Nik’s Marketing Minute June 2011
When Owners Yvon Cormier and Jennifer Crook opened the latest Oceanside Fitness & Tanning gym in Shediac, NB they wanted to grow the tanning business as quickly as possible. Jennifer and Yvon knew from experience that while traditional radio and newspaper advertising worked… it also took time.
“We own gyms with full tanning salons inside them. What we did to accelerate business growth was producing a couple thousand business cards with ‘Free tan’ written on them. We gave them away in numerous ways - each new gym member got one (even the non-tanners, who were asked to pass them along to a friend who tanned). We gave each of our 8 staff members a handful of free tan cards, and asked them to pass them along to their social circle. We asked gym members who were also hairdressers and estheticians (seeing a lot of women clientele in a social environment) who were ‘raving fans’ of our facility to help us give out free tans to their clientele. We also went door to door to businesses in the community and left our gym brochures along with some free tan cards, and asked business owners to leave them in the lunchroom.
We expired all the cards a few weeks from when we gave them away, and also indicated on the card ‘limit 1 card per person’.
Our tanning business went from a standing start to NEARLY AS BUSY as our 10-year old salon in just months. We received hundreds of new tanners who brought in the free tan cards. Each new tanner who tanned for free was told that they could “refer” new tanners to us who would also be given a free tan.
Our tanning business is now bustling. We have added a new Versa Spa spray tan booth to our 5 UV bed mix, and are enjoying huge success in our market in our very first year of business. And we know we will only get busier as word of mouth spreads about our beds and our customer service.”
If you have a Marketing Minute that you would like to share, please e-mail me your promotional idea and if we print it you will be rewarded with $150.00 in product.
Thanks, 
nik@uvalux.com
