Promo Codes: Your Versatile Marketing Tool

Regardless of industry, every health and wellness business has three major needs at its core: attracting new customers, getting them to come back, and encouraging them to spend money. Introductory offers have long been a powerful tool for bringing in new clients—especially when those offers are promoted through the Mindbody app. But there’s another feature in the software that can help you increase retention and revenue generation, too.  

Promotions (or promo codes) can be a useful tool in your toolbox, providing your clientele with a timely incentive to spend money at your business. Promotions are extremely versatile, making them useful for attracting new clients, re-engaging inactive clients, and rewarding loyal clients.

Why Promo Codes?

There are many advantages to adding promo codes to your marketing strategy. Promotions work well with both new and existing clients, and they give you an objective way to analyze your marketing efforts, so you can see which campaigns and channels are yielding the best results. Promotions are also easy to create, use and report on.  Finally, while introductory offers are special pricing options used for a particular service or set of services, promotions offer a discount on whatever you see fit. You can choose to limit your promotion to a set of services or products, or leave it open for your customers to use on anything they’d like.

So how can you put promotions to work for you?

Promotional Emails

One of the easiest and most common ways to offer promo codes is through email. Simply create a promo code and include it in an email. Use the Mailing Lists report to generate a wide audience, or get fancy with your lists. Or, use the Last Visit report to pull a list of clients who haven’t visited your business in a while, and encourage them to come back with a promotion.  You might also use the Attendance Without Revenue report to see which clients have taken your Belly Burn Bootcamp over the last quarter, tag them and then run the Mailing Lists report to create a targeted audience to offer a Bootcamp-specific offer.

Social Media Promotions

Don’t miss an opportunity to reach your social customers; blast your new promotion across all your social networking channels. Better yet, create distinct codes (each offering the same discount) and use a different one for each channel (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)—when you run your reporting, you’ll be able to see which channel was the most effective.

System Auto Emails

MINDBODY offers an array of automated emails that you can also use to distribute promo codes. For example, you might modify the birthday auto email to say, “Happy Birthday <CLIENTFIRSTNAME>! To make sure you feel extra special today, use promo code HAPPYBDAY for 10% off your next facial.” You can use the First Visit Anniversary email similarly, offering a promo to say “thank you” for continued loyalty. Another clever email to pair with a promo code is the Series Notification - Visits Remaining Low email, which reminds clients that they’re almost out of visits (or sessions). Consider including a small offer here to entice customers to re-up.

Tracking Referrals and Money Spent

If you want to take your promo codes one step further, you can even use them to track staff performance. This is especially useful for salon, massage and personal training businesses, where practitioners are often responsible for helping attract and retain clients. To use promo codes in this way, give each staff member their own unique promo code (for example, their first and last name). They can then share the code and tell prospects and clients to mention their name at the counter to get a special discount. This promotion strategy often builds stronger relationships between staff and clients, and also gives you the ability to see who’s bringing in the most business. Make it fun for the staff—offer incentive prizes for the top performer!