ETS Tanning Bed Blog

Here are 6 key strategies that you can use to bring tanners back into your tanning beds more often. Remember, your repeat and returning clients are your business’s bread and butter, so use these strategies wisely to not only get them coming back, but also spending more at every visit.

1. Communicate with your customers.
Communicating with your customers doesn’t mean sending them a mass email, it means building a personal relationship with each of them.

• Start by learning everyone’s name.
• If a customer tries a new lotion, call them in a few days to see how they liked it.
• If a customer upgrades to a new tanning bed , follow up with an email asking about the results.

Basically, start communicating with your customers on a truly personal level.

2. Acknowledge your customers and make them feel special.
Keep your tanning bed users coming back by acknowledging them and making them feel special. A great way to do this is to host a special event around the holidays, put on an open house or treat your best customers to free samples of lotions, tanning bed sessions, etc.

3. Create and sell long-term buying programs.
You should already have monthly membership scheme for your tanning beds, but do you have:

• A Tanning Product of the Month Club?
• Do you offer discounts on tanning package "refills" or multiple tanning lotion purchases?
• What about varying tanning membership levels?

These are all programs you can create to get your customers buying more over the long term.

4. Use price incentives to lure clients into trying new services.
Let’s say you just got a new Velocity tanning bed in, but no one’s trying it (hard to believe that would happen, I know!). Instead of letting that new bed sit empty, try offering your clients one free upgrade or a discounted rate on the new bed. That kind of price incentive could convince a client to try the new tanning bed and stick with it at the higher price.

5. Develop a range of products you can sell.
Stop and ask yourself:
The goal of this exercise isn’t to flood your business with non-applicable offerings, but to focus on what could fit into your existing product line.

For example, one tanning salon owner I know noticed that the bulk of her new clients came in because they were planning a vacation and wanted to get a base tan. So, she started stocking small travel accessories that were functional and chic. She saw a major return on her investment.

6. Promote other businesses.
We’ve talked about cross-promotion before, but it’s definitely worth mentioning again. Just as your own client list is valuable, so are those of fellow businesses. Develop a relationship with a complimentary business like a nail salon, cosmetic dentist or local gym and start trading referrals.

It may sound cold, but you must evaluate every employee in your tanning business as a profit center.

Look at it this way, if you hire an employee to work 40 hours a week and you give them a basic salary of $8 per hour, then you’re paying out $320 a week, not including the additional expense of taxes, insurance and paperwork.

In turn, you should be asking yourself “how much profit does this employee bring in?” The cold, hard truth of the matter is that when it comes down to it, every employee should be evaluated by how much profit and how much revenue they’re bringing in.

I do a lot of sailing and I race competitively. One of the great things about sailing is how so many of our race strategies can be applied to running a successful business – like tuning your boat against the best to achieve the best.

No matter how fast you think your boat is, you have to go out there and tune it against a top competitor before the race to really achieve ultimate speed. As you adjust your riggings, sails and hull, you’re tuning to one another, always checking to see who’s going faster and how you can achieve that same speed. It’s about realizing your potential and the boat’s potential and then maximizing it.

Once you’ve both achieved that optimal speed, you’ve just eliminated everyone else from the race.

In the previous post we showed you how promotions can get turn the casual tanning bed user into a high-end profit machine.  The last step in building your revenue & profit blueprint is to balance out your bed usage and keep track of your numbers.

Part 6 - Optimize Tanning Bed Usage to Boost Revenue & Profits

We’ve spent a lot of time in this series talking about analytics, a technique that asks the business owner to visualize, analyze and evaluate their data to make smart decisions. In this, the last part of our series, we’re going to talk about how you can use analytics to optimize your tanning bed usage and really boost revenue and profits.

Using Software to Evaluate Tanning Bed Usage

In the previous post I showed you how tanning salon software gives you an inside peak at where the money is being made in your salon.  Now it 's time to make those profitable tanning packages really sell.

Part 5 - Promotions Build Profits

Some of your customers love to sit at the lower levels. You could have your best salesperson on them and they’re content to sit there and continue using the Level 1 Bed forever and because they have a membership and, as we both know, they’re not profitable.

So, how do you get them into that higher level tanning bed?

If new customers are the building blocks of your successful tanning salon, then your business software package is your most important set of tools and this brings us to part 4 of our Building Your Own Revenue and Profit Blueprint:

Part 4 - Why Tanning Salon Software is Critical to Your Success

Most tanning salon owners don’t utilize their software to its full potential. They’re not even aware that they can analyze their business right down to the lowest level and as a result, they don’t profit from the benefits of business analytics.

As a tanning salon owner, you may look at the big picture and say “gee, my per customer averages on lotion sales aren’t as good as I’d like them to be.” Then, you might bring it up at the next staff meeting and start hammering tanning package upgrades into your sales people. However, the truth is maybe 3 of your 5 sales people are already performing at their peak capacity and it’s the other 2 you should be focusing on.

If your existing customers and a great tanning salon staff are the foundation of your blueprint, then new customers are what will allow you to build your business up and that brings us to part 3 of our Building Your Own Revenue and Profit Blueprint series:

Part 3 - Increase Revenue & Profits with New Customers

When you really start to evaluate your revenues and profits, you should be asking yourself:

• How can I attract new people to my tanning beds?