awareness of these add-on services.

Menu Incorporation

Rather than integrating enhancement services permanently on the menu, creating menu inserts offers flexibility in changing add-on services seasonally or as new add-on treatment opportunities evolve. It also stops the client before they have the chance to look at the full menu and puts the enhancement services first in their mind.

Smart Verbiage

Using the terms “treatment elevations” or “spa enhancements” when you categorize the add-on services in your menu sounds much better to the consumer instead of add-ons. The term add-on can sound like spending more money to clients, while the term “enhancement” or “elevation” can be perceived as increasing the results and service, presenting more value.

Create Points of Interruption

Points of interruption are intentional areas throughout the spa dedicated to catching the client’s eye with marketing pieces. These interrupt the “autopilot” many clients are in while perusing the spa space and could be anything from a feature table, menu insert, or poster to a 360-degree tester table or before and after pictures. Being intentional with these points of interruption is essential to driving your message home to the client. A client needs to see a marketing piece five times throughout the spa before they remember the service you are trying to sell.

Offer Limited or Seasonal Promotions

When offering a new enhancement service, doing so as a promotion for a limited time only creates a sense of urgency and can be used to encourage the client to book the service. For example, if your spa generally has fewer facials scheduled throughout March, you can leverage an enhancement as a gift for booking a facial during that time. Always remember to present the dollar value of what they are getting for free, so the client knows the value of the enhancement they are receiving.

Be Consistent and Educate More Than You Sell

Consistently feature add-on services you are trying to promote throughout your client contact channels. The type of content you create can make or break the promotion’s success, so taking a traditional, “sell, sell, sell” approach can be off-putting to clients, causing them to skip over your social media posts or ignore promotional e-mails you send. A good rule of thumb is to have 80% of your content focused on educating the consumer on a specific skin care topic and only 20% of the content dedicated to the actual promotion of the enhancement. The education creates the need for the service and the client sees the value in purchasing the add-on service offered.

In summary, the key to success in offering add-on treatments lives in five key areas:

1. Offering enhancements which are appealing to your current market
2. Consistency in promoting the add-ons across all channels that reach the client, such as social media, e-mail, and print collateral such as posters
3. Smart verbiage used by the staff and throughout the marketing and promotional materials you create to sell the enhancements
4. Offering enhancement services in all categories of your business (salon, massage, nail, and skin services)
5. Grabbing the attention of the client with five points of interruption throughout the spa, as well as enticing them with limited time and seasonal promotions

Focusing on these areas will go a long way towards helping to maximize the percentage of clients who purchase add-on services.

Brian Goodwin is an international educator for Eminence Organic Skin Care and began his education in cosmetology at the prestigious school, Paul Mitchell. Originally intending to do hair while he figured out a career path in music, Goodwin quickly discovered aesthetics was his passion. Since this realization, he has become a master medical aesthetician, master herbalist, and consultant working in the industry for 14 years, providing educational trainings around the world.