Open houses are a great way to generate new interest from current and prospective patients by highlighting your latest and greatest products and services. They are also fantastic for showing off your practice, staff, and offerings in a comfortable and organic way. With everyone eager to look and feel their best for summer, consider the springtime an optimal time to host your next event.
The following six tips will ensure your open house goes off without a hitch and help your medical spa increase its following and conversion opportunities.
- Plan accordingly
The details matter, especially when you’re trying to plan an event that you want your patients to perceive as unmissable. This involves choosing the right date, theme, invitations, and catering services.
Life is busy for everyone, so it’s important to be thoughtful about the day you select to host your event. Consider hosting your open house on a Wednesday or Thursday night. Patients will be more willing to attend as the weekend draws near, and won’t be as likely to have other social events or scheduling conflicts.
Choose a theme that you’re able to center your open house around like “Look Your Best This Summer” or select one of your practice’s most popular treatments or new offerings to highlight. Choosing a theme also enables you to offer deals, giveaways, brief consultations, and demos centered around that topic. If you’re having trouble deciding on a theme, ask your patients what they’d like to learn more about.
Though you should use social media, email, and your website to promote the event, consider hand-delivering invitations to your regular patients. This will make them feel like VIPs and increase the likelihood they attend.
Serving poor food and drink is one way to ensure your patients leave your event quickly and never return again. By no means do you need to serve a whole dinner, but having enough food, drinks, and water on hand will help ensure your patients stick around to learn about your latest offerings and capabilities. Think about partnering with a popular local restaurant to serve on-trend hors d’oeuvres. Partnerships are also a great way to help spread awareness of your event!
- Promote your event (and your practice)
All of the effort that goes into planning and executing your event is wasted without a successful turnout. Begin marketing your event six weeks in advance, and make your customers feel like they can’t miss it by posting specials that will only be available that night. If you’re looking for creative ways to tease your event, consider posting photos of your goodie bags, reduced pricing menu, or personalized consultation capabilities on your social media ahead of time.
As mentioned, utilize all of your platforms to advertise the event, hand-deliver invitations to your top patients, and make sure you mention the open house to all of your patients when they’re at your medical spa for their regularly scheduled appointments. You can even encourage them to bring friends by sharing your referral program.
Work with local or micro-influencers to spread awareness of your event. To thank them for their support, you can offer them complimentary services or add-ons to their next appointment. You can also think about collaborating with other businesses in related industries like IV clinics, nutrition practices, and acupuncturists — just to name a few. This can help you tap into new audiences and increase your practice’s following.
- Show off your incredible staff
Not only does an open house provide a wonderful opportunity for you to flaunt your practice, services, and products, but it is also a fantastic way for your staff to build deeper relationships with new and current patients. Make sure they’re on hand to answer questions, educate, and lead demonstrations.
- Provide demonstrations
Live demos are a great way to show new patients the capability of your offerings in an honest and transparent way, and your employees are the perfect fill-in models. Demonstrations also provide an opportunity for you to organically promote appointment bookings, which your staff can facilitate.
- Offer discounts and specials to show your appreciation
Who doesn’t love a special offer, especially when aesthetics are involved? One way to incentivize people to come is by providing a freebie to the first ten people in the door. Consider offering goodie bags, giveaways, and raffles. Skincare samples, vouchers, and business cards make great swag bag stuffers.
Also think about putting together special pricing and packages for attendees of the event or for patients that bring a friend. This is a great way to ensure patient retention while creating relationships with new ones.
- Follow up after your event
Make sure you have a method for collecting attendees contact information so that you can follow-up after the event. Have your team do outreach to inquire about their experience and remind them of the specials and promotions that are available to them. This will also help ensure your practice remains top-of-mind for months to come.
Looking for extra help to execute your next open house? Contact our team – we’re here to help!At Synergy, we are here to support you. Your Success is Our Success!
