Season-Pricing Shifts Everything
Prices sit on your booking page like an old rug, never moved, while demand shifts under them every month of the year.
Prices sit on your booking page like an old rug, never moved, while demand shifts under them every month of the year.
Your prices are asleep on the job Most practices set a rate in January and leave it there like a coat on a hook, forgotten till it's out of season. Demand moves all year, restless as weather. Your pricing can move with it too. The practices that let it do so tend to fill the diary without ever raising their voice.
Your newsletter goes out at nine in the morning on the fourth of January. "New Year, New You," it says, in a font you chose with care.
Every other practice within five miles sends the same three words, the same morning, the same weary cheer. The inbox looks like a chorus line doing the identical kick, seven times over, before anyone's had their porridge.
Nobody applauds the seventh dancer. Your subject line needs to be doing something the other six aren't. That's a pricing question as much as a wording one.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
Seven identical kicks in one inbox. Nobody applauds the seventh dancer.
A physiotherapist near us drops her rates every August, convinced the town's gone still. Fair assumption. Everyone's away, the diary looks thin, so down go the prices like a blind at teatime.
But August is when the knee finally gets attention. The one people have been ignoring since March, hobbling round it, blaming the garden, the school run, the new shoes.
Summer is when clients finally have time to sort what they've been limping past for months. Cutting your rates then is like putting the good biscuits away the moment guests arrive. Your August prices deserve better than a August discount.
Try this anytime, before the tea's gone cold. Pull up what your prices were doing this time last year, and set it next to your bookings now.
Most practices never look that far back. The pattern sits there unread, like a diary nobody's opened since New Year's Day, full of things you'd have found useful in March.
Your own numbers hold the answer already. You just haven't asked them the question yet.
58% of UK physiotherapy practices run on the associate model. Only 21% work across more than one site.
The difference between those two figures matters more than it looks. A single-site associate practice can change its prices in an afternoon, over a cup of tea, with nobody to consult but the calendar on the wall.
A multi-site outfit needs three managers and a group chat just to agree on Tuesday. Your size decides your speed, and speed is worth knowing about before demand overtakes you.
Building a seasonal pricing calendar yourself takes real attention, every quarter, forever.
It is not a spreadsheet you build once in a burst of January virtue and never open again. It wants checking the way the boiler wants checking, regularly, by a reader who actually knows what she's looking at.
Handing it to another pair of eyes is a fair swap, if your afternoons are better spent with clients than with a calendar. Nobody chose this career to become a part-time actuary.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
One practice we noticed sells a "January reset package" and a "Spring refresh package," entirely separate, with their own leaflets and their own fonts.
Squint at them both and they're the same forty-minute massage, wearing a different cardigan depending on the month.
Nobody minds the renaming. Clients like a seasonal flavour, the way they like Quality Street changing its wrapper without changing the toffee inside.
But the website ends up reading like four different therapists wrote four different brochures, none of them quite talking to each other. Your naming can flex with the season. Your voice can stay in the same coat all year.
Word of mouth carries most bookings through the slack months anyway, the ones between the big pushes, when nobody's launching anything.
Pricing rarely gets touched until the diary looks properly thin. Panic arrives, and the discount gets far too generous, like over-buttering toast because you're hungry.
Test the small shift before panic does. A modest nudge in a still week beats a desperate one in a bare month.
The discount you make from panic is always bigger than the one you'd have chosen from a chair.
Ski resorts change their lift prices by the day, depending on snow, depending on who's turned up in Puffa jackets that morning. Nobody up there finds it strange.
Your practice has its own weather. Grey Februaries when nobody wants to leave the house, restless Septembers when everyone suddenly remembers their New Year plans.
The price on your booking page rarely notices either one. It sits there, unbothered, like a garden chair left out through a whole change of season.
Your pricing can read the weather too, once you decide to let it. Your forecast is sitting right there in last year's bookings.
Let your prices notice the season the way you already do. Sort your pricing
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