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Med Spa Success Strategies
Wednesday Thoughts: Should You Charge for Med Spa Consults? Pros & Cons Explained
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Hey, MedSpa owners, let's talk about consults. Should you charge for consults so that people value your time or offer them for free? We'll discuss the pros and cons in each strategy and what might be the best fit for you in your current situation. All right, so this conversation for us usually comes about when a practice owner is talking about wanting to attract more clients, growing their business, building their client database via more effective marketing solutions. And if the goal is client acquisition and growth, you don't have as many appointments as you wish you did. I would argue that you should consider offering free consultations. So if you've listened to this podcast or YouTube channel at all, you've probably heard me use this quote from a book called the Advertising Effect a bunch of times. And it's action changes attitude faster than attitude changes action. The idea that the best way to create perception is through experience. The that consultation is your at bat. It's the chance to prove your value. So inherently you're going to introduce a point of friction when you charge for a consult. If people are thinking about getting a service, they're on the fence. They want to see what their options are and they just want to talk to somebody. If you introduce a cost to the consultation inescapable, you will diminish the amount of patient acquisition, raise your customer acquisition costs from any advertising efforts. I think that's not arguable, that is a fact. Now the question becomes, are the pros? Do the pros outweigh the cons? Are the trade offs worth it in your specific situation? So here's kind of what I'd say overall to the pros and cons of each of these strategies. So when you don't charge for consultations, you're going to have more at bats. You're going to be able to provide or create perception through experience by proving value in office, getting people comfortable, confident and developing the relationship. And you're going to have lower customer acquisition costs, just more butts in the seats, right? Very simply, the things that you'll deal with as a result will be there might be people that are coming in that don't end up purchasing services, so you might feel like you waste your time on some of those people. I will say though, when I talk to practice owners, most people who offer These consultations, probably 80 to 90% of people in the seat are going to purchase something. So I would say that's the analysis of offering free consultations. What it does for your business and really like the simple version of the Downside is just you might have some people that come in and don't end up getting anything and then you feel like you wasted your time on those people. Now always talk in terms of absolute catch rate. So if we were to offer free consultations, let's say for every thousand dollars you see five people when you're offering free consultations. And by introducing a price to your consultation that raises your acquisition costs, it introduces a point of friction. And now for every thousand dollars, maybe you only see three or two people for that same thousand dollars. Even if only four out of the five buy, you still have four people purchasing from you instead of two or three. So this is across the board in marketing we see that this trade off usually is advantageous. If I maximize for at bats my catch rate, meaning the people that end up purchasing or the clients that are retained, the good quality clients, there's still an absolute larger volume of those people left over than if we try to optimize for patient quality up front. So that's what we see in the data. That's not my hypothesis, it's not a theory. It's what we actually see in the data when we run these types of campaigns and we do these types of things for clients. So I would argue that's probably the best strategy financially if you're trying to get butts in the seats and to grow your business. I would argue that's still the best strategy even for established successful practices. Most people are not going to waste their time showing up in your office if they're not serious about getting treatment. It doesn't mean you're going to have 100% success rate. But most of those people are very serious about doing something you can introduce at least like a booking deposit that's refundable for cancellations and no shows. Because if you do consultations without that, you will deal with no shows. No 30 to 40% even more in terms of no shows. So if you're going to do it without a deposit, make sure you have a really good show up sequence drip leading up to the appointment to make sure that person's going to show up. Got a whole other video on that because that's. There's some nuance to that conversation. This episode is brought to you by Med Spa 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, 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 Medspamagicmarketing.com okay, but so that's my two cents on offering a free consultation. I think the juice is worth the squeeze for the vast majority of practices. So when can you be stubborn and decide that you are going to charge for your consultation? I would argue that really one thing has to be true for that to make sense in your business and that means that you are supply constrained. You do not have the availability to serve additional clients and you're as busy as you could pretty much want to be and you're struggling to make room in the schedule. If that's the case for your practice and you can get away with charging for consultations and still achieve your goals in terms of patient acquisition, appointments and scheduling, then by all means go ahead. The very simple analysis here. This is all supply and demand. If you're able to get away with charging for consultations, you can do it. I would argue though that you're going to see less patients and you're, you're probably again introducing a point of friction that causes some of those people to go to one of your competitors and if they have a good relate a good experience on that free consultation and it feels like less of a commitment when they're thinking about getting services done, now your competitor has had the opportunity to establish that relationship. So again, that's my 2 cents on the pros and cons. One of the things I hear people say anytime we talk about discounting or free consultations or complimentary and complimentary consultation is probably a better term here. But what I hear people say is I'm worried, just like the discounting conversation, that it's cheapening my brand. And I just don't believe that to be true. And we've had Sarah Schickman on the podcast. She grew multi multi location multi multi multi million dollar med spa sold that med spa eventually when they audited their practice. The top 20% spenders, 80% of them had come from Groupon originally. I think there's ton of data and evidence and our own data and just across the board and consumer psychology that shows that dangling a carrot in front of a target prospect to get them to choose you over your competitors, to establish the relationship and then having those people pay a premium price point or a standard price point after you've developed the relationship and you've created perception through experience, it just makes sense mathematically. The same thing here is true with consultations. I do not think you're cheapening your brand. I think you're getting the opportunity to prove your value. And so that's my $0.02 on consultations. For those of you that are considering, should I offer free consultations? Do I charge for these? Obviously you have logistical concerns with provider time, provider pay, and there's some complications there with how you pay providers potentially. So that's for you to figure out just from a marketing standpoint, patient acquisition and growth standpoint. That's our analysis of free consultations from all the data that we have. If you have your own experience with free consultations versus charging, feel free to share those in the comments or let us know so we can share those with the rest of the audience. Thanks and see you on the next one.