Last minute Valentines Day gift buyers LOVE to buy packages (and they spend more money)
February 15th, 2008 • Posted by Seth Gardenswartz • Permalink
Guess what we learned this month? Last minute gift buyers spend more money, and packages help them do it! According to ABC News, people (mostly men) spend more the closer they get to a gift buying deadline.
The SpaBoom Valentine's Day data backs up that assertion. Our clients sold 1.5M in Valentine's Day Instant Gift Ccertificates (this includes sales from February 1 through February 14th). 60% of those sales happened on the 11th through the 14th. Our average sale for each of the first 10 days of the month hovered around $110. The average purchase from the 11th through the 14th averaged over $115. Why and how you might ask? Remember tip #3 in the Top ten ways to sell more gift certificates online? For those who forgot, it was "sell packages" for something more than the $100 most American males default to when faced with a spa menu. This holiday, packages were the preferred gift of your customers. If you don't believe me, argue with Cupid and our accounting team. In the first 14 days of this month almost 46% of SpaBoom gifts were packages. In December it was a little over 35%. This corresponded to an average transaction in February of $114.11 for Valentine's Day as opposed to 106.34 in December. If you are not selling packages you are leaving money your customer would like to spend with you on the table.
Overall, the numbers show that "occasion" gift buyers are willing to spend more, especially last minute AND they really like to buy packages. The good news is SpaBoom clients sell a ton of last minute gifts and we make creating service packages easy. So gear up for Mother's Day, but don't forget the birthday and anniversary packages to sell every day. Our customers seem willing to spend more for holidays like Valentine's Day, especially on the last few days leading up to the event. Give them a package that justifies that willingness and everybody wins.
• Trackback • Posted in General, Spa Gift Certificates, Spa Marketing
We use both the packages and events functions to promote our on-line gift certificates. I would really like to the see statistics broken down by geographic region and by urban vs. rural. While you are at it, show the avg. number of services in the package. Our clients love it!
Sorry this doesn't relate to the article — I was wondering if you guys could create a monthly report that contains ALL the data: website referrers, landing pages, key words (maybe not keywords) lists by month and day i.e. 1st thru the 30th and so on… Currently I print the month for each source but I can't tell (unless I write it down each day) what days of the week are the busiest and what weeks of the months my advertising is working the most for me. Maybe a graph could be created for the month at a glance? I am trying to figure out without writing everything down and creating a spreadsheet what days of the week are peak and what weeks of the month are peak to see if there is a trend with my advertising dollars. Did I explain it clearly enough? The reports you provide are awesome but viewing by date range without each day broken out is not enough. Please help! And thanks a mil.
Ruth and Stephanie:
We get lots of interest in our data and requests for more. We are working on more reports, but are committed to the privacy of our clients. Imagine if we permit every user to drill down to the city level, but in some small cities there are only one or two SpaBoomers! To avoid making it easy for folks to deduce the sales of their fellow SpaBoom users we are developing standards for the minimum number of SpaBoom clients in a reporting area or group. That said, our dev team is working on a whole host of new reporting features for the SpaBoom dashboard. Keep reading the blog for news of "new features." Thanks for your patience.
I guess I didn't make myself clear, sorry.
I would like a graph or tracking report for daily and monthly hits at a glance, meaning a total view of the 1st of the month through the end of the month broken down by day for my business only… not all SpaBoomers. I am trying to track which days of the week I get the most hits, which weeks of the month I get the most hits… I am currently writing down my daily stats and computing them myself, i.e. my busiest web days seem to vary between Tues and Thurs and my busiest weeks are the first and third weeks of the month… looks like to me people surf more the weeks they get paid, i.e. the 1st and the 15th of the month. I am looking for a report of the data you already provide but in a collective form by day of the week/by date to track when my site is the busiest and when my advertising is working.
Does that make sense? I know what I want but don't know how to explain it. What you give us is totals only and can be seen by date only, not day of the week or which weeks of the month they are… I am sorting out your data to fit my tracking.
Thanks a mil.