The Law of Demand: How to Sell High-Ticket Med Spa Services

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Most med spa owners spend a lot of time thinking about offers and ad campaigns—but not enough time thinking about basic economics.

In this article, I want to walk through a simple yet powerful economic principle, the law of demand, and show you how it directly applies to your marketing, your offers, your client quality, and the day-to-day experience of your providers.

We’ll break down:

• Why high-ticket packages are harder to sell directly from ads
• Why “gateway” services (like injectables and low-cost facials) work so well
• When ultra-low intro offers (like a $25 facial) do make sense—and when they don’t
• How to balance math, client quality, provider happiness, and long-term growth

This isn’t theory—I’ll share real examples from practices we manage, plus the math and trade-offs you have to understand.

The Law of Demand (And Why It Matters for Your Med Spa)

Let’s start with the basic definition.

The law of demand describes the inverse relationship between price and quantity demanded.

When price goes up, demand goes down.
When price goes down, demand goes up.

In other words:

• When the price of a product or service increases, fewer people are willing and able to buy it.
• When the price decreases, more people are willing and able to buy it.

Simple example:
There are far more people buying a pack of gum at the checkout counter today than buying a new home. Same world, same consumers—just very different price points.

This is basic economics, but it has major implications for your marketing.

If you:

• Run a promo for a $99 facial, you’re going to get more people responding than
• If you run a promo for a $4,000 facial rejuvenation package

Just like:

• More people drive Hondas than Rolls-Royces.

So when you hear consultants say:

“You should focus on selling high-ticket, $3,000–$5,000 treatment plans to your ideal clients…”

That may be true as a long-term goal—but you have to respect the law of demand and be honest about the trade-offs:

• Higher price = fewer responses
• Lower price = more responses

The question becomes: How do we reverse engineer this intelligently?

Why High-Ticket Packages Are Hard to Sell Directly From Ads

Most med spa owners have a mental picture of their “best client”:

• They come in consistently
• They spend good money (often in big chunks)
• They’re generally easy to work with
• They trust your recommendations

Those clients often do buy high-ticket packages and treatment plans.

But here’s the key:

High-ticket purchases require trust.
Trust requires a relationship.

And you rarely build that level of trust from a single ad.

High-ticket services—full facial rejuvenation plans, multi-session laser programs, big wellness transformations—usually require:

• Social proof
• A compelling story about the transformation, not just the treatment
• A sense that the provider and practice can truly be trusted

Without that trust, the hurdle to saying “yes” at $3,000–$5,000 is just too high for most people.

That’s why, at our agency, we talk constantly about gateway services—especially injectables.

Injectables as the “Gateway Drug” to Your Med Spa

If you’ve listened to the podcast, you’ve heard this from us a lot:

We love injectables as the gateway drug that brings people into your med spa.

Not because we have some back-alley deal with Allergan or Galderma (we don’t).
We just follow the data.

Over and over, what we see is:

• Practices that use injectables as a front-end gateway
• And then cross-sell and ascend patients into higher-ticket services over time

…tend to have the best growth and the best long-term results.

Injectables sit in a sweet spot:

• Price point: Not “gum at checkout” cheap, but not $4,000 either
• Familiar: Most consumers have at least heard of Botox, Dysport, etc.
• Immediate or near-term visible results
• Great entry point for a first experience with your practice

The law of demand says:
If you try to acquire brand new patients directly for that $4,000 rejuvenation plan, far fewer people will respond than if you get them in the door with a Botox or filler offer.

So our philosophy:

Use marketing to maximize opportunities for first visits with gateway services.
Use your in-office experience to turn those opportunities into long-term, high-value relationships.

Marketing’s Real Job: Create Opportunities, Not Just Sales

Here’s the reframing I want you to sit with:

Marketing is here to create opportunities far more than it is to create high-ticket sales directly.

Marketing:

• Gets people aware of your brand
• Gets them curious enough to book
• Gets them physically into your practice

After that, the baton passes to:

• Your providers
• Your consultation process
• Your follow-ups
• Your client experience

That’s where trust is built. That’s where bigger treatment plans get sold.

We’ve seen amazing examples of this:

• One practice we spoke to still writes handwritten cards to new patients two weeks after their appointment.
  • Think about the signal that sends:
    “We care. You’re not just a transaction.”
  • That builds trust in ways no ad copy can.

So the flow becomes:

1. Marketing → creates opportunities (at-bats)
2. Experience & education → builds trust
3. Trust → makes high-ticket plans and long-term retention possible

But remember: there’s a line.

You can go too far in the direction of “more opportunities at any cost.”

That’s where offer strategy and the law of demand collide.

Case Study: The $25 Introductory Facial

Let’s talk about one of the most extreme “opportunity-maximizing” strategies we’ve used:

A $25 introductory facial offer.

We’ve seen this work extremely well in some practices—and fall flat or feel awful in others.

When the $25 Facial Works

My colleague Lauren shared one of our favorite examples:

• We ran this $25, 60-minute introductory facial for a client at Christmas.
• They booked 200 brand new appointments from that campaign.
• Roughly 40% of those patients cross-sold or upsold into other services and became recurring patients.

Not a 30-minute “teaser”—a full 60-minute facial for $25.

Why did it work so well?

1. They kept the price point.
   They didn’t tweak it up to $49 or $59 when they got nervous. They stayed committed to $25.
   
2. They had a stellar provider running those appointments.
   That esthetician:
   
   • Used the full 60 minutes to talk, educate, and build rapport
   • Treated every visit like a chance to create a long-term relationship
     
3. They integrated their injector into the experience.
   During those intro facials, the lead injector would come in, introduce herself, and say hi.
   That simple touch:
   
   • Humanized the practice
   • Planted the seed for future injectables
   • Connected the facial experience to the rest of the med spa

This is what “doing it right” looks like:

• Strong offer
• Intentional in-office experience
• Focused on relationship and education, not just volume

When the $25 Facial Doesn’t Work

We’ve also seen the flip side.

Here are a few patterns where this type of offer tends to fail:

1. The provider isn’t selling anything now to people who already know and trust them.
   • If your existing clients aren’t buying microneedling, products, or other higher-ticket services from your esthetician…
   • It’s unrealistic to expect that brand new people from a $25 promo will.
     
2. As Lauren put it:
   “It’s not fair to expect a brand-new $25 facial client to buy the big microneedling package if your existing patients aren’t doing that either.”
   
3. The practice plays with the price point.
   
   • When people bump the offer from $25 to $49 or $59 “to make the math feel better,”
   • Response rates drop, cost per acquisition goes up, and the whole balance shifts.
     
4. The provider has the wrong mindset.
   
   • If they resent these patients
   • Don’t want to educate or cross-sell
   • Or treat them as “cheap” and low priority
     
5. …the strategy collapses, even if the math could have worked.
   
6. There’s no back-end plan.
   • No clear cross-sell path
   • No packages or memberships to present
   • No follow-up nurture

Then you’re just giving away cheap facials with no strategy to turn them into revenue and retention.

The Trade-Off: More Dirt, More Gold

Let’s assume the math does work and your team executes reasonably well.

There are still important trade-offs to accept.

With low-ticket, high-volume offers (like $25 facials or deeply discounted toxin):

• You will see more cancellations and reschedules.
• You will see higher no-show rates.
• You will see lower retention rates compared to full-price services.
• A smaller percentage will become long-term clients.

That’s normal. That’s the game.

I like to describe it this way:

You have to sift through more dirt to find more gold.

Example:

• With a low-cost intro offer:
  • You might have to sift through 100 pounds of dirt to find 10 pounds of gold.
• With a full-price Botox-only strategy:
  • You might only see 3 pounds of gold,
  • But much less “dirt” to sift through.

Neither is inherently right or wrong.

You just need to:

• Be honest about the trade-offs
• Decide what your practice has the tolerance and capacity for

There’s also a sliding scale at play:

• A $25 facial will almost always produce:
  • The highest volume
  • The lowest retention rate
• A full-price Botox offer will often produce:
  • Much fewer leads
  • But a much higher retention rate (80%+ isn’t unusual)

The question isn’t “Which is perfect?”
The question is:

Which mix of volume, client quality, and provider experience is right for your practice—given your goals and stage of growth?

The Provider Experience: Avoiding Burnout and Resentment

There’s another reality we have to acknowledge:

Discount-heavy strategies can change what your providers’ work week feels like.

If your injectors or estheticians are used to:

• Seeing mostly full-price, word-of-mouth, or long-term patients
• Working with people who already know, like, and trust them

And suddenly:

• 40–50% of their schedule is people from discounted offers
• Many of those patients are “deal chasers” who never come back

They can start to feel:

• Overworked
• Undervalued
• Frustrated

Even if the math looks great.

That doesn’t mean the strategy is wrong.
It just means you have to:

1. Communicate the WHY to your team.
   Don’t just spring these promos on them and say, “We’re doing this now.”
   
   Help them see:
   • Why this makes sense financially
   • How it will benefit their schedule in 6 months (more great, returning patients)
   • How it ties into practice growth and their own opportunity
     
2. Lauren shared a great example:
   • She often talks to the owner or spouse who handles finances…
   • But not the injector or provider who is actually seeing all the discount-offer patients.
   • Once she gets on the phone with the provider and walks through the math and strategy, they almost always feel much better.
     
3. Balance anecdote with data.
   
   • Providers will naturally remember:
     • The no-shows
     • The rude people
     • The ones who “just wanted the deal”
       
   • It’s your job to balance those stories with actual numbers:
     • Retention rates
     • Cross-sell rates
     • Long-term revenue from that cohort
       
4. Watch for burnout and adjust.
   Even if the math is great, if your key providers hate their lives, that’s not a win.

The Math You Can’t Ignore

Let’s talk numbers for a minute.

For any front-end offer, we want at least this baseline:

Average initial visit revenue should cover:
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) + cost of goods (COGS).

Example with the $25 facial:

• Let’s say your CAC for that campaign is $40.
  • It costs you $40 in ad spend to acquire one booked client.
• The facial itself brings in $25.
• Maybe your cost of goods (product, time, etc.) is $10–$15.

If all they ever buy is the $25 facial, you’re losing money.

So what do we need?

• On average, we’d want initial visit revenue to be $75+:
  
  • $40 to cover acquisition
  • $10–$15 to cover cost of goods
  • A bit of cushion

That doesn’t mean every single client spends $75.

It means:

• Some will only spend $25
• Some will buy:
  • Product
  • Add-ons
  • Or book additional services quickly thereafter

And when you average that out, you want:

Initial visit revenue ≈ CAC + COGS (or slightly better)

That way:

• You’re creating opportunities at breakeven (or better)
• The profit comes from:
  • Repeat visits
  • Cross-sells
  • Higher-ticket plans down the line

I think this is a great mental model:

“How can I maximize at-bats with the right clients
while breaking even (or better) on the first visit?”

If you can do that—and you have solid retention—you’ll win.

Red Flags: When Your Offer Strategy Is Broken

There are a couple of big red flags to watch for when running low-ticket, high-volume offers.

1. Very Low Retention From Offer-Based Clients

We had one med spa where:

• We ran our go-to Botox introductory offer for a full year
• Normally, this campaign performs incredibly well for most practices
• At the end of the year, they had a 10% retention rate

In other words:

• 90% of the people who came in from that campaign never returned

Why?

• The provider changed five times in 12 months.
  (Yes, five times.)

If you think about what we said earlier:

Marketing creates opportunities to build relationships that create trust…

You can’t build trust when the face of the practice keeps changing.

So in a situation like that:

• The problem isn’t the offer
• It’s:
  • Provider turnover
  • Inconsistent experience
  • Unstable operations

If you’re not retaining clients:

• Look at:
  • Provider stability
  • Sales skills
  • Client experience
  • Follow-up process

2. Initial Visit Revenue Consistently Fails to Cover CAC + COGS

If, after a few months:

• Your CAC is $40
• Most clients only ever spend $25
• Almost nobody cross-sells or returns

Then:

• The math doesn’t work
• It’s not a marketing strategy—it’s a slow bleed

In that case, you have to:

• Either:
  • Fix sales and in-office experience
  • Or change your front-end offer strategy

Matching the Strategy to Your Stage of Growth

Not every med spa is in the same place.

An offer that makes perfect sense for one practice can be a terrible fit for another.

For example:

When a $25 Facial Makes a Lot of Sense

In the Florida practice Lauren mentioned:

• They had a brand-new esthetician
• He was being paid full-time
• And had almost no appointments

In that situation:

• You’re paying for the hours whether he’s busy or not
• You want his schedule to be slammed
• You want as many at-bats as possible

So a $25, high-volume intro offer makes a ton of sense:

• Great way to build his book of business
• Great way to load the top of the funnel with opportunities
• The math works because his time is largely “sunk cost” already

When You Might Prefer a Slower, Higher-Quality Strategy

On the other hand:

• If your esthetician is already pretty full
• The practice has limited room to grow capacity
• And your providers hate seeing a ton of discount-only patients

Then:

• You might accept slower growth
• With higher acquisition costs
• To maintain:
  • Higher client quality
  • Better retention
  • Better provider experience

You might lean more into:

• Standard-priced injectables
• Consult-driven campaigns
• Less aggressive discounting

The point is:

There is no one “right” offer.
There is only the right offer for your goals, your capacity, and your stage.

Don’t Forget: Ask for Reviews & Build Your Brand

Quick side note while we’re here:

If you’re getting value from content like this—podcasts, videos, articles—one of the best ways you can support creators (including us) is:

• Leave a review on iTunes or Spotify if you listen to the podcast
• Hit Subscribe on YouTube if you watch the videos

It helps the content get seen by more med spa owners and teams who need this information.

Same goes for your own practice:

• Make it part of your process to ask happy patients for reviews
• Systemize it
• Incentivize your team around it

Reviews are a huge part of building trust before someone ever walks through your doors.

Bringing It All Together: Playing the Right Game with Marketing

Let’s land the plane.

1. The law of demand is real.

• Higher price = fewer people buy
• Lower price = more people buy

That’s why:

• You’ll always get more volume with lower-ticket offers
• You’ll always get fewer leads with high-ticket offers or full-price consult campaigns

2. High-ticket packages are easier to sell after someone has experienced your practice.

• Trust comes from experience, not ad copy
• Let gateway services (injectables, intro facials, etc.) do the heavy lifting on the front end

3. Marketing should focus on creating opportunities to build relationships.

• At-bats first
• Trust second
• High-ticket and long-term value third

4. You get to choose where you sit on the spectrum.

• More volume, more “dirt,” more gold at the end
• Or fewer leads, higher average quality, less chaos

Just be honest about:

• The math
• The retention
• Your providers’ capacity and mindset

5. Watch your numbers and your team.

• Does your initial visit revenue cover CAC + COGS?
• Are you retaining a reasonable percentage of offer-based clients?
• Are your providers burned out or bought in?

When you:

• Respect the law of demand
• Use gateway services strategically
• Build a strong in-office experience
• And choose offers that fit your stage of growth

…you stop guessing, stop chasing “magical” campaigns, and start playing the right game with your marketing.

That’s the game we help med spas play every day.

If you want help mapping out your own numbers and strategy, you can always schedule a planning session at medspamagicmarketing.com.