We spoke to Hylton Lipkin, Head of Operations at Apollo Health about their plans and challenges with their rapid expansion and how Zenoti (formerly ManageMySpa) software helps them manage their spas, salons and fitness centers.

Can you describe your business in 1-3 sentences?

Apollo Health and Lifestyle has 5 centers in the country. Each location may have slightly different facilities available, but they can include any combination of rehabilitation, fitness, spa and salon facilities.

Why are memberships important for your business?

Memberships ensure we don’t lose our customers for any reason, even those that have been long time regulars. In the past few years, we’ve seen 5 competitors open up within a mile of this particular center. We get a higher lifetime value from members, and also increased our revenue. Most of our revenue for our fitness centers comes from memberships and more than 30% of our spa and salon revenue comes from memberships. Clearly, it’s in our interest to maximize revenue from memberships.

Can you describe your membership programs?

Our fitness center requires a membership to use the facilities. Some memberships require an upfront payment, while others require a monthly subscription fee. For our spa and salon, our membership plans include a set of services, credits or even ongoing discounts. We always cross-promote our fitness, spa and salon offerings between each business unit. This has been an extremely successful way for us to convert fitness club members into regular spa and salon customers.

How does Zenoti software help you run your membership program?

For our family and couple memberships, we’re able to add multiple guests to a single membership – the salon management software tracks everything for us and has built in mechanisms so that there’s no dispute on benefit usage at a later time. Members often ask for the balance on their membership. It’s easy to look up in Zenoti, which makes it easy for us to clarify on any misunderstandings or disputes.

We also have a few corporate spas and corporate accounts. For our spa at the Google office, their employees pay for a portion of their total invoice at the time of their visit. We bill Google for the remaining portion at the end of every month. Zenoti tracks everything for us – how many employees came in, money received from the employee and money due from Google. We just have to send the reports to Google, which makes accounting between Google and us accurate.

Around 15% of our customers visit more than one location. Zenoti gives us real-time access to our customer database. So, we can access the customer’s membership details and balance regardless of which location they visit. This ensures we can deliver a highly personalized experience regardless of where they are. From an operational perspective, Zenoti helps us automate most aspects of managing our membership programs.

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Can you describe real business results you’ve seen by using Zenoti?

There are a few things that stand apart for me. The first is that we use the personalized icons on the appointment book in a number of ways. There’s one icon that indicates when a customer is a high spender (I can also see the customer’s total spend from the appointment book). We always encourage these customers in particular to sign up for a membership. We have a 50% success rate. These customers end up trying new services and we’re also assured of their long term loyalty. This represents significant revenue opportunity for us. Also, we see higher value from members just from the fact that on average 15% of a membership value is never redeemed. This compensates for any discounts in a membership and actually we come out ahead in terms of revenue. Zenoti helps us track our membership revenue and identify the best performing salon membership program for us. Cross promoting services between the salon, spa and fitness centers helps us increase each customer’s average spend with us. To drive more of these types of memberships, we send SMS’s and emails to promote deals and make announcements directly from Zenoti. The target segment capabilities make it easy for us to make sure no-one goes untouched, and that we’re sending the right offer to each customer. And, we’re able to track the effectiveness of these campaigns by tracking membership sign-ups and so on. Read more case studies to learn how businesses have grown with Zenoti. To learn more about Zenoti, request a demo.