Have you ever heard the saying, ‘You can’t sell a secret’? It’s worth remembering. After all, what point is there in having a beautifully appointed spa, with an amazing range of pampering and remedial treatments on offer, if no one knows anything about them? This is where a well-planned spa menu not only educates but also entices potential and existing clients to experience more of the treatments your spa has to offer. Your menu needs to be much more than simply a price list that contains every treatment you offer. Instead, it should be crafted with increasing sales in mind. There’s no question that a well-designed menu will help to generate additional revenue, but the amount of revenue it generates will be determined by the treatments you include, the description of each treatment, and the way the content is presented to the reader.

What goes out and what stays in…

Stays In

Naturally, your menu should include your most popular and profitable services. These are the services you know your target market is interested in having and the ones you know will return a healthy profit also. If you’re a start-up business without any information on past sales, then it’s important to do your market research on this topic before creating your first menu. Don’t blindly assume that your clients are going to want the treatments you want to provide, as this isn’t always the case. Your spa will also benefit from including some essential spa policies on your menu. This will help to overcome many exasperating issues spa owners deal with such as late arrivals, no-shows, last minute cancellations, inappropriate cell phone usage and bringing along their children to their spa appointment. And of course, you need to include all your contact information (including website), opening hours and location so that readers can easily make their booking.

Goes Out

To create a profit-generating menu, you need to begin by eliminating space-wasting treatments from your menu that are both unpopular and unprofitable. Don’t be tempted to include every single service your spa provides, as unless you have unlimited space, this isn’t practical and won’t help you to sell your top profit-makers. The same principle applies to your add-on treatment options. Include only those that will help to increase sales and profits. It’s pointless to use a valuable line of space on a $10 upgrade service when that space could have been used to promote a $100 facial or body treatment instead.

Menu Size – Is bigger really better?

The ultimate goal of your spa menu should be to help increase not only sales but more importantly, profits. This is not necessarily achieved by listing every service on offer as mentioned earlier. By eliminating the less popular or unprofitable services from your menu, you will often be able to stay with a standard DL tri-fold brochure, which means you will eliminate the additional cost involved in producing more expensive booklet-style menus. However, if your spa offers a wide range of higher-priced and exclusive services that require more descriptive text and images required to convince readers to buy, then a more lavish booklet-style brochure may be in order. Choose the style of menu that best fits in with your spa branding. An expensive day spa needs a higher quality menu, but a small regular spa may be well served by a tri-fold brochure. The important thing to remember is that you want to be able to freely hand out your menus to prospects and clients without worrying too much about the cost involved. If you are hesitant to hand out your menus because of the cost, then your menu is not able to do its job, which is to generate sales.

Service Descriptions – Should you focus on benefits or features?

Too often, I read service descriptions that are loaded with industry jargon or are a step-by-step outline of service inclusions. You may think this sounds professional and informative, but what your readers really want to know more about are the benefits they will receive from each treatment. This means, that instead of using words only other industry professionals understand, you need to use words that your readers will understand. If you’re not sure if you are focusing too much on service features and not enough on benefits in your service descriptions, consider whether your text delivers solutions to reader’s problems. As an example, does it tell the reader that her skin will be deeply hydrated (benefit) or does it say you include Hyaluronic Acid (feature)? Does it talk about diamond tips (feature) or tell the reader that her skin will be softer, smoother and more evenly toned (benefit)? When space is short, it’s always preferable to focus on the benefits clients will get from their treatment, rather than the delivery method and ingredients used.

Menu Layout – What goes where?

The layout of the services on your menu is also important to improve readability. You want to ensure that your readers see the most profit-generating and popular services first. With this in mind, consider your service category placement carefully. Your goal should be to make finding popular and profitable services an easy task for your readers. Don’t make them hunt for the services they want to know more about (and you want to sell). Keep these VIP services towards the beginning of your menu, and use the less obvious areas of the menu for the basics such as waxing and tinting (unless, of course, these are your specialist services). Also, consider how you can use service categories to help your readers find services more easily. As an example, you may want to consider breaking down your facials into various categories (depending on the style of spa you have). Some spas might break facials into Relaxation-style and Remedial. Others might use categories such as Facials, Skin Treatments and Peels. You might also want to break up your body treatments into Massage Therapy and Body Treatments to make it easier for your readers. Look for ways to segment your services so that readers can easily find what they may be interested in having, and avoid the temptation to lump as much as possible under a single category heading. Do your best to simplify your reader’s job of finding the service they want.

Menu Readability – If they can’t read it, they won’t buy it.

I’m an avid collector of spa menus. One thing that frequently stands out to me is the fact that these menus are often next to impossible to read. This is generally due to the use of a quirky font, tight line spacing and extra small text size due to trying to cram too much information into too small a space. If you want clients and prospects to actually read your menu, you must make it as easy as possible for them to do so. You can do this by choosing easy-to-read fonts for your text, increased line spacing so your text doesn’t look crammed in and, of course, making sure your font size is large enough to actually read with ease. By allowing some breathing room around your text, your service information will stand out more vividly.

Summary

The goal when creating your menu is to inform and tantalise your readers. It should show them clearly what benefits to expect and create an emotional response to that information. And finally, it should convert your readers into buyers by getting them to take the desired action of booking an appointment with your spa.