Business Memberships are considered the ultimate catalyst of scaling a salon towards unimaginable growth. They serve as a brilliant resource to scale your salon as well as build a bond and a long relationship with your clients.

Salon Memberships helped our salon, Emma Hellier, grow 3 times in just less than a year and we continue to multiply our growth due to this.

But if you are still undecided on implementing a salon membership scheme in your salon, here are 24 reasons why you definitely should.

Let’s start with the basics and the most pressing issue most salon owners face – empty seats.

No matter how small, big, profitable or unprofitable your salon is, no one wants to see vacant empty seats and idle staff within their salon.

A vacant salon not only is psychologically and financially tormenting for the salon owners but it can also be a turn off for your clients. They might think that your salon is not good enough to be populated and visited by people in the town and would prefer a salon where more people like to go.

But when you have a salon membership program in place, it works as a magic wand to pull the client’s towards you and occupy your seats.

To use the free services you have to offer as part of the membership, your client’s will routinely flock to your salon during less popular times, making it look active and popular when others do not.

A salon membership program offers a direct line to clients, making communication much easier.

Aside from announcing new products/services, promoting sales, and the like, a useful benefit of a salon membership is that it creates more streams for communication with you and your client.

Just imagine, having a closer relationship with your client will help you in;

• Understanding their issues related to their overall look and feel
• Put you as their personal styling or beauty consultant
• Understand and differentiate between services they will and will not like
• Easily sell them additional services and benefits.

Client retention is much harder than acquiring a client. You can get a good number of people coming to your salon through different marketing and promotional methods but keeping them is a whole different matter.

And it gets even more difficult when you have multiple competing salons in the same area.

Effective client retention helps put your salon in a consistent state of cash flow. When you have consistent cash flow everything is easier – all aspects of running your salon can be more effectively planned.

Having salon memberships helps you retain your best clients. Not only has this helped you bring your clients closer to you but also in making the relationship even stronger.

You would be able to communicate with your clients more, understand problems at an individual level and provide value where they actually need it.

All of this, in turn, helps you retain more of your clients.

And if you smartly tackle your increased client retention right, you can convert those clients into fans that drive in more referral friends.

A well-designed salon membership program allows salons to segment clients and discover which are profitable and unprofitable.

It helps them in identifying the clients who rarely visits or just are only interested in discounted services and avoid premium services on a regular basis. These client profiles can cost more money than they generate as they might occupy our seats and staff and discourage high paying client’s, waiting-in-line.

Through a membership program, companies can segment better, more loyal, higher paying clients only; and thereby align their services towards them.

Regardless of a business type, every industry has a different category of client and this holds true for salons as well.

No matter how small or large your salon is, there is always 3 core types of clients you will see.

One time clients: They might visit once (maybe twice ever) because they’re in your town or you have a discounted offer going on. Chances of these clients returning are very bleak.

Casual Clients: These type of clients do come back, but there is no pattern, which makes it hard to predict when they will come in next. But whatever the case, they will visit you often.

Regular Clients: These are the clients that every salon owner loves. Regular clients come back month after month, buy anything you recommend and could possibly have some permanent spots in your calendar.

When you have a membership program in place, you are more likely to easily segment clients based on their visiting and buying habit.

For example, if you have a 3 tiered membership plans, you can safely say that the client that signed up for the lowest plan, might visit you less and would be a difficult candidate for additional services.

Similarly, the best plan clients can help you identify your best clients and what possibly can you do to increase the average order value.

When you spend more time with your clients, you get to know them better, obvious right. You can learn more closely what their problems are related to their overall beauty and styling, how they want to be treated behind the chair and what possible issues they might have with your salon.

This way you not only get to know and understand your clients a lot more but also plan your salon services and upsell pitches around them.

With a membership you have a focus group, that pay you to give ideas.

Clients love the value in the services delivered above anything else. They will always ponder, what’s in it for me?

Though the price is one of the key factors, it all comes down to the actual value you are delivering. After all, they want the service completed to a standard that they expect, regardless of the cost.

Having a membership program in place helps you deliver value to your client. If you can get your clients to believe that they are getting more value from your membership program, than they would have from a standard walk-in relationship, they will stick with you.

By showing them the cost savings and all the added benefits of memberships your clients will feel as though the value they receive is unmatched so why bother going anywhere else.

Salon memberships have the potential to triple salon sales in a very short time.

And this was the case for us.

Our BlowDry Club Membership helped us increase revenue and staff 3 fold in less than a year.

Our higher revenue was largely attributed to the Monthly membership fees and the Upselling from the club members.

Membership plans help you increase your client’s salon time. Without a membership plan, even your loyal clients might visit you 4 or 5 times per year. But with a membership in place, that number can easily double and triple quickly.

And from all additional visits and seat time, you can for sure upsell them more or they will request additional services. If you are committed to value-delivery, chances are that the 30% of those additional visits will result in more upsells – product sales and bookings.

Ok, this is another big one and perhaps a very understandable.

When you have a membership program in place not only are you promoting it but it also automatically spreads across to the friends and circles of your clients. This, in turn, creates a lot of brand awareness for your salon.

Not only does this help in recognizing you as a salon to be a member of, but also builds your reputation among stylists, hairdressers, nail experts and other salon staff as well in the industry.

In every salon regardless if it’s a hair, nail, spa or all in one beauty salon, there are some popular services and some not so popular services. In most cases, salon owners try to be competitive and focus only on popular services, which tend to have a small profit margin.

When you have a salon membership program in your salon however, you get talk face-to-face with your clients more. This way you can easily communicate and convince them on other services, which might not be popular but are more profitable.

Even if 20% of your members take on those services, you will likely get more profit with less effort than what it takes to sell the same services to non-members and standard walk-in clients.

Following on from the benefits of creating super fans and gaining referral interest, a salon membership plan can easily open doors for new clients. In B2C businesses like salons, word of mouth referral or personal recommendations are like a silver bullet.

Salon Experts believe that selling a membership is much easier than selling a service, as it offers more privileges and benefits than the standard menu services.

And don’t forget your super fans for bringing you more clients. Give your members an opportunity to bring a friend – for free.

Your members will love it as it gives them a further, shared experience in your salon, and the friend may just like what they see.

When you open your salon for membership, naturally you will get more bookings and busy schedules for your staff. A salon membership system can dramatically increase the amount of foot traffic and appointments within your salon.

Imagine 100 members coming in at least once per week. This will result in over 400 more appointments/month alone, not to mention the significant upselling opportunities they bring along can result in extended or more appointment for your salon.

Client Lifetime Value (CLV or CLTV) is the net profit of the overall relationship you will ultimately maintain with a client. It measures the net value of each client is to you now and the anticipated value of all your interactions with them in the future