Pulse September 2018 | Page 59

abits are powerful influencers of human behavior. Forty-five percent of the choices we make in any given day, according to a Duke University study, are based on habits rather than informed, conscious choice. Habits control where we shop, what we eat, when we clean the house and when we go to bed. Habits also define what skincare products we use. The same goes for nail polish, or cosmetics, or any other beauty product your spa may sell. Habits and behavioral patterns even inform when we go to the spa in the first place, as well as what kind of treatments we get when we’re there. As a spa or resource partner, knowing and understanding your guests’ and customers’ habits is key to driving revenue growth, both through retail sales and through in-spa treat- ments. Once you understand your customers’ habits and how they form, you can begin to anticipate when they’re looking to change their habit—for example, switching from one facial moisturizer to another. It’s this line of thinking that led to retailer Target, in the early 2000s, discovering someone was pregnant before they themselves even knew. h a fEW yEars ago, this story came to me through the grapevine: that a grocery store actually managed to find out that someone was pregnant before her own household even knew. I did some digging and found an article from 2012 (“How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” by Charles Duhigg) originally published by the New York Times. In it, Duhigg relates how forward-thinking retailers of all kinds—from Amazon to the Home Depot—have begun analyzing consumer data and purchase history to find out when customers were most likely to switch stores, brands or products. For example, there are only a handful of times in life when someone is likely to switch their primary grocery store. In these moments—the birth of a child, a marriage, starting college, moving to a new city—customers’ old habits were particularly changeable, and it’s easy to “convert” a customer to shop at a new store. “The more you understand about what cues a customer to visit the spa, the better you’ll be able to incentivize them to come in again and again.” To this end, retail giant Target developed tools that could identify pregnant women through their purchase history alone; this made it possible to send them targeted ads and coupons for baby items before other retailers did, making it more likely that they’d switch to shopping at Target full-time. By tracking purchases of things like prenatal vitamins, unscented soap, and cotton balls, they identified tens of thousands of women who were likely to be pregnant. Target’s strategy paid off. From 2002—when they began targeting customers who were likely to switch stores—to 2010, Target’s revenues increase by more than 50%, from $44 billion to $67 billion. As a day spa, resort spa, cosmetic manufacturer or skincare company, you most likely won’t have the analytical chutzpah to track data like a $70 billion company. That said, modern spa management software is extremely full-featured, capable of tracking purchasing data and attaching notes to customer profiles. Be sure to ask your software provider for a thorough tour of the software’s capabilities. Even if you can’t track extensive data in your spa software, you can still take the ideas that Target applied and use them to increase your business’s revenue. How do you do it? Talk September 2018 ■ PULSE 57