Buy One Healing Session, Get One Free

by Coach Cary Bayer

Restaurants, shoe stores, athletic stores, bookstores, you name it...these days it's hard not to find an ad for a "Buy one, get one free" offer. I can hardly walk down an aisle in my local Public supermarket in south Florida without seeing the word "FREE" in huge bold letters, while the "Buy one, get one..." piece of copy is in smaller font and without bold face. Oh, sure, you don't see it in the ads for medical practices, auto dealers, and healers. It's understandable why businesses that sell big-ticket items like cars aren't going to give away something as expensive as a $20,000 item just for purchasing another one. And it's understandable why MDs, uncomfortable about advertising in the first place, aren't running such specials. But massage therapists, hypnotherapists, chiropractors? There's no really good reason why they're not doing it.

In a previous column in a massage journal, I discussed the advantages of massage therapists promoting half-price specials for first-time clients. Many LMTs adopted the practice with excellent results. For the cost of a few hundred dollars worth of advertising, a number of them received ongoing clients--some of whom might be worth several-to-many thousands of dollars during the course of their relationships with these therapists.

The buy-one-get-one-free special is actually a refinement of that ad. I say it's a refinement because it requires that first-time clients pay the full price for their first session before they receive the second one gratis. The key to making this promotion successful is to make it so that the new client receives that free session within a week of the first.

What the half-price and the buy-one-get-one-free specials have in common is that new people get to experience your work for half the price they normally would. This is particularly attractive to them during a slowed- down economy. The advantages of the latter over the former, however, are several:
1. New clients have to pay full price for their first session from you. This is psychologically important.
2. New clients get two sessions from you rather than one.
3. New clients get these two sessions in consecutive weeks.
4. The second session they receive will be free. Human nature being what it is, the tendency to feel obligated to the therapist is very real, perhaps further inspiring the client to sign up for a third session.

The peaceful state that accompanies a healing treatment from you is far more subtle than a sloppy Big Mac or an eventual sweaty pair of Nikes, each of which can also be purchased on a buy-one-get-one-free basis, so that some therapists might feel it odd to be compared to such multinational giants. But for a healer to be conceptually associated with companies which feature two of the most prominent logos in American marketing history can only be a good thing.

Cary Bayer (www.carybayer.com) was keynote speaker at the 2006 American Massage Therapy Association national convention. Widely known as The Business Coach for Massage Therapists, Cary is a Life Coach; CE provider licensed by NCBTMB and Florida Dept. of Health's Board of Massage Therapy; and faculty member of Massage Business University, he writes for Massage Today, massage publications in 14 states, and a syndicated column, "Life 101," that runs in wellness publications. His 27 publications include 11 specifically for massage therapists. He's coached some 150 LMTs and dozens of alternative healers. His CE seminars, "Build a $100,000 a Year Massage Business" and "Healer, Heal Thyself," are very popular among alternative facilitators.