Well…

2020 hasn’t really been what any of us expected, has it?

To be certain, it’s tested (testing?) many of us to our limits (and sometimes beyond).

There’s a lesson here though. There’s always a lesson…

And it’s one many of us have learned before.

In the midst of chaos and upheaval and great discomfort, there is always great opportunity.

Always.

And just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

And that’s the challenge — now and as we move forward into the future as MTs, bodyworkers, business people, parents, children, friends, and communal members of this delicate planet.

This year, when the world as we knew it changed dramatically in a matter of a few weeks, this perspective helped us here at MassageBook get off our heels — and move towards massive action.

We shifted our focus quickly to how we could help support our community of bodyworkers who were faced with a foreseeable future of greatly reduced to zero income.

We cut our subscription rates in half for two months, made all our premium features available to everyone at no cost, provided a stream of actionable ideas that could help our community earn income while the doors were still closed, and set aside 30 minutes for everyone of you who wanted to speak to us one on one to make sure your practice was taking advantage of every benefit and feature MassageBook provides.

And, just as importantly, we helped you focus on preparing for rapid growth for the day that your doors opened again.

Here, at home in Charleston, South Carolina, we committed to keeping our full staff engaged and working on features and improvements that were needed “Now!”

When we look at how quickly most of the practices using MassageBook were able to ramp up to near normal levels again, it makes us very happy to think that we perhaps had at least a little something to do with that.

Since then, it’s been full gas — working on a long list of features that will continue to help you and your practice operate smoothly and reach your business goals as we head into 2021.

At the end of the year, I like to put together a list of all the things we accomplished in the last year. If you’d like to see all the ways we improved MassageBook in 2020, please see below…

Today still finds most of us at MassageBook working from our homes, missing the casual conversations and banter with our fellow teammates, and yearning for the day when we can be with each other again and feel connected by more than the virtual thread of video and chatrooms.

I imagine almost all of us probably share some version of those sentiments.

So it’s with sadness and empathy that we acknowledge that not all of us were able to make it through this crisis unscathed, and with pride that we congratulate those of you who courageously made the most of this year.

Thank you for continuing to trust us, and to support our mission of helping our profession flourish in good times and bad.

Wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a more predictable, happy and successful 2021!

Mark and all your fans on the MassageBook Team

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The Best Ways MassageBook Continued to Help Massage and Bodywork Practices Simplify and Grow in 2020

New Improvements to Scheduling and Online Booking

MassageBook’s scheduling and online booking software is built to help you manage your availability with confidence and keep you on top of your busy life as both a business owner and service provider. This year saw the release of many long-awaited, highly anticipated features that give you even more capabilities and control over how you do business with your clients online.

1. A freshly designed, mobile-friendlier online booking experience that helps you earn more income

The latest version of online booking uses a faster, modern design to simplify how clients book and pay for appointments online. Plus, they can leave a tip in advance and breeze through checkout by keeping a card on file in their online booking account.

Go here to watch a video of the new experience and learn more about each update we’ve added to it.

2. Smart scheduling to save time and make you more efficient

Minimize Gaps — one of two new ways MassageBook helps you better control your online availability — automatically and intelligently modifies how your online booking openings appear so that clients can only pick appointment times near existing appointments.

Watch a demo video on how Minimize Gaps prevents awkwardly long periods of downtime between appointments to help you get the most out of each hour you work:

3. Smart scheduling to limit how many online booking openings show

Make Me Look Busy — the second new way MassageBook helps you better control your online availability — makes it easy to hide some of your online openings if you don’t want the world to see when your schedule has plenty of room to spare.

Watch a demo video on how Make Me Look Busy caps your online appointment times by only showing a percentage of what you actually have open:

4. A contactless way for clients to prepay for upcoming appointments that weren’t booked online

Even though we firmly believe that online booking is the best way to schedule appointments, it’s not lost on us that many practice owners still book appointments on behalf of their clients.

To make it safe and convenient to collect payments from those clients, each client can prepay for their upcoming appointments in advance through their individual MassageBook account.

Now all they have to do is get off the table, get dressed, and simply walk out the door!

New Improvements to Client Intake Forms and Appointment Reminder Emails

In order to ensure the best overall experience at your practice, it’s vital that clients are well-informed about your procedures and protocols and that you have accurate, up-to-date health information on each one. It goes without saying, COVID-19 has taken things to a whole new level!

1. COVID-19 features to help you get back to practice safely

As businesses began to reopen their doors after the initial shutdown, we decided to add COVID-19 precautions and symptoms to client intake forms and appointment reminder emails to help make the pre-screening process for appointments smarter, safer, and easier.

Go here to watch a video on how the COVID-19 features work and learn more about each update we’ve added to them.

2. Smarter intake form requests to help keep you and your clients safe and on the same page

Automated email requests that remind existing clients to update their intake forms, the ability to exclude some clients from receiving intake form update requests, and more timely intake form requests for new clients are three new enhancements we added to help practice owners stay informed and better navigate reopening their doors with confidence.

Go here to learn more about how these new additions work to help keep you and your clients safe.

New Improvements to the MassageBook Directory, Promotions, Email Campaigns, and Membership Management

MassageBook’s marketing software includes easy-to-use features that every independent bodyworker can rely on to attract new clients and get existing ones booking and buying more often. Our focus over this year has been on creating new ways to take even more of the marketing workload off of you — because with the right tools in place — you can focus your time and energy on keeping happy, healthy clients.

1. A seamless way to get promotions in front of more new clients

MassageBook Promotions makes it simple for you to create custom deals on services or gift certificates that can be quickly shared with existing clients across email and social media using the tools that are already available in MassageBook.

To help your promotions reach a wider audience of new clients, MassageBook’s directory of massage and bodywork professionals, which attracts thousands of weekly visitors looking to find a service provider near them, now includes a Deals section on the main search page.

Visitors to the directory can quickly view and book active promotions that are going on nearby, giving you a seamless way to put any promotions on services or gift certificates that you’re currently running right in front of people who are looking for the types of services you provide.

The directory is in the process of getting a fresh makeover with more precise tools to help each visitor find the provider that’s right for them. Learn more about Deals and what’s coming next for the directory in our webinar recording, Top Tips for Getting More New Clients From the MassageBook Directory.

2. An eye-catching, customizable page for selling more promotions

Promotions have helped thousands of massage and bodywork businesses book more appointments and sell more gift certificates since the feature launched back in 2017. With the release of the new “Deals” section on the MassageBook directory homepage, we knew it was time for us to revisit the look and feel of each promotion’s unique webpage.

Just in time for the holidays, all new promotions feature a modern page design, including a color of your choice that’s based on the theme color of your MassageBook website.

3. Pre-written massage focused emails to simplify marketing your services

Email marketing is one of the simplest and most direct ways to promote your services and keep in touch with clients about what’s new at your practice all year round.

To help you spend less time coming up with your own material, we added a host of new pre-written email templates to the Campaigns feature for things like coronavirus updates, collecting Google reviews, and holiday marketing.

You’ll find these new templates in MassageBook under Marketing > Campaigns > +New Campaign. Pick your favorites today, customize to your liking, and schedule them to send on the dates of choice.

It’s easy to implement the new templates for Gift Certificates and Memberships as a series of emails that can help you increase gift certificate sales and the number of regular clients you see monthly. Follow right along in our webinar recording, Holiday Marketing Strategies for Growing Your Massage Business.

4. More exclusive membership plans that reward your most loyal clients

Starting a Membership program for your practice is a smart way to grow the number of regulars you see. Clients who sign up for a Membership plan are issued monthly service credits and enjoy a hassle-free way of booking and paying for their appointments each month.

As a way of rewarding Membership clients for their loyalty, many Membership plans are slightly discounted. MassageBook makes this easy by letting you create both simple and more involved plans based on any extra incentives you want to provide.

Want to create a multi-level Membership program that rewards clients with more perks as they move up? No problem! You’ve now got an even better way to make each plan more exclusive than the one before.

In addition to in office and outcall services, Membership plans can now include service menu add-ons like aromatherapy, hot stones, and essential oils.

Add-on credits are tracked, managed and redeemed just like service credits, meaning a client can apply them during the online booking experience.

New Improvements Coming in 2021

Here’s a sneak peak at a few of the big-ticket items we’re hard at work on for next year:

• A brand new cash register that will open the door for us to build more of the features you’ve been requesting — like inventory management and keeping a client’s credit card on file in your account.

• A completely new version of the MassageBook mobile app built on a brand new technology platform. It’s going to look amazing and streamline a lot of functions (like checking out if you use Square as your payment processor). Plus, it will also let us build even more features into the app as we continue to develop MassageBook mobile.

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Sign in to explore the best of MassageBook 2020.

For a full list of enhancements and bugs fixes that are included in each software release, visit the Update Log in the MassageBook Help Center.

Questions about anything that’s new in MassageBook? We’re standing by and ready to help!

Email us at support@massagebook.com, call us at 843-352-2026, or live chat with us in MassageBook.