1. What is massage therapy software?
Massage therapy software helps massage studio owners, practitioners, and therapists manage appointments, schedule staff, and send client alerts/notifications. The software enables massage therapists to manage their calendars and maintain clinical documentation while also ensuring the following:
Record customer details
Process payments
Send appointment updates to clients
Create loyalty programs and marketing programs
Analyze staff performance for accurate payroll
2. The benefits of massage therapy software
The following are some of the most significant benefits of using the massage therapy software:
Time saving: Massage therapy software helps massage practitioners and owners save time and energy by automating administrative tasks, including calendar management, payment processing, and client communication.
Enhanced appointment scheduling: With online appointment scheduling systems, massage therapists enable their clients to book, cancel, or reschedule appointments at any time. In addition, the appointment scheduling feature provides your employees with detailed client information to help them understand massage clients’ preferences and offer more enhanced services.
Marketing automation: Massage therapy software features consist of marketing automation tools to help you reach your target audience, as well as retain your customer base by offering discounts, coupons, and gift cards. Most tools have dedicated marketing solutions, while others integrate with third-party solutions (such as a CRM tool) to help you run marketing campaigns and send email blasts. You can also use these tools to monitor the results of your marketing strategy and make necessary changes.
Staff management: Using this software, you can track employee workflow to ensure proper task allocation and prevent overburdening any employee. Massage therapy software lets you manage employees’ time off, payments, and overtime to ensure accurate payroll. You can also invite customer feedback for individual employees to analyze their performance and services.
Personalized services: Massage therapy software lets you record customers’ appointment history, feedback, preferences, and medical details to offer them personalized services and increase customer retention. It also improves your brand marketing strategy.
3. Typical features of massage therapy software
Here are some of the most common features of massage therapy software:
Appointment management: Schedule, modify, or cancel massage appointments online.
SOAP notes: Record SOAP (subjective, objective, assessment, and plan) notes about the customer’s condition and progress.
Customer database: Collect and store customer information such as name, location, service preferences, appointment booking history, and birthday, to enhance service and assist marketing efforts.
Email marketing: Access in-built marketing tools or integrate with third-party solutions to create and send email blasts/campaigns, organize loyalty programs, offer promotional gift vouchers, and measure progress.
Billing and invoicing: Track bills, send invoices, and process payments via cash, credit/debit cards, e-wallets, or gift cards, and automate alerts for upcoming and overdue payments.
Inventory management: Track inventory and enable automated reordering of items once the stock levels are low. Scan new product barcodes to capture details, label descriptions, and photos.
Customizable branding: Customize your massage therapy software module as per your business to represent your brand language.
Reminders/notifications: Send automated appointment reminders via SMS and(or) email to customers for their upcoming appointments, ensuring availability and avoiding no-shows.
4. The cost of massage therapy software
Most products in the market are priced on a “per user per month” basis and can be divided into three pricing tiers based on their starting price.
Price ranges*:
$1 - $14
$14 - $39
$39+
*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offering found on vendor websites on December 27, 2021. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentiles of pricing information gathered from vendor websites of sample products.
The above list summarizes pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise or premium product that is priced higher may include additional features such as loyalty/rewards program, lead management, and product consumption reports.
5. Considerations when purchasing massage therapy software
Business requirements: Before you invest in massage appointment scheduling software, you should analyze your business requirements. Consider whether you need advanced marketing features, or if a basic tool would suffice. Whether you want to automate your administrative tasks, streamline the appointment process, or maintain customer records. After identifying your business needs, you can look for a tool that best aligns with your checklist.
Marketing capabilities: Make sure the massage software you choose has some marketing capabilities, if not many, such as email marketing and CRM. Such features will help you reach your target audience, retain, and increase your customer base.
Integration with existing tools: Massage scheduling software works alongside calendar apps and customer relationship management tools for appointment scheduling and customer data management, respectively. Thereby, it is important to ensure that the solution you choose is compatible with your existing software stack.
Software price: Different vendors may have different pricing structures. Some have a one-time upfront fee, while others come with monthly subscriptions. Hence, you should examine the pricing structure to avoid hidden costs that inflate your investment.
Reporting: The massage therapy scheduling software you select should enable you to record appointment activities, sales reports, profit and loss statements, and tax reports to analyze business performance.
6. Relevant massage therapy software trends
Increased adoption CRM tools for precision marketing: Massage business and Spa owners are adopting CRM programs to increase capture rates, guest loyalty, and engagement. CRM tools help divide the market into smaller categories or groups with similar preferences, demographics, lifecycle, and behavior. After that, it enables users to channelize specific campaigns for each group. It ensures the delivery of brand messages and enhances precision marketing strategy. While some are already using CRM tools, many studios in the massage therapy software market are expected to adopt the program.
AI to increase operational efficiency: AI (artificial intelligence) can help wellness practitioners with marketing automation, streamlining massage bookings, reporting, and inviting new customers. It helps businesses analyze customer data to identify their preferences and create a personalized experience. AI also increases operational efficiency by sorting administrative tasks and allowing teams to focus on service delivery.
Sources
Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from Capterra’s 2021 Shortlist for massage therapy software. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in Capterra’s massage therapy software directory that offer them.
Wellness Industry: Top 10 technology trends for 2021 (Date accessed: Dec. 28, 2021)
Emerging Trends: Spa and Wellness (Date accessed: Dec. 28, 2021)
