Take your Thai Massage Marketing to a new level (Part 1)

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series on the business of Thai Massage. For more ideas on building the ultimate Thai Massage business please check out other articles I have written. You can find them here, here and here.   This post is born out of my recent visit to teach in Australia and a conversation I had with a practicing Thai Massage practitioner. She lives in Queensland and she is a yoga teacher and a Thai practitioner and is very good at supporting her clients. In fact she adopted many of the principles I have written about previously in terms of how she communicates with her clients during the practice. She adapted the 50-25-10 principle for her own needs, she is an excellent communicator and has set up a great system of follow up and touching base before, during and after her massage. She would get such amazing feedback from clients during the sessions and they would swear that they want to make this a regular part of their health routine. However they would not take her up on the offer to book in the moment and then they would not end up booking again for a very long time, if at all. As such it has been a slow crawl to build up her regulars and revenue to the level she’d like. She is feeling stuck and looking for ideas on what to do. I have a feeling that she is not alone out there. This is a place that many Thai Massage practitioners, body workers of all stripes and private yoga teachers find themselves in. That is especially true if you cannot provide insurance receipts to students, which is the case for many of us. And if you find yourself in the same camp I would really like to hear from you. The best way to get out of the circle is to share. Share your frustrations, share some of the things you’ve tried and be part of the conversation as we exchange positive ideas on how to evolve. I hope this thread persists for years to come. This is definitely one of those times that more heads are better than one. What are the things you are doing in your practice or would like to do? You can leave your comments below or better yet click here if you are a Still Light student or an aspiring one and would like to be part of our private community on Facebook. Personally I have many thoughts and lots of ideas- too much to share in just one article so I will be spreading it out over two or three posts. But let’s get started with some of my suggestions to help take your marketing to a whole new level: The first thing I asked her is if she had made an email list of her clients. Thankfully she has been doing that.* I also asked her if she sends them newsletters. She said she did, roughly every month or two. I suggested that she send her clients a short survey and in our brainstorm, to help encourage a greater number of responses it could also include a contest and anyone who completes the entire survey would be entered in a draw to win a free massage. To help entice a higher response level you may also decide to award multiple prizes. That way you increase your client`s odds of winning and they may be more likely to fill it out. The basic goal of the survey is to learn from your clients, to take the mystery out of the equation as much as possible and then craft solutions based on those answers. So fundamentally the main point of this survey would be to find out why her clients who as best as she knows really love their massages aren’t coming back more regularly. This can be a very short survey. Perhaps have a question or maybe two to find out how much and what they like best about their massage. Maybe a question to ask is if there was anything they didn’t like about the massage? Then getting to the main point I would ask in your ideal world how often would you like to come for a session? I would be specific about it and include options such as daily, every other day, weekly, every two weeks, 3 weeks, etc. Part of the point of that is for you to suggest ideas for how frequently they could be coming for a massage and that may already help influence future choices for coming more regularly. Finally the kicker is to ask what is preventing you from coming as often as you would like in your ideal world. You could suggest some options and then leave room for your clients to write other reasons. The 4 options I can think of that I would include are: A)     I keep meaning to, but then keep forgetting to book B)      I am just too busy –as much as I would like to keep coming C)      The price makes it prohibitive D)     I am just not interested anymore Don’t forget that since you are running a contest you will make it a requirement for clients to leave their name and email. As such when you get the answers to these questions you will also know exactly what each person answered. You can then craft specific strategies that address each of these different answers and clients. In the next postings I will share with you what I would do in each case, but in the meanwhile I want to hear from you. Post your answers below and on our Facebook page! If you also find yourself wanting to boost your business then I would strongly suggest running a survey right away. In a couple of weeks I`ll post my next article and we can tackle more strategies of what to do in order to bring more clients back. So together we will help remove this obstacle from our business and turn it all around! Now just so you know there is an amazing service out there called Survey Monkey. http://surveymonkey.com/ If you haven’t seen it before here are some of the reasons it is so amazing: 1)      It is free (awesome!- There is also a paid version, but totally unnecessary for our purposes) 2)      It is really easy to set up a survey. It is basically like building a Word document 3)      It creates reports that makes it easy to get the information you’re looking for 4)      You will know which of your clients responded to your survey and exactly what their answers were which can help you with your follow up communication to customize your responses 5)      Getting clients to fill out the survey is as simple as adding the survey link to the email you will send out to them *If you haven’t been up to date with getting your client’s email addresses, please note that it is never too  late to start! Those who study with me know that part of your requirements for documenting massages in to keep client notes that helps you to keep track of that. You can download the client notes from our private Facebook group