Go to enough conferences and you’ll find at least one person on stage telling you never to discount. That discounting will kill your brand.
Really?
You can find Gucci and Prada on sale, and they make more money than all the med spas in your city combined. Somehow their brand survived.
Discounting is a tool. If you understand how to use a tool, you can build anything with it. If you don’t, you end up shooting yourself in the face with a nail gun. Most of the horror stories you’ve heard about specials are nail-gun stories, told by the person who was holding it.
Key Takeaways
- A special is a way to get a new client through the door. Whether it makes money depends on what happens after she walks in.
- Price it so the first visit doesn't lose money. If every redemption costs you, you're paying people to show up.
- Decide what she buys next before you launch, and train your team to sell it. An $87 offer can become a $3,000 sale.
- Measure each offer by what its clients spend over twelve months, not on day one.
The Math That Kills Clinics
Start with the part the conference speaker gets right. Average med spa profit margins run 20-25%. Run 20% off a service with a 25% margin and you’ve given away almost all the profit on that treatment. Do it with no plan for what comes next and you worked for free.
Groupon is the extreme version. You cut your price 50%, the platform takes another 25-50% of what’s left, and you can end up collecting a quarter of your normal fee before you pay for product, staff and overhead. The client’s contact details belong to the platform’s relationship as much as yours, and she found you because of the deal, not because of you.
Before you launch any offer, work out what one redemption costs you in product, staff time and payment fees. If the offer price is below that number, every client who takes it costs you money. That's not a special. That's a donation.
We saw this at Revery Medical Aesthetics in Windsor. When we started, their entry offer was priced so low that the clinic lost money every time someone took it. We repriced it so it stopped bleeding, and built the rest of the system around what clients bought next.
What a Special Is Actually For
A special does one job. It gets a new client through your door who wouldn’t have come otherwise. Everything after that is selling.
The first visit was never going to make you rich. Average first-visit spend at a med spa is $350-$600, and the profit on it is thin even at full price. The money is in what comes after. A Botox client who comes back every three to four months is worth $1,400-$2,000 a year from that one treatment, before filler, lasers or skincare.
So the right question isn’t “how much did we give away on the special?” It’s “what did the people who came in on the special spend over the next year?”
If you know how to build desire, handle objections and actually listen to the client in front of you, you can take an $87 offer and turn it into a $3,000 sale. At Revery, the average laser hair removal sale went from a single session to a package worth more than six times as much.
What Has to Be in Place First
An offer priced to survive. Lower than your regular price, enough to get attention, and still above what it costs you to deliver.
A next step decided in advance. A package, a treatment plan, a membership. If your team doesn’t know what she should buy next, she won’t buy anything.
A team trained to sell. This is where most specials die. The person in the room treats the discounted client like a discounted client, rushes the appointment, and never mentions the plan. A person who doesn’t know how to use her tools will lead you to poverty. We built Echo, our AI sales coach, for exactly this: it drills your staff on the objections clients raise until turning a special into a package is a habit.
Follow-up for the ones who don’t buy that day. Most won’t. A text the next day, a reminder at the right point in her treatment cycle, an invitation back. Without follow-up, the special is a one-time sale at a discount, which is the worst deal there is.
Tracking by offer. Tag every client who came in on each offer and watch what they spend over twelve months. Some offers will bring in clients who become regulars. Others will bring in people you never see again. Keep the first kind and kill the second.
Protect Your Regulars
The one real way a special damages a clinic is when your loyal, full-price clients see strangers getting the same treatment for half and feel like fools.
Keep offers aimed at new clients, through your ads, with an end date. Give your regulars something the newcomers can’t get: a membership price, priority booking, first access to new treatments. Your best clients should feel looked after, not undercut. The mechanics are in our article on med spa loyalty programs.
The Bottom Line
There’s an old saying: it’s a poor workman who blames his tools. The same is true for discounts.
A clinic with the right offer, a plan for the next purchase, a team that can sell and a follow-up system can build an empire on the back of a single discounted offer. A clinic without those things will lose its shirt, and then go to a conference and tell everyone that specials don’t work.
Bad advice is worth less than you paid for it, full price or not.
If you want someone to build the offer, the follow-up and the tracking behind it, that’s the work our med spa marketing agency does. See if your clinic is a fit.