It's the time of the year where your patients are confronted with family parties and get-togethers... and it's a reminder that they're another year older. You could be the Santa they're looking for.

Look, you're probably already doing the basics with things like gift certificates and perhaps an email offer, but you might want to take stalk about what you could do to really boost your sales here.

For day spas it's common to do 50% of their yearly sales in December as gift certificates, leading to some very lean months in spring when they have to redeem them all. This can cause serious cash flow problems as clients fill your treatment rooms with no sales. There are a couple of tricks I've seen to deal with this that can mitigate the effects. 

• Selling your gift certificates with some restrictions at a discount. You can stagger your gift certificates so that you push treatments or sessions into the summer or fall. On way is to sell your gift certificates by 'quarter' (spring, summer, fall, winter) with specific dates, then discount the ones farther out. By keeping track of purchases you can see what the discount should be to give you some control over when redemptions come in. Spring would certainly be full price but you might try scaling from 10% to 30% discounts for summer, fall and next winter. The fact that you're giving a 30% discount for a gift certificate that you sell for next winter is more than mad up for by getting payment up front, and the occational "breakage" that goes will all gift certificates.
• Bundling treatments and services. Purse strings generally loosen over the holidays and, if you're not greedy, you can take advantage of this by bundling services that effectively boost your revenues. Tying your normall laser hair removal bundles along with an introductory Botox or filler treatment at a discount can give your patients a sense that they're lessening the cost and risk by getting a deal. (Don't do this all the time lest you fall into the trap of becomong a discounter where that's always expected.)
• Memberships. One of the big moves that can give you regular recurring revenue (what eveyone wants) is to begin offering memberships. I'll go into that in a different post but you should be aware that memberships, while tricky to implement and get right, can dramatically change your clinic into a real business. Memberships allow you to tier your services, create some scarcity, engender a feeling of exclusivity with your high-revenue patients, and give you some vision into your future income. Yep. I'm definately going to have to deal more with memberships.

Create a relationship with your clients this holiday season and use that relationship to keep them coming back. Looking for new customers is more tedious and costly than maintaining regular customers. Gifts have always cemented relationships.  Use this time honored tradition to create some of your own!