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Med Spa Success Strategies
Top Strategies to Prevent No-Shows & Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs - Interview w/ Lauren McAtee
00:22:59
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- [00:00]
Ricky Shockley
Hey there. I'm your host, Ricky Shockley, and this is the Med Spa Success Strategies podcast where med spa and aesthetics practice owners come to discover strategies and tactics that help them better market and manage their practices so they can grow, improve profits and have more financial freedom. Excited to do another episode Today with Lauren McAtee. Lauren is our digital marketing specialist at MedSpa Magic Marketing. She manages and guides online advertising strategies for med SPAs in nearly 20 different states, overseeing about a million dollars in annual online advertising expenses expenditures. Today, Lauren and I are discussing the best strategies to maximize your lead to booking, conversion rate, how to handle deposits, credit card capture, no shows, and more. There's a lot of controversy, a lot of ways to do this, and we're going to show you the best practices that we've developed through much trial and error. So here they are, our best tips on how to maximize booking to conversion rates. Hey everyone. This episode that we did with Lauren from our team was very popular last time, so we wanted to do this again. Jump in, go really deep on some of the marketing advice and the tactical advice we give to our clients when they're spending money on ads. I think this is stuff that people are not sharing openly, they're not talking about. And there are a lot of questions surrounding some of these best practices. So I'm very excited to jump into some of these questions and today we're going to be talking about booking deposits, credit card capture, and best practices for converting leads into appointments that actually show up and pay for service. So with that said, Lauren, the first thing we were going to talk about today is question. A lot of people have is should I require a booking deposit? That's where somebody would be spending $100 to secure an appointment. What do we recommend there and why? Just in terms of general guidance and what do we see?
- [01:34]
Lauren McAtee
Yeah, so as a standard, we typically do not recommend requiring any form of a booking deposit or actually charging the card before somebody comes in and has an authentic interaction with you. Most of these leads have probably never heard of your business. They're learning a lot about you through social media, through advertisements, after browsing your pages, maybe your website too. They have that much of an experience about you, but they don't actually have an authentic interaction with somebody at the practice or have never been in actually and met somebody. So providing your credit card and knowing that it's going to be charged in advance prior to an appointment, a lot of people just have a lot of friction with that and it's really scary to a lot of people. From what we've seen, it kind of turns away a lot of people who have otherwise been interested in scheduling.
- [02:18]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah. And then I, I even know from last week, we were on some conversations with clients and we've actually saw in the conversation thread one person said what we assumed was happening based on our tests and they said, I've never been there before. I'm really not comfortable doing that. I'm going to show up for the appointment. I want to come in, but I don't really want to give you my credit card. And then Lauren, I think when you all tested that with one of your clients because you were hands on, managing the leads as a trial run, what we found is there were actually a lot of people confirmed and booked an appointment, but started ghosting us when we asked for credit card. But when we still confirmed the appointment, we had 75% of those people still show up, even the people that were hesitating and not responding when we asked for credit card. So our thought process behind that is that's just the data that we're seeing. We don't, we don't have, you know, an opinion that we're married to either way. We're just trying to share the advice based on best practices and the things that we're seeing working best. I think a couple things are playing into that and let me know what you think, Lauren. One is people are not used to giving their credit card before they visit a brick and mortar business. Right. I never, I wouldn't give my credit card to a restaurant before I go eat, unless it's a fancy restaurant where maybe you do have like dining reservations because there's very limited capacity. But for the most part we're just not used to going into brick and mortar retail style businesses and giving our credit card. The only thing we really do that for usually is like travel. Right. Airlines, hotels. If a plumber comes to my house and they ask me for a deposit over the phone, I'm probably going to be weirded out. Come here, let's do the work. We'll talk to you and then we'll pay you once you're here. In that case, they actually don't even take the money until after the service is performed. Right. They've already driven out to your house and committed a lot of time and energy. So we do see that when we're trying to convert as many of our leads into booked appointments as possible, we're introducing a point of friction by introducing a booking deposit. We'll explain the math and the trade off later. In this episode. But that's kind of the first thing that people generally ask is should I require a booking deposit? That'll make sure that people show up for the appointment. And we're going to get into the stats on show up rates here in a second and our recommendation, but long story short on your should I require a deposit? Our answer is no. Is that correct? Lauren, anything else you wanted to add to the booking deposit question?
- [04:19]
Lauren McAtee
No. And like Ricky said, we'll get into the stats here in a little bit too to kind of go deeper on these things. But just from one anecdotal experience, we did have a client who came to us that did require booking deposit prior to working with us and out of her 10 booked appointments, two of those even no showed after they paid a hundred dollar booking deposit. So even requiring it doesn't necessarily fix everything and doesn't ensure that everybody's going to show up for every appointment. Um, so that's always a concern to have in mind too, for sure.
- [04:47]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah. And that's one of the things that we'll get to is. Excuse me, we talked about, we generally still see a 10 to 15% no show rate even with a booking deposit. So we're going to get into what expects in terms of no show rates if you don't require a booking deposit and some of the numbers there in a second. But then the second thing that people will ask well, what if we don't do a booking deposit but we just get the credit card so we have the information to be able to charge a no show fee if someone no shows we. What do we recommend there, Lauren? Is it pretty much just an extension of the last conversation? Any nuance to add there?
- [05:15]
Lauren McAtee
Yeah, I would say it is a little bit of an extension of the last conversation because people aren't comfortable giving their card via, you know, the Internet or text or phone necessarily to pay something. But even taking the level of payment out and still saying like, hey, we're not going to charge your card unless, you know, show, there's still a point of friction there that people just don't feel comfortable with providing that information. So, so typically the way that we talk about it is on a sliding scale depending on where your practice is at in terms of bookings, revenue, opening spots, et cetera. So if you're a newer practice with tons of openings in your schedule, you're looking to fill as many slots as you can from advertisements and from word of mouth, business, et cetera. We recommend generally do not take a credit card at all. Because it's not worth missing out on those couple extra people that you can get in by not taking the credit card. So that's the first place to look is if you're going to have Monday at 2pm Open regardless, there's not really a point in taking the credit card to charge a no show fee in case they no show. However, for more of our established practices who have been around a lot longer, a lot of their appointment slots are full. They're only looking to fill maybe a couple extras here and there through advertisements. Those people we would recommend taking a credit card actually for the deposit, not for deposit, but you know, in case they no show or cancel because that slot would have otherwise been filled. So we are filling a gap in the revenue there by taking that. So it really does depend that first step of seeing where your business is at and what your goals are with the ads and getting people in and then making that decision on credit card. But our main suggestion for people between like 0 and 75% booking capacity is no, skip the credit card and get as many extra people in as you can.
- [06:54]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah, because that's the trade off you're managing here if you don't force credit card capture. Because anyone would admit it's at least a small point of friction. And the thought process is hey, if they weren't serious about about booking the appointment then we don't want them anyways. If they didn't give us a credit card that the person that was going to no show. But what we found is like Lauren mentioned, there are actually a good chunk of people that will sort of ghost you and get and hesitate when you ask for the card but otherwise still show up for the appointment. So not a black and white answer necessarily on this one. It's understanding the trade off. If it's actually going to cost you five or six hundred dollars by not having the appointment slot full with a patient that shows up, then absolutely having some sort of credit card capture is probably a good idea. Even if it forces your cost of customer acquisition to go up a little bit, it's still a good thing to do if you're taking the spot that would have been revenue generating. So really good little nuance there. And a lot of times we don't like black or white answers. It really is understanding trade offs of the different decisions and that's kind of what we're going to talk about here today. So if we're not requiring a booking deposit and if we're not requiring a credit card to charge a no show rate. Even if we are getting a credit card to charge a no show rate, we one of the things that we really recommend having dialed in is what we call your show up sequence trip. So I'll, I'll start this and Lauren, you can go into some of the details. One of the first places that I recommend looking is when you book an appointment. We do not want to ask people to make the decision all over again. So a lot of your practice management solutions like a Zenoti or a Vergara, by default they're sending a reminder to people a few days before their appointment, asking them to reconfirm the appointment, like right, press Y to confirm. And one of the challenges of doing that is you're making the person make the purchase decision all over again. Got a cool example that I like personally from, from a purchase decision that I made recently, I bought a like an Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. I'd been thinking about buying it for months and then I finally pulled the trigger. Bought it on prime day. It got shipped to my house, I already paid for it and it was sitting on my kitchen counter for two or three days and I was trying to decide whether I still wanted to keep that. So because Amazon's return policy is so lax, I made the purchase decision all over again a second time after I'd already spent money and had the thing shipped to my house. So when you force people to make the purchase decision all over again, you're going to have drop off. So on that one specific text, we really recommend just confirming the appointment. Just let them know you have them on the books for Thursday. Earlier in the sequence, make sure you give them an opportunity to opt out or reschedule. Otherwise confirm the appointment and move forward. But Lauren, can you go a little bit more into how we like to structure our show up sequence drips?
- [09:29]
Lauren McAtee
Yeah, absolutely. So our drips are very robust. A lot of times when our clients look at them, they'll say, is this going to be annoying? So we might have to tweak it a little bit per client, but the majority of them are very robust. We have reminders that start up to 15 days before appointment. People that book out in advance, one nine days before, five days before, two days before, a day before, and then the same day of. Again, that's going to sound very repetitive and a lot of touch points, but it's really just a simple text that says, hey, this is so and so from med school magic. You're confirmed for your appointment tomorrow. We can't wait to meet you. Here's our address. As simple as that. The next nuance with that, like Ricky said in terms of confirming is we don't want to welcome cancellation. So I've seen some clients who even have. If you would like to cancel, click this link or do you need to cancel, click this link or you can reschedule by texting us back here. We don't even want to welcome that option or give people the thought of doing that or getting out of their booking payment or their cancellation payment. We would rather it just be your appointments confirmed set in stone. We look forward to seeing you. The nice part about having that drip sequence built out is that you're at least going to get people to give you the courtesy of letting you know they're not going to come. We avoid no shows a lot by doing it that way. It doesn't necessarily remove all cancellations, but it does remove mostly no shows from just completely no showing without any form of letting you know. Um, one of the reasons being because the final drip that goes out is two hours before the appointment. So most people at least have the courtesy to be like, hey, sorry, I'm not going to make it. So that's why that drip is so robust and so important. We've seen a huge increase. When we started working with a newer client in California a couple of weeks ago, they first launched ads. They had no credit card capture and their show up sequence was only one to two messages, one email and one sms. Their notion rate was incredibly high. When we first started we were getting a little concerned, getting towards the point of taking credit card to where we implemented the robust drip outside of their practice management. We turned it off and made our own in high level since you can't make it very specific in a lot of the practice management systems. So we made our own one in high level. And from there our no show rate has decreased significantly from getting that drip in place because people at least let you know.
- [11:41]
Ricky Shockley
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? That'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 that brings up the conversation. If you're listening to this podcast, you're like, what are they even talking about? This is two steps deeper than I'm even thinking. This conversation is really based on anybody that's running ads. So you're running ads specifically on social media, Facebook and Instagram that are generating leads for your practice on Google too, or you have leads coming in via the website. We want some way to automate the follow up with those leads, to try to nurture those leads and to get them to confirm an appointment. If people are just coming off the street and they're calling, you're probably not having an issue like the people that are just calling the practice. In scheduling an appointment, you're able to knock down, knock out all of the stuff that you want to capture in terms of information. But these are people that have just from our marketing initiatives raised their hand, expressed interest, but not actually, you know, made it super clear that they want to book an appointment. So we need to do a little bit more legwork to push these over the finish line. And we're trying to discuss strategies for how to ensure that most of the more of the leads that we capture are actually turning into booked appointments. That showed up, I was going to.
- [13:29]
Lauren McAtee
Say, I will say too, even for some practices who are maybe newer or haven't done advertising before, or haven't dipped their toes into ad advertising. We even see this principle apply just in your website through online booking. So we have a client who started with us recently who just opened her med spot at the middle of June last month and she thought that she had turned off credit card capture requirement when scheduling online, but she accidentally left it on. And we went back to audit the leads, as they call them in some of the practice management tools and there were like 45 people in the list and I'm like, where are these leads coming from? So we reached out to the practice management tool and Asked them the question of what does this mean? What does it lead to you all? And they said, it's the people who clicked your online booking, filled out all their information, selected the booking date that they wanted, and then they got to the credit card screen and canceled it, closed out of it. So this was maybe possibly 45 appointments that could have been missed or could have still been booked via online, but people who just didn't want to put their credit card in. Maybe because it's a newer practice, maybe because people don't feel comfortable doing that, maybe because there's lots of scams nowadays and you don't know where you're putting your credit card. Um, as soon as we remove that. Now, bookings have been flowing in from online and from advertisements. So this principle really does apply kind of across the board, not just from ad leads too.
- [14:48]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah. And going back to the scam, another anecdotal example, recently with a client, we had somebody call in, actually multiple people. I told someone on their update calls they had multiple people because they were trying to originally do credit card capture calling in, trying to like get more information about the business to make sure they weren't going to get scammed. So yes, bottom line is you have to accept you're introducing a point of friction. And that's not to say the trade off isn't sometimes worth it, but just acknowledge that you're introducing a point of friction when you ask for credit card and especially with a booking deposit. So with that said, let's kind of explain the math of the trade offs here. What we generally see. So when you require a booking deposit, for example, let's just look at the two extremes. What we generally see is still a 10 to 15% no show rate. Let's just give the example here that for every $5,000 you spend on ads, you're probably going to have a 2x cost in terms of booking rate from what we generally see when you require a booking deposit. So for us, that might mean that our typical client doing it the way that we do it, for every $100 they spend, they actually get a booking. Doing it where you require a credit card deposit, it might be two or $300, but let's just, let's just give it the benefit of the doubt and let's say it's only $200. So it's doubling the cost to get a booking with a 15 12% no show rate. So you're spending $5,000, you're getting a credit card deposit, that means you're going to have 25 booked appointments doing it this way. Of that you're going to have 22 actually show up. So you're going to have fewer booked appointments, but you're going to have more of those booked appointments that actually show up. So in that example, your cost of customer acquisition is $227. So for every $227 you spend on ads, you're going to get someone that actually comes in, shows up and pays for service doing it the way that we generally do it. With the drip sequence that Lauren mentioned, we might get bookings for $100 or less. So that would mean for every $5,000 you have 50 clients book. And if you assume the no show rate, what we generally see is 25%. But we're going to say 30% to even play devil's advocate a little bit. You have so many more bookings that Even with the 30% no show rate, we now have 35 paid appointments and our cost of customer acquisition is $143. So 35 for every $5,000 instead of 22 appointments for every $5,000. And that goes back to the trade off. If it's costing you a bunch of money to have to have those to accept the extra 15% of no shows, then maybe you do accept the higher customer acquisition cost of $75 in addition to ensure that you have much a far fewer no show rate. But for vast majority of our clients, it usually plays out to your financial advantage to not force credit card capture to have a really good show up sequence. And just to build into your systems that 25 to 30% show up rate because at the end of the day you're have more people through the door at a lower cost of customer acquisition. Does that sound right, Lauren, anything you wanted to add to that part of the conversation? There was one other thing I wanted to kind of talk about on this and I can't remember what it was. It just slipped. I wish I wrote it down in the notes here, but I guess to kind of summarize this, understand the trade offs, it's not necessarily a black and white answer. You're going to pay a higher customer acquisition cost if you require a deposit for sure. And even if you have a credit card capture requirement for no shows, regardless of how you do this, you want a really good show up sequence drip that heavily relies on text message and doesn't present the option to opt out easily. Yes. Let people know if they need to reschedule. They can let you know. But otherwise your goal in that show up sequence trip is to confirm the appointment, let them know you're excited to meet them, not make them make the purchase decision all over again by texting. Why? To confirm an appointment. I think that's a good summary of this issue. We have this conversation with clients all the time. If you all have any questions for us, please feel free to shoot them in the comments below. Lauren, did you have something else to add?
- [18:27]
Lauren McAtee
Yeah, I think the other discussion was going to be about how to get if you're going to do credit card, how to get the credit card.
- [18:33]
Ricky Shockley
So one other thing we were going to talk about was if you're going to force credit card capture, what's the best process for doing that?
- [18:39]
Lauren McAtee
So what we've seen across the board, and again, it's hard, it's not easy to get people to give you their credit card, especially when they come from advertisements. So when a person comes from ads, again, to reiterate, they're seeing us on social media, they're seeing us on Facebook or Instagram, they're filling out a lead form and then they're communicating with us via text. So everything has happened virtually. There's been no phone call interaction and there's been no in person interaction, mostly for getting those appointments booked or at least close to booked. So for our clients who do force credit card capture, the number one thing that we've seen actually work to get the credit card is basically hounding the person to get the credit card. So it's having someone on your team who has the time to do it and continuously follows up with the people to make sure that they schedule and make sure they give us the card. So the two ways mainly to do that, one is to continue to call them on the phone. So after you've confirmed the time and date for the appointment, you continue to call them consistently to see if we can get that credit card over the phone to finalize booking details is what we'll usually say. The other way to do it is we typically recommend when you're in High Level or our tool is called High Level. But when you're having a conversation with a lead from ads, we recommend giving them options for dates and times to schedule. It works better to get the answer to the question, hey, does it work for you to come in on Tuesday at 2:30 rather than what time works best for you and letting it up to somebody to figure out and expecting that they're going to ghost us on that question. So after that question is asked, then we send them the booking link. And we say, hey, fill out this booking link to finalize your booking details through that link. That's where they capture credit card. So it's not as much on us to have to phone call them. They can do it through the booking link. But it is important to follow back up with them in 24 hours or so to make sure they actually went through with the booking link and finalized their details and submitted the booking. What we see a lot of times is basically our text will go out that says, hey, thanks for claiming our Botox offer. Would you like to schedule an appointment? The person says, yes please, I'd love to. And we say, okay, great, here's our booking link. Find a time that works best for you and schedule. And then they never schedule. Which you're not going to believe that because they just said yes please, I'd love to schedule, but it just doesn't happen. We send the link and it stops there. The conversation ends. So that's where the nuance importance is to follow up with that person. Check in your software, see if they booked. If they didn't, send them another text says, hey, I know student finished the booking. Can I help you get that done? Something like that. To stay on top of people to either finalize the link or get on the phone with you to give you that credit card.
- [21:07]
Ricky Shockley
Yeah. And not to go down a side tangent, but again we're talking really a lot, a lot of this conversation is based around lead generation from Facebook and Instagram ads where you have a lot of people that are raising their hand, expressing interest, but not going through with booking right away. It's just really important to be diligent about lead follow up. These people are fence sitters by nature. You're going to have to nurture them. You're going to have to have conversations. You're going to have to build on factors of no like and trust and stay on top of these leads. It's, it's not the same as them needing a plumber because they got a toilet leaking upstairs dripping down into their kitchen. Right. They, they know that if they want to, they can put this decision off a week, two weeks and even a month in many cases. So being diligent, staying on top of these, these leads and then having a best practice for how we go about booking an appointment and ensuring that people actually show up and pay for services is going to optimize your ad spend and give you a better result. Right. We've taken over ads for clients where we look at the initial ads and the frameworks we're like, that doesn't look too far off. It's similar ish to what we do. Maybe the cost per lead is a little high, graphics are a little ugly. But we took over ads for a client that I think was just missing the mark with a lot of the stuff that happened after the lead was generated and their cost to acquire a customer for Botox was $450. Now our clients doing it the way that we outline generally see customer acquisition cost at around $100 or less. We have some clients that are in the 50s and 60s for customer acquisition cost. So you're talking about four times the number of booked appointments for your ad spend doing it the way that we're outlining. So we're trying to bring you best practices on this. I hope this was super helpful. We're going to try to bring more of this type of content, really going a couple layers deep in terms of strategy to help you get better performance from your online advertising initiatives. Thanks and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks everyone for tuning in. This podcast is a production of Medspa Magic Marketing. If your med, spa or aesthetic practice is in need of digital marketing services, help with advertising, advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Google lead generation and booking more appointments, please visit medspamagicmarketing. Com.