Warren B. Seiler III, MD
John Di Saia, MD
Beatriz H. Porras, MD
Shervin Naderi, MD, FACS
Edward Zimmerman MD
Paula Di Marco Young, BS RN
Seth A. Yellin, MD FACS
Dr. Kevin D. Light
Stephen Weber MD PhD
Brian K. Sidella
Sabine Zenker, MD
Daniel Kaufman MD
Brian Howard MD FACS
Mickey A. Couvertier
Lila Bratani MD
Alex Denes MD FACP
Monday
May102010
2 CommentsGroupon & Medical Spa Offers
Groupon is gaining traction in a number of cities and doing a fair amount of business if their testimonials are a real indication of what's going on.
I received an offer last week from one of the local medical spas in the area for 50% off of some general day spa treatments (facials and massage).
I can see that you might generate some real traffic by offering high demand services like laser hair removal, but they might end up loosing you money since Groupon also takes half of all sales generated by the offer.
Is ayone having real luck generating traffic with services like groupon? Has anyone tried it?
Reader Comments (2)
We did a coupon deal like Groupon and had somewhat mixed results. In my opinion there are a lot of bargain hunters who come in for a single discounted treatment and you'll never see again. That being said we saw a slight bump in that month's revenue and sold a few other treatments. I found it to be something of a wash and moved to what I see as better efforts that have longer residual benefits... SEO and internet marketing that we can control for example. We also started our own direct mail efforts and these worked better for us.
We've done a few Groupon or Groupon type promotion with their competitors and have had AMAZING results.
there are some clients that will use the Groupon's just for the bargain, but we found that if you treat the Groupon consumer with kid gloves and give them VIP treatment, that you can add a significant number of clients to your business.
You almost need a different business model to handle the massive influx of the one time business. I confess that we were caught short the first time we ran one, and our staffing and clinic infrastructure couldn't keep up with the demand.
The trick is staffing the phones during the Groupon, then upselling, following through, and asking for referral business.
We then run different promos directed to just the Groupon patients we retained because we know they are attracted to "deals".
As far as Groupon "taking" 50% of the business, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate.