The Law of Demand: How to Sell High-Ticket Med Spa Services

Summary

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Med Spa Success Strategies: The Law of Demand — How to Sell High-Ticket Med Spa Services

Host: Ricky Shockley
Guest: Lauren
Date: November 17, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores how the "law of demand" impacts med spa marketing and the sale of high-ticket services like $3,000–$5,000 treatment packages. Ricky and Lauren discuss practical strategies for balancing low-ticket offers (like $25 facials) as entry points versus direct advertising for high-value services, emphasizing building trust and retention to maximize long-term profitability.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Understanding the Law of Demand in Med Spas

• Concept Recap (00:08):
  Ricky introduces how the law of demand—a higher price usually means less demand—applies to med spa service marketing.
  • “There are more people buying a pack of gum at the checkout counter today than are buying a new home… More clients buying that $99 facial than your $4,000 facial rejuvenation package.” —Ricky Shockley [00:44]
• Directly advertising high-ticket services results in fewer leads and higher acquisition costs.
• Lower ticket services generate more interest but may bring in more “deal-seekers” rather than loyal, high-spending clients.

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2. Marketing’s True Role: Creating Opportunities, Not Sales

• Marketing should be focused on generating opportunities to build relationships and trust, rather than expecting instant sales, especially for high-ticket packages (01:46).
• Trust is foundational:
  • “What’s required to sell those expensive treatment packages… It’s trust. And we can’t have trust without a relationship.” —Ricky [01:33]
• Marketing’s job: Provide at-bats for the med spa and then rely on in-office experiences, education, and provider-client relationships to turn visitors into high-value, loyal clients.

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3. The “Gateway Drug” Approach: Injectables and Low-Cost Facials

• Injectables are recommended as an effective “gateway drug” for new clients—supported by data, not just theory (02:13).
• Example:
  • Some practices use $25 introductory facial offers to flood the schedule, then rely on providers to upsell or cross-sell.
• Marketing creates the relationship, but in-office service quality and education drive trust and conversions.

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4. Striking a Balance with Low-Ticket Promotions

• When Low-Price Offers Work ([04:25]):

  • “Times that we have seen it work: one, when we stick to that price point… Two, when you have a stellar provider in office…” —Lauren [04:30]
  • Example: A Florida practice ran a $25, 60-minute facial promo over Christmas and converted ~40% of 200 new clients into recurring patients. Key: Ample time for education and trust-building.
  • Provider involvement (e.g., lead injector greeting each client) greatly increases conversion and retention.

• When Low-Price Offers Don’t Work ([06:00]):

  • Playing with the price (raising above $25) reduces bookings.
  • If providers aren’t engaged or aren’t skilled at cross-selling, upselling falters.
  • If your current patients aren’t buying high-ticket items, new bargain-seekers likely won’t either.
  • “If your provider isn’t already doing a good job pushing them to people who trust them, you’re not going to see it sell to brand new people.” —Lauren [06:40]

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5. Trade-Offs and Retention Math

• Retention is lower with lower-ticket offers:
  • $25 facial: ~20% cross-sell/retention rate is typical, while full-priced Botox client retention may be 80%+ ([07:52]).
• Providers may get frustrated serving mostly deal-seekers.
• The “dirt and gold” analogy:
  • “If I gotta go through a bunch of dirt to find the gold… This might have the maximum amount of gold at the end, but we might have to go through 10 times the dirt.” —Ricky [08:55]
  • Full price offers mean less “dirt” (low-quality leads), but lower volume of “gold” (loyal clients).

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6. Provider & Owner Alignment

• Owners are often the only ones discussing strategy, while providers end up dealing with “discount shoppers.”
• Communication is essential:
  • “It is on the owner… to explain how that makes sense long term and why we’re doing it… Make sure they understand the why too.” —Lauren [12:03]
• Consider provider feelings, compensation, and workload when running heavy promotions ([11:39], [13:23]).

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7. Business Stage, Strategy, and Red Flags

• Startup/new provider? Heavy promotions can fill schedules fast.
  • “I’ve already got somebody on salary that’s got no appointments. I’m going to use this strategy all day.” —Ricky [14:57]
• Established/practices at capacity: May want slower, higher-quality growth.
• Red Flags:
  • Retention from promo offers is too low (conversion to regular clients is poor).
  • Initial visit revenue doesn’t break even on advertising + cost of goods.
  • Frequent provider turnover disrupts retention:
    • “Provider changed five times in 12 months… The strategy kind of falls apart.” —Ricky [15:54]

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8. Formulas for a Healthy Offer

• Initial visit revenue must cover or break even on cost of acquisition and cost of goods ([16:42]):
  • “Let’s say your customer acquisition cost is $40. I want my initial visit revenue to probably be $75 at least on average. Right. Because that covers my product cost and my acquisition cost.” —Ricky [17:10]
  • Upsell/cross-sell is critical; if it isn’t occurring, it’s often a sales/service issue, not marketing ([16:15]).

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On realistic expectations for cross-selling:
  “It’s not fair to say, well, these people coming in from the $25 facial ad better buy my microneedling package every day. If your existing clients who already know, like and trust you aren’t buying your big microneedling package, we can’t assume that somebody brand new is going to.” —Lauren [04:53]

• On provider experience:
  “If providers are going to feel frustrated… you want to understand what is the capacity for frustration, what is the percentage and are we comfortable absorbing that?” —Ricky [10:49]

• On customizing by business stage:
  “If I’m pretty much like an established med spa with a pretty full schedule and I don’t have the headroom to grow massively, I might accept slow and steady growth with higher acquisition cost and it might be okay to do that.” —Ricky [15:10]

• Key takeaway:
  “Marketing should create opportunities to develop relationships with quality clients at an effective enough rate… That’s the game you’re playing with marketing for your med spa.” —Ricky [18:55]

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Key Timestamps

| Time | Segment / Topic | |----------|------------------------------------------------| | 00:08 | Introduction to the law of demand in med spa marketing | | 01:33 | Trust and relationships as prerequisites for high-ticket sales | | 02:11 | Why injectables and facials are the “gateway drug” for new clients | | 04:25 | When low-ticket offers work—and why | | 06:00 | When $25 facials don’t convert, and why | | 07:52 | Retention rate realities for low-ticket vs high-ticket journeys | | 08:55 | “Dirt and gold” analogy: maximizing opportunities, sifting through leads | | 11:39 | Provider alignment and transparent communication | | 14:54 | Choosing your strategy based on practice maturity / goals | | 16:42 | Financial formulas and the break-even rule for promo offers | | 18:55 | Closing takeaways and practical summary |

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Summary Takeaways

• The law of demand underpins why low-ticket offers generate more leads but require robust systems to convert and retain valuable clients.
• Effective marketing creates opportunities, not instant sales; providers must turn opportunities into high-value relationships with education, service, and trust.
• Low-ticket “gateway” offers remain effective—if the math works, providers are onboard, and post-offer conversion systems are strong.
• Success depends on matching strategy with your business stage, provider capacity, and retention processes—and being honest about the trade-offs involved.

If you want more clients willing to invest in high-ticket treatments, you’ll need to start with relationship-building at a lower transactional point and let trust—and your team—do the heavy lifting.

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Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

So this is a topic that we've talked about, but it's a little bit of a different angle that adds some nuance and some extra clarity as applied to your marketing, your marketing investment, and just what you do to attract clients to your med spa. And that concept is the law of demand. The law of demand is, is a description of the inverse relationship between price and quantity demanded. The higher price results in lower demand. When the price of a product goes up, consumers are less willing and able to buy it, so the quantity demanded decreases. The opposite is true for lower priced services. Lower priced services naturally will have higher demand. When the price of a product goes down, consumers are willing and able to buy more, so the quantity demanded increases. Right? Think about this. There are more people buying a pack of gum at the checkout counter today than are buying a new home, for example. This is just a basic law of economics. So when we hear consultants sometimes talk about, hey, the goal should be to sell high price, high ticket services in our Med spa to people who want to spend three, four or five thousand dollars. That might be true. But the question becomes, how do we reverse engineer that and how do we accept the trade off when it comes to the law of demand? Because this is a basic, basic economic principle. When we advertise lower ticket services, there's going to be a better response rate than when we try to advertise or sell even higher ticket services. So more clients buying that $99 facial that are going to buy your $4,000 facial rejuvenation package packages, more people drive Hondas than drive Rolls Royces. So if the goal at the end of this is we want to sell more of our high ticket services and we want good clients that are spending money with our med spa in large chunks. Right? Picture what you have in your mind as your best clients. That probably describes them. People that come in consistently, that spend a good amount of money, generally easy to work with. Well, what's required to sell those expensive treatment packages and to retain those clients? It's trust. And we can't have trust without a relationship. So marketing is here to create opportunities more than it is to generate sales. Lauren, any thoughts on that so far?

[A]

No, I think that sounds great. Continue.

[B]

So. So we talk about from an ad standpoint, you've heard us on the podcast probably tons of times, talk about why we really like injectables as the gateway drug to the med spa. It's not because we have some sort of like back alley deal with Allergan and Galderma to sell More injectables. We're just, we're just explaining what we see in the data. We're passing that along to our clients. We're trying not to be married to any concept or underlying philosophy other than where the data points us. And the reason that we keep leaning in that direction is because that's where the data keeps pointing us. When we have clients that are leveraging those strategies, like using injectables as the gateway drug to the med spa, it's where we see the best growth and the best results. This is a deeper explanation as to why. So most people are not going to buy the high ticket things directly from an ad. The high ticket services require trust. They require social proof, a little bit more of a compelling story on the transformation that they're going to see. Not just the treatment option. It's a bigger hurdle to overcome and without trust, we're not going to overcome it. Without a relationship, we're not going to generate trust. So using marketing as a way to generate opportunities is generally our go to strategy and, and then it's on you as a med spa to deliver exceptional experiences that build that trust in the relationships using education followers follow ups Good in office consults. I just talked to someone about a preliminary podcast episode where they still write handwritten cards to their new patients after they come in two weeks post appointment. How many of you are doing that? Right. If we want to develop trust that sells those higher ticket services, what a great way to do that. So marketing being the conduit to starting the relationship I think is an important framework and, and an expectation to have around your marketing. But there's a line there, so we can take that to an extreme. Right. If I say our entire goal is just to create opportunities, well then why not just do a 25 introductory facial? We've seen that, for example, work really well if the goal is just to create opportunities. But how do we make sure that there's a pulse on how these opportunities are not only turning into long term revenue and retention for our med spa, but also how it feels day to day for our providers to serve those clients. So let's talk about striking a balance here and the pros and cons to some of these different strategies. So Lauren's Talked about this $25 facial promo, I guess, Lauren, the clients that we've done this for, let's talk about when it's worked and when it hasn't and maybe why.

[A]

Yeah, I think the times that we have seen at work one are when we stick to that Price point of that $25 facial and two, when you have a stellar provider in office and who's taking care of those appointments. I think a big thing too that we talk about with a lot of our practices and providers is what are you currently seeing in office as a trend on your esthetician schedule and side of things? Right. So it's not really fair to say, well, these people coming in from the $25 facial ad better buy my micro needling package every day. If your existing clients who already know like and trust you, trust is the biggest thing, aren't buying your big micro needling package. We can't assume that somebody brand new is going to come in and do that. So there's some things on the back end that we need to have sorted out and ready to go first. And one of those is having great offers in place or great education opportunities in place once those people come into the chair. So that being said, my practice, who has done this, the absolute best, they ran it last Christmas, they had 200 brand new appointments and of those I believe like 40% of them cross sold or upsold and became recurring patients. They actually did a 60 minute facial, not even the 30 minute facial for $25. So that might seem crazy to a lot of people, like Dang, 60 Minutes for $25. But that provider had so much time to talk, to educate, to build trust and build relationships with the person in their chair. They even had their injector, their lead injector, come in and introduce herself too to each appointment. So it's the people who do it right and actually put the effort into doing it and wanting to grow that and is where you're going to see the most success. When you don't see success is one, when you start to play with that price point, that's a bigger conversation we can get into another time. But definitely, you know, when that starts to get higher, like Ricky said, that's when we start to see less people scheduling and it makes that gap a little bit more challenging to make ends meet in terms of customer acquisition cost versus your sale cost or your initial visit revenue. But so price point is the next thing is gotta keep that in the right spot. And then three is if your provider isn't doing a good job. And that goes back to point one, but it is such a big point and that's where we see it fall apart. So things that aren't selling in office, if your provider isn't already doing a good job pushing them to people who trust them, you're not going to see it sell to brand new people.

[B]

Yeah, let's even go one step further. Let's even say it's the practice that they do this adequately. Their numbers aren't that good.

[A]

So.

[B]

So one of the conversations we had with the client recently, Lauren is I think, I don't know, maybe 80%. It was very limited data set, but it was probably 80% of the people only bought the introductory facial. Right. It was only 20% of people ended up buying other services. This particular practice had a lot of other things going on in their business like hormone therapy, weight loss and they had some pretty big splashes from that batch of clients that came in for the cheap facial. So. But here are some other things to think about. There are trade offs to manage here. So. So some signs that you don't have a tolerance for this. First of all, like the math needs to work. We're trying to make these decisions first. The math has to work first and foremost. If the math doesn't work, it doesn't matter how anybody feels about anything. The math doesn't work. Like we don't have a business. The math has to work. But let's assume the math does work. Here are some signs though that this might not be the right strategy for you. If you don't have a tolerance for the clients from these types of offers that are going to inevitably cancel.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Reschedule, not return or rebook at higher than typical rates, that might not be a good strategy for you. You have to accept that like hey, this is a good, good way to maximize. This is going on one extreme of maximizing opportunities. If we want to say marketing's goal is to create opportunities to establish relationships that lead to trust, that's going to do that effectively. But it's a small catch rate. Right? The catch rate, I would say it also slide is on a sliding scale. You do with a $25 facial, that's probably going to be your lowest retention rate of any strategy that you leverage. Even if the math is really good and effective, let's say it's 20% retention, rebooking or cross sell rate for a typical med spa. And if you get someone that's coming in initially for full price Botox, you might retain that person at 80% plus. So understand this happens on a sliding scale and you get to calibrate. But this is where I think we get so frustrated is because sometimes people don't want to face the realities of the trade offs and the decisions. And the law of demand is one of those and, and then the other thing that plays into that is your client quality and retention is also on a sliding scale based on the offer price. But there's math that goes into all of this, as Lauren mentioned. But understand that that's a reality. This episode is brought to you by MedSpa Magic Marketing, my agency. We help med spas and aesthetics practices grow with more effective marketing strategies. And I know that's a vague phrase, right? It's a vague claim. So I have an offer for you. I offer this to any new prospects if you're interested in exploring any of them, another marketing option, a new agency, or just getting into Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads for the first time. I'd love to show you why we're different, what we're doing for clients. And we can do that via a one and a half hour planning session where I'll outline a specific marketing plan and I'll give you all of the blueprints that we would implement if we were to do business together. Now you can take that, use that on your own, hire someone else to help you execute it or work with us. We really don't hold anything back on that strategy call. And I think you'll have a lot of confidence in how you manage your marketing investment moving forward, understanding some of the nuances that can help you implement more effective marketing strategies for your business. So if you want to do that, you can go to medspa magicmarketing.com so if you don't want to what we call sift through the dirt to find the gold, right? If I got to go through a bunch of dirt to find the gold, this might be one of the best strategies to have the maximum amount of gold at the end. But we might have had to go through 10 times the amount of dirt to get that. So to illustrate a point, let's say we had to go through 100 pounds of dirt to find 10 pounds of gold. When we're sifting to try to find the good stuff, that's what this strategy typically looks like. The other strategy with like a full price Botox client, you might only get the gold from the get go. You don't have any dirt to deal with, but there might only be 3 pounds of gold from the start. So kind of understand how the numbers play. Watch some of the previous episodes. We've talked about the numbers, but also the second thing we've noticed sometimes is when with these types of strategies, even something like a 20 unit Botox offer providers feeling overworked or undervalued like they can feel they can get frustrated because their work week changes from only seeing like their existing patients or people that were word of mouth referrals to all of a sudden seeing patients where maybe 50% of them, we haven't, nothing we're going to do is going to help us retain that patient because they were just coming in for the deal. 50% might be a great catch rate, might be financially lucrative, but if we don't want to burden our providers and they're feeling that way, then we need to have a pulse on that. Right. I would say though, don't follow the anecdotal examples from your providers. This can be a dangerous thing. Here too is like a provider goes from only seeing clients that were word of mouth referrals, paying full price or existing clients to seeing people that were generated from an advertisement. It's fundamentally different relationship starting point to a relationship, at least on average. So that can be an adjustment. And if providers are going to feel frustrated, you want to understand what is the capacity for frustration, what is the percentage and are we comfortably comfortable absorbing that? Lauren, anything to add to that or does that sum that up?

[A]

Yeah, I think two, tying the two together is really important. So a lot of times for me, right, I manage a bunch of med spas and a bunch of accounts. I only get to talk to the owner or the person who controls the money and is talking through these kinds of things with us. I don't get to have a sit down conversation with each provider who is seeing these patients. So it is on the owner or on you if you're deciding to do these promotions to explain that to your provider and to explain how that makes sense long term and why we're doing it. It's not just, hey, we're doing this because I want to crank out people in here, but it's, this does make the most sense, math wise, money wise, to get us the most in the long term. While your schedule might look not so fun right now, in six months when you're returning and seeing all the patients who came in that were great and the gold that we're talking about, you're going to love your schedule down the line. So there is a fine balance though, because you want to keep your providers, you want them to be happy and you want them to feel excited. So, so think about how you're working through commission or sales or, you know, what they're getting from that initial appointment. But in the long run, make sure that they understand the why too and that they're not just hearing this third party and dealing with it anecdotally. I have a client specifically who I talked to the husband who runs the finances every day and the wife in the background is doing the injecting and dealing with some of the discount shoppers. And it's very hard when I don't get to talk to her directly. As soon as I get to get on a call with her directly and explain how the whole thing makes sense and how long term it's going to map out and make revenue make sense, that's when they understand it and it makes them feel better about what they're doing too. So I think it's just super important to explain what's going on.

[B]

Yeah. And then some of this too is like again, understand the trade offs and the options that you have and then you get to make a decision as to what's right for your business. We've had clients, they just decided, hey, this might make the most sense in the math to use this to maximize opportunities, but we just don't like the way it feels having to sift through the dirt to find the gold. You're, you're allowed to make that decision, but I just want you to have the, the information and the clarity and the transparency around the decisions that you're making so you can make the decision that's best for you. We typically find that when we optimize for these at bats, at the end of the day it gives us the best financial outlook because like I said, I'd rather sift through just the financial part, 100 pounds of dirt to get 10 pounds of gold than only have 3 pounds of gold from the get go. And that's what happens when you try to attract clients for high paying services or standard price points out of the G. So when you run an ad like we've talked about to get people in for a consultation, you're going to pay a lot more to acquire that client and you're going to have much fewer of those clients than the people that will come in for a 20 unit Botox promo or a low cost introductory facial. But it happens on a sliding scale. The frustration with patient quality on average is going to go up as the offer price goes down. So just understand that too. But again, it's on average, it's not that the absolute volume, that's what that's left over at the end of the day is bad, it's just that you have to see a little bit more junk. Sometimes the people that are just coming in because they wanted a really good deal on a facial, you have to accept that's part of the game that you're playing when you use these strategies. The other thing is it might be different depending on your stage in the business and where you are in your practice. The practice that Lauren mentioned in Florida that we talked about, they had a new esthetician that was coming on full time that had essentially no business. Right. Was that the case, Lauren?

[A]

Yeah. When we started, it wasn't even paid out.

[B]

So I've already got somebody on salary that's got no appointments. I'm going to use this strategy all day. When that's the case, if I'm pretty much like an established med spa with a pretty full schedule and I don't have the headroom to grow massively, I might accept slow and steady growth with higher acquisition cost and it might be okay to do that. So kind of understand what it is you're trying to accomplish, where you are in your business and what makes sense for you. But the last two things here are the red flags that if these offers are not working for you, like have a pulse on this. If the conversion rate into long term clients is too low, might not make sense. Like if you're actually doing this type of strategy and you're not retaining any of the clients, maybe it's not a marketing problem, maybe it's a sales problem, but you got to get that part fixed or a client or a patient service quality issue. Either way, you got to get that fixed. Because if you're not retaining any of the clients. We had a, we had a med spa that we looked after a year of running ads, an ad that's really effective for us 90% of the time, which is like a Botox introductory type offer. They only had a 10 retention rate at the end of a year, but it's because the provider changed five times in 12 months. That sounds like a fake story. I think that's the real number, right, Lauren? Five times in 12 months, genuinely like, like, yeah. The strategy kind of falls apart. So you, the goal of this is to create opportunities to develop relationships so that people trust you, stay with you, spend money with you. Long term, if that's not happening, you got to figure out where the kink is in the process. It might be offer related. I would say more likely than not, it's also going to be sales related or client service quality provider related to. So last thing is initial visit revenue. As a general rule, we want our initial visit revenue on average to cover the cost of acquisition plus the cost of goods. So with this 25 facial as an example, you're going to see a ton of patients. Let's say your customer acquisition cost is $40 from this type of campaign. It costs you $40 in ad spend to get a client. Well then I want my initial visit revenue to probably be $75 at least on average. Right. Because that covers my product cost and my acquisition cost. Now, that's not to say you're not going to get a bunch of people coming in just spending $25. You will. The question is, do we have enough people that are cross selling or upselling either on the initial visit or within a very short time window of the initial visit to offset that so that we're essentially creating opportunities at break even? I think that's a really good framework is how do I maximize opportunities at a break even point with clients that are going to be retained at a satisfactory rate? Right. If you were to use a strategy where you're getting people in for something where they're really not being retained at a satisfactory rate, then it doesn't make sense to do this like, but if we can do that, a satisfactory rate, icing on the cake from there, as long as we're able to break even on the first visit. So I think that the law of demand in a nutshell, understand as the price points go up, you're naturally going to have fewer people buying those services at cheaper price points. You're going to have more people interacting with. If we believe that we're trying to shape perception through experience, then the goal of marketing should be to maximize at bat with a pulse on our business need. And again, have the pulse on your business need. Because there's definitely a case here that if this doesn't make sense for your practice because your, your esthetician is already pretty full and they don't want to spend all day seeing a bunch of people knowing that only 30% of them are going to stick around? Even though financially it might be a good strategy, it might not make sense for your business. Hey there. Wanted to briefly interrupt the episode to make a quick ask. If you're a podcast listener, it would mean the world to us if you leave a review for the podcast, whether that's on itunes or Spotify. It's something I hadn't really remembered or thought of asking for, but it does help us show up more frequently so that we can reach more people with the information that we're providing. So it mean the world to us if you leave a review on itunes or Spotify, if you're listening on audio. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to hit the subscribe button so you're in the loop for future videos and you don't miss any of the content that we're putting out. Okay, so to wrap this episode, not to be redundant, but I just want people to understand that trade off is as you go up with price points, you're going to have fewer people responding to the ads. This is why we generally love to put money into the gateway drug services. They're going to help us establish relationships so we can develop a relationship, build trust that ends up turning into the higher ticket package sales. We're with you. As med spas, we want you to be able to sell more of those $3,000 packages to the clients that want to buy them. But it's hard to do that from ads. It's a lot easier to do when someone had had an experience with your med spa. They know like and trust you based on personal experience. So the end line here takeaway from today, marketing should create opportunities to develop relationships with quality clients at an effect at an effective enough rate. Again, there's a trade off there that you're making, but we want the rate of quality clients to be satisfactory and to do that as efficiently and effectively as possible. That's the game you're playing with marketing for your med spa. Hope that was valuable. We'll see you on the next one.

[A]

Sat.