How to run an IV therapy promotion that books real clients

Give each promotion one job

A discount meant to bring in new clients, fill a slow Tuesday and sell a package all at once is hard to aim and hard to measure. Before you write a word, decide which single job this offer has.

• First visit: gives people who have never booked with you a reason to try a new nurse.
• Slow hours: fills the weekday mornings or early afternoons your calendar sits empty.
• Groups: books a wedding party, an office or a team as one trip, which matters most if you are mobile.
• Second visit: brings back clients who came once and have not returned.

The job decides everything that follows: who sees the offer, where you post it, what the client has to do to get it and how you will know it worked. If you have two jobs, run two promotions with two names and two codes.

Price it from your own numbers first

Write down what one visit actually costs you before you pick a discount. Count the bag and supplies, the nurse's time, any card fees and, if you are mobile, the drive there and back. Subtract that from the promoted price. What is left is your real margin on the promotional visit.

Fill in this line before you post anything: promoted price, minus bag and supplies, minus nurse time, minus drive time, minus card fees, equals what you keep. If that last number is close to zero, the offer only works if the client comes back.

Then ask what has to happen next for the promotion to pay off. For a first visit offer, that usually means the client books again at full price. For a slow hours offer, it means the visit fills time you would have earned nothing in anyway. If the only way the numbers work is a return visit, plan the rebooking text before you launch, not after.

Some offers cost you less than a straight discount and still feel generous:

• Waive the travel fee for bookings in your home town on weekday mornings.
• A group rate that only applies when enough guests book the same trip for it to be worth your drive.
• A prepaid package where the saving comes with the commitment to come back.

Each of these rewards the behavior you want, which a percentage off on any day does not.

The pricing words the FTC watches

Promotions run on a few words: free, sale, regular price, was and now. The Federal Trade Commission has written guides on each of them, and they apply to a small IV business the same way they apply to a big retailer.

Start with "regular price." If your ad says a drip is normally one price and now another, the normal price has to be one you really charged, openly, for a real stretch of time. That is the test in the FTC's Guides Against Deceptive Pricing. Raising your menu price for a week so the sale looks bigger is the exact trick the guide calls false.

"Free" has its own guide. It defines the regular price behind a free offer as the price you sold at for a reasonably substantial period of time, i.e., a 30-day period. So a free add-on with a drip only means something if the drip was already selling at that price for the past month. Quietly raising the drip price to cover the add-on is exactly what the guide says customers have a right to believe you will not do.

The same guide on free offers wants every condition stated clearly at the start of the offer. In plain terms, the conditions go right next to the offer, where people read it. An asterisk that sends people to small print at the bottom of the page does not count.

Sample wording: "New clients: [amount] off your first visit in [town] when you book a weekday morning by [date]. Use code [CODE]. One per person." Every condition sits in the offer itself.

Promote the visit and leave out the outcome

The quickest way to get an ad disapproved, or to draw a regulator's attention, is to dress a promotion up with a health promise. "Beat the flu," "detox for the new year" and "boost your immunity" all make a claim about what the drip does. The FTC's guidance for health products says claims about the health benefits or safety of foods, dietary supplements, drugs, and other health-related products require substantiation in the form of competent and reliable scientific evidence. A seasonal coupon is not where you want to be defending that.

Promote the parts of the visit you can stand behind: a licensed nurse, the town you serve, the time slot, the price and how to book. The urgency can come from the date the offer ends. If you are unsure whether a line crosses into a health claim, ask your medical director before it goes live.

Where to put the offer so people see it

Your Google Business Profile. Google lets you post an offer straight to your profile on Search and Maps. In Google's words, an offer post is meant to Provide promotional sales or deals from your business. It requires a title, dates, and time. It also adds a View Offer button and has room for a coupon code and terms. Google's tips for posts also add a caution for regulated industries, a list that names pharmaceutical products and health and medical devices: You can use posts if you offer products or services in a regulated industry, but do not include content about the products. To stay on the safe side, keep the post about the appointment, the price and the dates, and leave the drip's ingredients out of it.

Google Ads. If you already run ads, a promotion asset shows the offer under your ad without rewriting it. Google's help page explains that You can show a monetary or percentage discount as your Promotion type, and you can add a code and start and end dates. One setting to know: Google says Existing promotion assets that haven't been modified for the last 6 months are automatically paused, so an old offer will not run forever, but you should still remove it yourself the day it ends.

A page for the offer. Send the post and the ad to a page that shows only this offer, its terms and a booking button. A homepage makes people hunt for it. The guide on landing pages and homepages walks through what that page needs.

Your own clients. A short text to past clients costs almost nothing and reaches people who already trust you. Send it once, with the end date and the booking link, and do not send it again the next day.

Set an end date and count what it booked

Every promotion needs an end date that you keep. An offer that never ends becomes your real price, and anyone who paid full price last week notices. The FTC's guide on free offers even limits how often one runs: a single size of a product or a single kind of service should not be advertised with a "Free" offer in a trade area for more than 6 months in any 12-month period.

Give each promotion its own code or its own booking link, so you can count three things when it ends: how many people used it, how many were new to you and how many came back at full price. That last count tells you whether to run it again. Google Ads policy also expects your ad and your page to match. It warns against Ads or destinations that deceive users by excluding relevant product information or providing misleading information about products, services, and businesses, so when the offer ends, the ad text, the promotion asset and the page come down together.

Promotions to skip

• Deep discounts with no plan for the second visit. They fill a day with people who were shopping for the lowest price and may never return at your regular rate.
• Anything traded for a review. A discount or free add-on in exchange for a Google review breaks Google's rules. Our guide to Google reviews covers what you can and cannot offer.
• Offers named after a condition. A "hangover special" or a "flu fighter deal" puts the health claim in the name of the promotion itself.
• A sale on top of a raised price. If the regular price was not real, the sale is not either.

Sources

• FTC Guide Concerning Use of the Word "Free" (16 CFR Part 251), eCFR
• FTC Guides Against Deceptive Pricing (16 CFR Part 233), eCFR
• FTC Health Products Compliance Guidance
• Google Business Profile Help: Create and manage posts on your Business Profile
• Google Ads Help: About promotion assets
• Google Ads policies

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