Maximizing Revenue While Minimizing Office Work: Oak Haven Massage

Find a problem, and offer a solution. Any business owner will tell you that this is the key to building a successful company. When Allison Moreno opened the first Oak Haven Massage location in San Antonio, Texas in 2005, that’s exactly what she did. 

Prior to Oak Haven, you would need to visit a high-end spa or chiropractor’s office to get a quality massage. This was the gap that Oak Haven filled in: its sole focus is massage therapy and healing chronic pain, offered at affordable prices and without requiring customers to commit to a monthly membership. 

Without a doubt, Oak Haven is the first of its kind—a niche-specific business centered on making people feel better. These days, it’s operating out of five locations in Austin and San Antonio, making for 90 treatment rooms total. 

Their services were already unparalleled—this, they knew. The question then became this: how could Oak Haven support such rapid growth, keep its massage therapists happy and busy, and continue its marketing and outreach efforts? 

This is where Mindbody came in, with our Marketing Suite. 

Streamlining the Appointment Booking Process

Across the five locations, Oak Haven schedules an average of 16,000 massage sessions each month. Furthermore, these appointments are booked individually and on an as-needed basis. It likely goes without saying that managing 16,000 phone calls a month isn’t exactly feasible. 

The solution? A sleek, user-friendly enterprise booking system. 

"A key component of managing that many appointments is online booking — it’s critical,” Moreno says. The Oak Haven team knew that they needed a streamlined process for managing such a large volume of appointments each month, and Mindbody’s online booking software was the perfect solution for them.

Oak Haven books over 60% of their appointments online, so that allows staff to really focus on the clients that are coming in the door, versus being stuck on the phone for five to 10 minutes helping a client schedule an appointment. That is 60% fewer phone calls than they had before switching to Mindbody.

An Automated, Customized Method for Filling Empty Slots

Managing incoming calls is one thing. Filling empty spots in the calendar is another. By creating campaigns in Mindbody’s Marketing Suite, Oak Haven can immediately see when there’s a cancellation or a gap in appointments and get to work filling in those times and maximizing revenue. 

This is especially important considering that roughly 70% of Oak Haven’s bookings happen on the same day as the appointment. So, knowing how to quickly and effectively communicate with customers, via both email and text, is a must. 

“Having a way to fill up those last-minute appointments and kind of step on the gas, so to speak, does a couple of things for us,” Moreno says. “Number one, it keeps the massage therapists busy, because therapists who aren’t busy are not happy. It also allows us to maximize our revenue, because we’re able to have those missed appointments recaptured. It really gives us an opportunity to fill up every single day.” 

How exactly does this work, behind the scenes?

Marketing and Outreach Tailored to the Customer

Your run-of-the-mill email automation won’t cut it. Moreno knew she needed a more customized way to communicate with people. 

Here’s how they do it. 

Oak Haven leverages Mindbody’s behavioral targeting to connect with customers who haven’t been in for a massage in a while. This way, they’re reaching out to the people who are likeliest to need a massage, and therefore, they won’t need to offer unnecessary discounts to get them in the door.  

“I don’t want to be doing a bunch of discounted offers that probably would have been filled up with full-price customers,” Moreno says. “The software is really intuitive—it’s allowed us to maximize our time and get us closer to capacity by capitalizing on those unfilled slots. And it’s not just a drip campaign—that’s the genius part of it. It’s not blasting the same people—you’re able to target people who haven’t been here in a certain amount of time, encouraging reactivation.” 

It’s an effective way to give customers that little nudge they need to return to Oak Haven. 

This ultimately means that Oak Haven uses Mindbody to keep the calendar packed—all without having to pick up the phone to book an appointment. This is efficiency at its finest. 

In a nutshell, it boils down to this: communicating with the right people at the right time in the right way. And that’s made possible by Mindbody. 

The real beauty of this process is that as Oak Haven continues to scale, Mindbody will be able to effortlessly keep up with them. Filling up appointment times will continue to be a streamlined and semi-automated process, with five locations or 10, with 16,000 appointments or 30,000.