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Groupons?

Does anyone have experience with doing groupons? I was curious about the success rate of them. I know they may get people in the door but what I'm worried about is turning those clients into repeats. I feel like they may just be in it for a cheap massage and may not rebook at full price. I don't want to base my clientele on discounts. I know I should treat these clients exactly the same as regular paying clients and give them the best massage ever (like all my regualrs). I guess I'm just curious if doing a groupon is worth it.

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Permalink Reply by Lee Edelberg on April 7, 2012 at 2:19pm

Katie there are several threads already about Groupon.

I'm just at the tail end of a 1-yr Groupon feature and I'm going to post about it on the more recent thread sometime this weekend.

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Permalink Reply by Julie Onofrio on April 8, 2012 at 8:50pm

There are many successful stories of people using groupon or living social. You just have to create the right offer. Actually if you are just one person, they usually won't take you or they have a new program called last minute or something like that where they do just last minute offers for openings you might have. You can do the same really if you have an optimized website that gets found for your keywords and then use a twitter feed to update your page constantly and announce your last minute openings.

http://massagepracticebuilder.com/groupon-for-massage-therapist/

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Permalink Reply by Kim Galliher on April 9, 2012 at 6:17am

You will definitely get clients in that are solely there because they want a cheapy massage and then they move on to the next good deal but it is possible to make a lasting impression on clients just looking for a good therapist. I ran a special on Eversave-I think they do a little more to make people repeat clients by offering them a $5 rebooking coupon they can use towards their next Eversave purchase-and the first person to come in was a personal trainer who is now referring her clients to me. I made up some referral coupons for her just special to give to her clients. That alone made the deal worth it to me.

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Permalink Reply by SchedulingWizard on April 12, 2012 at 1:47am

Groupon is great for goods, as it's easy to sell many. Just order more and sell more.

With services it's a whole another question. It's very hard to give a quality experience and still make a living with those huge discounts. Also, let's say you do a Groupon massage for $30. You usually receive 50% of that price. So you make $15.

I've seen pretty low numbers of repeats, one MT mentioned 3% repeat clients after a Groupon. So yes, Groupon clients are price hunters. Price hunters usually do not look for relationships.

If you still want to do a Groupon and are aware of those shortcomings, then it might work for you. The most important thing is to favor your existing clients. Never turn down an existing client for Groupon clients! The way to do this is to set a day or two per week for Groupon clients. That way, you don't get burned out. Hope this helps!

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Permalink Reply by Jorge Arnaldo Pabón Acevedo on April 14, 2012 at 9:29pm

In my case, not to good. 277 couples stone massage's groupons, 200 visit us and no $$just money lost In laundry service.