Is Your Spa Marketing Working? Here's How to Tell

Is your spa marketing working? Today, Delia, my marketing manager, and I dive into how you can tell.

While there may be an overload of information on the Internet about how to do your marketing (such as which platforms to target and step-by-step how-to’s to posting your first batch of content) let’s face it: we in the spa industry often forget to actually track our marketing progress once we get going with it!

But while being allergic to tracking your marketing metrics may sound passable, it’s wrecking more havoc on your marketing’s effectiveness (and overall spa sales!) than you’d think: after all, if you don’t check your metrics… how do you know anything’s working? 

It’s not enough to feel like you’re getting good results: you need to know what and why is happening so that you can repeat and optimize those successes! 

Let’s dive further into that:

What Should You Be Looking For?

Firstly, let’s go over what metrics you should be looking for so that you’re not just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks!

Marketing is not a “build it and they will come” scenario. Instead, especially for email marketing, social media marketing, and website, you need to be measuring your metrics against the average spa industry’s benchmarks to see what’s worth continuing to invest in (and what you need to outsource in order to see real results!)

Email Marketing Benchmarks for the Spa Industry

Let’s get this out of the way first: you will never achieve a 100% open rate. Instead, these are the metrics you should use to actually gauge how effective your email marketing is:

• Open Rate Benchmark: 16.6%
• Clients Who Outsource Via Kirsten Foss Coaching: 30% - 50%
• Click Through Rate Benchmark: 1.92%
• Clients Who Outsource Via Kirsten Foss Coaching: 2% - 5%  

Not hitting these benchmarks? While there are numerous reasons why that may be the case, one of the most probable is that the latest iOS update prevents the tracking of open rates…which means you’ll see yours declining as it rolls out. If you think this is the case, go back over the last year to see what your averages were.

Need some further insight? Look at your unsubscribe rates and bounce rates. If you get a few, don’t panic! But a high number of either means either a problem with your email marketing platform (meaning that your emails are bouncing or there are issues in the formatting of your emails) or a high level of disengagement with your current audience. 

Social Media Marketing Benchmarks for the Spa Industry

As a core component of our digital marketing services, we know a thing or two about social media.

Here are the metrics that should matter to your social media efforts:

• Engagement Rate Benchmark: <1% (Yes, organic/unpaid user engagement is really that low! Did you know even Sephora has a .03% engagement rate as of 2022?)
• Clients Who Outsource Via Kirsten Foss Coaching: Up to 8%
• Audience Growth Rate Benchmark: 2-3%
• Clients Who Outsource Via Kirsten Foss Coaching: 3-8%
• Stories Completion Benchmark: 75%
• Clients Who Outsource Via Kirsten Foss Coaching: Up to 100%

For Stories, pay attention to the number of replies you get from audience members and if there are a certain number of Stories that have a high drop-off rate! After all, why crank out 10 Stories a day if two has proven to be your sweet spot? Metrics can help you work smarter, not harder!

Website Benchmarks for the Spa Industry

Now, onto where all the client conversion magic happens: your website.

• Google Ranking Benchmark: Not on page 1, typically at the bottom of page 1 or page 2, which is not ideal for clients finding your site
• Bounce Rate Benchmarks:
• 26% - 40% is excellent
• 41% - 55% is average
• 56% - 70% is higher than average and likely means that your website is slow to load or has other accessibility problems

On top of these hard-and-fast metrics, we highly recommend checking where your referrals come from, which is available via Google Analytics: are they coming from social media? Google itself? Email? Direct search? This knowledge can steer you into the right direction in terms of which channel to keep investing time and money into!

If you’re not hitting the benchmarks above, it’s probable that you require SEO and service description improvements to better connect with clients and refine your website’s formatting. 

“Is My Spa Marketing Working?” Here Are Our Final Takeaways

Watching your metrics and comparing them to the spa industry’s general benchmarks helps keep your marketing expectations in check, guides you towards which channels are worth your time and money, and which methods need a professional touch in order to start seeing real results from them.

After all, you can’t hit a target you can’t see!

Ready to leverage the power of metrics-measuring? Contact us today to learn how we can get you started.