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
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