The next 30 days: build your holiday gift card season before November
Holiday gift card buyers start looking in late October. A 30-day plan for spa owners to set up the offer, the page and the follow-up before the rush.
Most spa owners start selling holiday gift cards the week of Thanksgiving, which is about three weeks after the buyers started looking. By then the shop down the street has a gift card page, a clear offer and a reminder text going to last year's buyers, and your gift cards are a line at the bottom of the booking page.
The next 30 days are the setup window. Nothing you do now has to bring in a dollar before November. It just has to be ready when the money moves.
Why October, not December
Gift card revenue is different from appointment revenue in one way that matters. It does not need an open slot. A Tuesday afternoon you could not fill in July does not limit how many $150 gift cards you sell in December. The only limits are how many people see the offer and how easy it is to buy.
That makes the work front-loaded. The page, the offer, the email list and the reminder texts all take time to set up and almost no time to run once they exist. Build them in October and the selling season runs on its own. The slow season guide lays out the whole year, and the short version is that the last week of October is when gift card marketing should go live.
Week one: decide the offer
Pick one offer and write it in a sentence. A few patterns that work for massage and spa businesses:
- Bonus value. Buy $100, get a $20 bonus card valid January through March. The bonus pulls redemptions into your slow months, which is the point.
- Bundles. A 60-minute massage plus an add-on, priced as one card. Easier to give than a dollar amount, because the buyer knows what they are giving.
- Couples. A couples session as a single gift. It carries the higher ticket and fills two rooms at once.
Avoid deep discounts. A gift card is already prepaid revenue. Giving away 30% on top of that turns your best cash month into your thinnest margin. If you need help pricing the bundle against your memberships, the pricing and packages guide walks through it.
Week two: one page, one link
Build a single gift card page on your own website. Not a line on the booking page. A page that shows the offer at the top, the three or four card options with prices, and a buy button that works on a phone in under a minute.
Then put that link everywhere you can:
- Your Google Business Profile, as a post and in the business description.
- Your Instagram bio, replacing whatever is there until January.
- The confirmation and reminder texts your booking software already sends.
- A small printed card at the front desk with a QR code.
Across 70,932 massage and spa listings in our data, 78.7% link a website. That means most of your competitors have somewhere to send gift card buyers. If you are in the 21.3% without one, a gift card page on a simple site is the single most useful thing you can build this month. The website guide lists what that site needs.
Week three: pull last year's buyers
Your best gift card buyers this year are last year's buyers and every client who came in during the past twelve months. Export both lists from your booking software. Clean out duplicates.
Write one short message to go out the last week of October:
"Hi Sarah, it is Maria from Willow Spa. Our holiday gift cards are up early this year, and every $100 card comes with a $20 bonus for you to use in January. Here is the link if you want to get ahead of the list: [link]"
Then a second one the week after Thanksgiving, and a final one around December 18 for the last-minute buyers. Three messages over eight weeks is not too many for a gift people actually need to buy.
Week four: be reachable when they call
Gift card buyers call. A lot of them are buying for a partner or a parent and want to ask what the difference is between a 60 and a 90-minute session. If that call goes to voicemail, they buy somewhere else.
Look at your hours. 59.9% of spa listings show Saturday hours and 39.3% show Sunday hours. Weekend afternoons are when a lot of gift buyers get around to it. If your front desk is closed, at minimum set up a text-back so a missed call gets an instant reply with the gift card link. The missed calls guide shows how, and the calculator puts a number on what unanswered calls cost you at your average ticket.
What done looks like on November 5
- One written offer, priced so it does not gut your margin.
- One gift card page, live, that works on a phone.
- The link in at least four places.
- Three messages written and scheduled to past clients.
- A text-back reply on missed calls that includes the gift card link.
That is the whole plan. None of it is complicated, and almost all of it can be done between appointments.
If you would rather have the gift card page and text-back built for you, the free 14-day trial covers any service, no card. Text or call (385) 386-3176 or visit the free trial page.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, massage therapists and spas among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor