Tutorials

Last time, I showed you how to easily add your Reviews to your SpaBoom Dynamic website — its incredibly fast and most of the work is done for you, thanks to the design of our templates.

However, if you already have SpaBoom Instant Gift Certificates linked to your existing website, you can still join the party — we love for everyone to collect and show off their customers' comments, so here's part 2: how to add reviews to your existing website.

Wonder if you already have reviews out there?  Get a glimpse by logging into your SpaBoom account, and go to the Reports tab, then take a peek at the Reviews report.  You'll see any reviews you've collected so far, for a glimpse into what your customers think and how much they appreciate your services to them.

Ready?  You're all set to add the link to your website.  We have a great tutorial on the details in our Help section, titled "Reviews for Linked Websites".

Essentially you or your web designer will be adding a link to your website, just like you did when you added your Instant Gift Certificate link when you first signed up with us.   Easy, huh?  Promote this new and neat way to connect with your customers, and your business will surely keep booming!

Posted in Tutorials, SpaBoom New Features, Spa Business Management • Comment »

When running a business, getting feedback from your customers on how they perceive your company is critical. Do they appreciate the value you provide? Is buying from you a fun experience? You can always ask people directly, but that can be awkward or time-consuming.

SpaBoom has now added a new feature that allows you to collect this kind of information about your clients' Instant Gift Certificate purchase experience, and by extension, their opinion of how well they were able to use your website overall.

Any time someone buys an Instant Gift Certificate from you, they will see this extra section on the post-purchase screen:

Submitting a review is completely optional - they can end their transaction immediately, or click on a button to purchase another Instant Gift Certificate. If choosing to provide a review, they can select a rating of one star through five stars, and also leave a comment detailing their experience. Once submitting , they are again taken to a screen thanking them and allowing any additional purchases.

For your business, a new SpaBoom account report has been added to list all of your clients' reviews so you can see how things are going, and also to address any problems that the might have encountered. When you login to your account, you'll see a new item in the Today screen mentioning that you have new Reviews. You can view them by clicking on that link, or through the main Reports screen.
From the Reports tab, click on "Reviews" on the left side of the screen, to see this view:

You can sort by any of the columns, see the average rating at the bottom, and even click on the client's name to view their record.

We hope this will be a useful tool for you to keep in touch with your customers' attitudes and feedback for the services you offer, both through SpaBoom as well as your overall website design and functionality. Please let us know if you have questions about Reviews, or any other suggestions for great new features we can add in the future.

Posted in Tutorials, SpaBoom New Features, Spa Business Management • 3 Comments »

Okay, so you're starting to read about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) everywhere, including on the SpaBoom Blog. You have a sense that it's important, but it's still very confusing. Worse, the information you read about SEO seems to be either conflicting or unhelpful.

What exactly is SEO and how can it help you? Let me suggest this definition for SEO:

When someone goes to Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL or the other search engines, and they want a spa or salon, they find and click to your website. Your website and online marketing practices should be tuned such that this opportunity is maximized - and more people see your business listed in those search results.

At the end of the day, people go to search engines to find the websites (and businesses) they desire and might not already know about. SEO involves everything that is necessary to get those people to go to your website.

There are many diverse opinions on SEO, and what makes this as much art as science, is the search engines themselves are constantly "fine tuning" the way they rank websites. They appear to do this for two primary reasons: first, to ostensibly provide better search results to their users and second, to prevent websites from "gaming the system."

Despite the varying opinions on SEO, there are some basic ground-rules. We are beginning a series of blog posts that will discuss how you can evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO, and give you practical suggestions on how you can improve your SEO. To not miss a thing, add our blog to your RSS feeder, or keep watching for new posts in the "Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO)" category.

Posted in Tutorials, Spa Search Engine Optimization (SEO) • 1 Comment »

Email marketing can be powerful stuff for your spa. It's no cost marketing for SpaBoomers to the very people most important to you: your clients and prospective clients that have asked for you to talk to them.

That power comes from email marketing being permission based. To begin, you should confirm that everyone that is on your client list is appropriately marked as a "yea" or a "nay" on the "Send Email Marketing?" checkbox. Make sure your list is updated, and you'll know that those who receive your marketing emails are only the people who are already receptive to communications from your business.

Second, even if you have sent out your own Email Marketing campaigns before, you'll need to go into the Settings and adjust all of the colors to make them your own.

Some default marketing colors are shown on the screen (which could differ from those below):

but they are just there to demonstrate a basic color palette. Until you adjust each of the five colors and save them, you will get the system's default colors and they might not be what you are expecting, which brings us to the final, crucial tip:

Use the "Send Test Email" link early and often as you craft the message. You might find that the colors need more tweaking, or the text could be refined.

Once everything looks great, you'll be ready to send off to your list of clients with confidence!

[As to what happens after you send the email, see our other post about email delivery.]

Posted in Creating Customers, Tutorials, Spa Marketing • Comment »

You likely receive emails from SpaBoom from time to time. Sometimes we are notifying you of your account settings and status, others are our newsletters about new features or seasonal heads-up reminders.

In some of those emails we will include logos or graphics to illustrate and decorate the message, but Outlook is often very proactive when it comes to blocking things of this nature. If something is not shown, the message will display a bar near the top that says, "Click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy…" et cetera:

In order to see all of the embedded graphics and logos that we might use in those emails, there is an easy task that will make everything pretty from now on. Just right-click on that bar and select "Add the domain @spaboom.com to Safe Senders List":

 
That means that in the future, any email from an @spaboom.com address will be deemed safe from Outlook's perspective, and it means the messages will be stylish as they ought to be from your perspective.

Posted in Tutorials, General • 1 Comment »

We've been adding new GC designs left and right, and now might be a good time to put away some of your Instant Gift Certificate designs that you've been using for awhile, and show off the new options, just to keep things interesting and fun.

Here's how to customize your customer's GC experience on your site.

When your customer loads your IGC page, they see, by default, the designs that have been marked as "Most Popular". This setting is a drop-down item in the Gift Certificate details view, shown here (just under the name of the GC):
 

 
Currently there are six (6) designs that are globally marked Most Popular, and those will show in addition to any that you have marked. So, if you have chosen 3 Most Popular that are different from ours, your customers will see 9 in total. Keeping it to an even number (six or eight) is visually more appealing, so keep that in mind when selecting those Most Popular items.

To only show the defaults we have selected (resetting all of the global GCs to the current defaults), both for Most Popular as well as Hidden/Not-Hidden, simply click the link on the lower left corner that says "Restore Defaults":

 

 

Again, that will undo ANY changes you have made to the settings of our original GC Designs. Your Custom GCs that you have uploaded (if any) are safe.

Posted in Tutorials, Spa Gift Certificates • Comment »

Are you? Will you admit to your obsession with all things SpaBoom, just like we'll admit that we're crazy about having you on board?

If you're one of our amazing businesses that have jumped up your sales by using Instant Gift Certificates and you're looking for ways to enhance what you provide to your customers, you probably read this very blog for tips and updates.

Whether you check in a few times a week or daily, you should know about a quick and easy way to make sure you never miss a new post - the RSS reader.

Think of all of the magazines, catalogs, and newspapers that you love to read, and the mailman that delivers them to your mailbox every day, saving you the hassle of going to stores to buy them in person. The blogs you read online are like those print publications and the RSS reader is both the mailman and the mailbox rolled into one - no need to bounce around on the web to get caught up on your reading.

If you already use a reader, just point it to our RSS Feed (also linked on the left side of the screen) and you're good to go.

If you are new to RSS, there are many web-based services available, from Bloglines to Google Reader, and they are as easy to use as web-based email. Dive in and enjoy your SpaBoom Blog addiction!

Posted in The Company, Resources and Development, Tutorials • 1 Comment »

Get more mileage out of your printed newsletters by posting them on your website using SpaBoom Events.

The first step is to get a PDF version of your newsletter. If you use an advertising agency or graphics designer, just ask them to send you a PDF whenever they create something for you. If you design your newsletters in-house, see if your software has a "Save to PDF" option, or check out free tools like PrimoPDF or PDFOnline.

Once you've got a PDF, it's easy to post it on your website:

1. Go to Setup, Events and Add Event.
2. Make up a Headline and some Narrative to describe your newsletter.
3. Change the type to "News".
4. For Link to PDF File, select "New file", then click on the Browse button and select your PDF file.
5. Enter an appropriate name in Link text for your PDF, like "March Newsletter".
6. Enter the Start date for when you'd like the PDF to first appear on your website.
7. If you'd like it to automatically disappear, enter an End date. Otherwise, leave it blank — Events automatically shows your latest three News items.

For Dynamic Spa Websites, your News item will automatically appear in the sidebar of your website. For linked-in sites, it will appear on your Specials and Events page (see Help to add the link to your website).

Fliers

The same approach works great for fliers, too. Just use an "Announcement" or "Occasion" type for the event instead, and enter an End date for when the flier is no longer relevant.

News Page

You can also add a "News" page to Dynamic Websites to show the history of all of your News items. This is particularly useful if you're using News for newsletters or other timely pieces like press releases:

1. Go to Setup, Website and Add Page, calling it something clever like "News".
2. Click on the edit main content icon, and change "Your Headline" to something like "News", and "your text" to "{news}". It's that little tag, with the funny curly braces around it, that causes your news events to appear on the page.
3. Add a link to your new page in main navigation and/or the main content of your home page.

Posted in Tutorials, Spa Marketing • Comment »

Of Instant Gift Certificates, that is. But first, let's step back and talk about what happens when you sell an Instant Gift Certificate.

Selling Instant Gift Certificates

Every time you sell an Instant Gift Certificate, you'll receive an email copy of the receipt sent to your client (and a copy of the emailed GC, if your client choose to email it).

1. If you're using automatic credit card processing, then you've already been paid. If you're doing manual processing, then you need to login to your account at SpaBoom and click on the GCs tab; any GCs you need to process have a cute little credit card icon next to them. Just click on it to bring up the credit card information.
2. Process the credit card like you would a phone order. For tracking purposes, enter the approval code and invoice # from the credit card transaction, and then change the status to "Processed". You can make any notes that you'd like to see for future reference.
3. If you're unable to successfully process the credit card, then contact the client for additional information. If you're unable to resolve, then mark the credit card has "All attempts failed", and then click on the GC and Void it.

Redeeming Instant Gift Certificates

Now, let's get to the redemption part. The lucky recipient has arrived on the scene:

1. When the recipient schedules their appointment, go to the GCs tab and search for the GC by the To, From, date or ID.
2. Verify that the GC is valid and check the remaining balance.
3. Depending on your policy, you may still want to collect credit card information to hold the appointment.
4. When the GC is redeemed, bring it back up in GCs. Click on the ID for the GC to see the history of activity.
5. Click Redeem and record the amount of the GC that has been used.
6. You don't need to issue a replacement GC for any unused portion. You can simply track the unused amount in SpaBoom. Some spas note the unused amount on the GC, and hand it back to the client, or use a rubber stamp with a blank to fill in the unused amount.

Posted in Tutorials, Spa Gift Certificates • Comment »