How to Spend Less Money on Marketing and Increase Your Bottom Line
Sick of spending huge amounts of money on marketing and not seeing the results? The team from PatientPerfect explain what many clinics are missing
The aesthetics sector is booming but also increasingly competitive. Attracting and keeping clients is more challenging than ever.
PatientPerfect conducted a survey of aesthetic practitioners’ marketing spend in the UK and Ireland, and identified over 80% of marketing spend is focused on acquiring new customers.
If this is you, this is costing your practice. Your first priority should be converting as many existing clients who have walked through your door into engaged, loyal advocates. You are wasting money if you are acquiring new clients without focusing on the other four engines of demand growth: retention, cross-selling, recurring revenue and referrals.
Rethinking your marketing mix
Why should you be focusing on these pillars to improve the economics of your business?
- Retention: Acquiring a new customer is up to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Losing clients is expensive
- Referrals: Engaged clients who feel valued by your business are more likely to refer friends and family. Referred clients tend to be stickier and higher spending than ‘cold’ new clients
- Cross-sell and upsell: Engaged, loyal clients spend up to three times more than unengaged clients
- Recurring revenue: Loyal clients who feel valued are easier to convert to recurring revenue, such as membership and subscriptions.
How can my clinic capture this opportunity
What can a clinic owner or manager do to fuel these four growth engines? We outline a few ideas that are tried and tested.
1. Increase retention and spend with a mobile rewards programme
Consumers today are accustomed to rewards programmes in every aspect of their life. Behaviour science shows the promise of a reward drives more regular visits and increased spend. Many aesthetics practices know this and have a loyalty programme in place, but clients are often unaware of it or find it difficult to track.
This is where mobile rewards come in. Smartphones are almost always within reach, making them the best channel for delivering rewards and engaging with consumers. 60% of global e-commerce happens on a mobile phone more than on a desktop. For the average UK consumer, 80-90% of time spent online is on a mobile phone.
A mobile rewards app enables your clients to be kept up to date with push notifications on their loyalty status, on recent, personalised promotions or new services and enables a direct line of communication between clients and the clinic team. Mobile-only rewards can help you create a sense of exclusivity and urgency so clients take up offers and book in.
2. Gain WARM clients through digitised referrals
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful levers for acquiring loyal and high-spending clients in the aesthetics and wellness industry. Clients want to visit practitioners who are trusted.
Again, many clinics have referral programmes in place, but they are clunky and not fulfilling their potential. A tool that enables you to design incentives for your clients and the friends and family they invite that can be sent in one click is shown to significantly increase the volume of new, referred clients.
3. Offer easy-to-manage memberships, but sell them properly
Memberships are a hot topic in the sector right now. The clinics that get them right increase the average annual spend of their clients and lock in reliable monthly revenue. Imagine converting a client who comes in twice a year for an injectable procedure to one who comes in 6 times a year for regenerative treatments in addition.
Many clinics launch memberships but don’t see them successful. There are two reasons for this. First of all, they are not selling them proactively in clinic. Clinic staff need to talk about them and their benefits to clients. Secondly, there is not an easy-to-access portal for clients to see, manage, or even pause or cancel their memberships. This is something customers get in any other subscription service in life, but aesthetics clinics fail to deliver.
4. Engage them with mobile-first communications
Email marketing does not work anymore, you know that. Most clients don’t even open it, let alone read it. To get into your clients’ headspace, you need to be engaging them on their mobile phone, be it SMS, WhatsApp, push notification or other mobile messaging services.
What is PatientPerfect, and how can it help?
Having seen these huge gaps in the marketing toolkits of aesthetics clinics, we built PatientPerfect to offer these features and more in a custom-branded app for your clinic. It is a clinic growth powerhouse proven to improve retention and increase client spend and referrals whilst saving time and admin for clinic teams.
Your clients rightfully demand the best possible experience, and for a modern clinic, this means being mobile-first and rewarding their loyalty. PatientPerfect helps you achieve this with set-up in a matter of days, a very high level of customer service and immediate commercial impact.
Visit www.patient-perfect.com or contact us directly at hello@patient-perfect.com.