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.
A solid membership program not only will help you calculate your CLV but also help you identify the tactics you need to get that CLV in the best possible manner.
So for instance, if you’re CLV before membership program was $1000 you can use a membership program to bring them much closer to you and increase the CLV by large margins through upselling and increasing average order value (more on this shortly)
Following up from above, having a membership program in place eventually increases the average visit value for each client.
Loyal clients like in a membership program not only visit your salons more but they order more services too.
And besides that when you have a stream of incoming members, they are likely to get more services besides the membership, which ultimately increases your order value.
You can also implement ad-hoc or instant offers to members to increase your average order value for each client.
When your membership program is up and running, in full motion; then the chances of acquiring a client increase 3 fold.
The number of clients that will find you through word of mouth, because of the value you are offering, or through the referral scheme from your existing clients will skyrocket.
This is what a membership system will do for your salon.
When you start getting results with memberships programs, the need to invest in acquiring clients or the overall cost of doing so will reduce significantly.
REDUCE PROMOTIONAL AND ADVERTISING COSTS
You can significantly save a lot from your marketing and advertising budget if you have a salon membership program in place due to two reasons;
A – It helps you create a targeted advertising campaign
There is no need to spend bulk on advertising or send out thousands of flyers that will be thrown away unread, or take pages of newspaper space that is irrelevant to many of the readers.
Instead, when you have a list of existing members already available, you can create targeted advertising and marketing campaigns to keep bringing them back to your salon.
B – More word of mouth marketing
The word of mouth marketing is one of the most essential marketing tools in any B2C and local services based businesses like salons. Most of the salons cater to a specific town or community where potential clients and their friends etc. are usually connected.
So if a client receives an offer from you or uses your services, they are more likely to communicate that with their friends, who might also live in your targeted area, which eventually will bring them in too.
These strategies help you to reduce your marketing spend significantly but also drives in the measurable results.
Initially, setting up a membership system may take some effort on your part. It requires you to do research regarding the preferences of your clients, your sweet spots and the overall schemes you would like to implement.
However, once that is set up, a membership program works like an automated sales machine that continually drives growth for your salon.
Your members will keep coming back to you to get those Free Perks of your membership plan and you will always get the opportunity every month to show them value and sell other services.
You really don’t need to push and push to bring back your clients. Instead, they will occupy your seats regularly, which gives you the room to become their consultant and this goes on and on as a cycle.
One of the legacy ways of attracting and retaining clients is by providing discounts on services. Salon owners tend to provide limited time or big discounts on several services.
However, what will happen if a competitor provides a higher discount?
Most probably the clients that were coming to your salon just for the discounted service, will leave you for higher discounts.
This is where a membership program glues your clients together and avoids losing your clients to competitors. It helps you create a sustainable and predictable model of growth for your clients and helps you build strong relationships with clients over time.
If you keep delivering the value promised throughout the membership program, you will continue to see that the churn rate of your clients is very low and they are staying on with you.
Regardless of how small or large, your salon is, having a consistent and predictable cash flow is essential. It helps you plan your salon’s finances and helps you understand potential cash inflow every week or month.
With automatic monthly membership payment, salon owners know that a certain and guaranteed amount of revenue is coming into the salon every month, which helps them plan finances with greater precision than to have an unstable and unpredictable revenue stream.
ELIMINATES RELIABILITY ON YOUR TOP STYLISTS
This is one of the biggest issues most salon owners face.
Typically, when a top stylist goes on a vacation or worst leave the salon, you start seeing a drop in your clients, as they felt comfortable around that stylist.
But with a membership system, your clients will get to be serviced by different stylists on different days. You have the complete control on assigning any stylist to any client.
So even if any of your top stylists are away, your clients will not churn out but continue to be your member, as they signed up for the value, not for a particular stylist.
They are not only your paid member but have already seen the value they get from the membership plan, regardless of which stylists are taking on their bookings.
A salon which has more clients and busy staff, the likelihood of that staff getting additional income through tips increases.
When your staff is getting healthy returns out of tips, they might not ask for raise, which helps you with your payroll increment burdens.
Under a membership plan, your clients generally think that they are not paying for the service or not paying enough for the membership perks they are getting. Therefore, they will naturally tip your staff for the heavily discounted services they are getting, which is brilliant for your staff’s motivation but also removes additional payroll burden from you.
Today it’s easy for discerning salon clients to compare tens of salons very quickly. They can see the service prices of different salons online and change their mind.
If they are just thinking of the services you sell instead of your salon, then you will find yourself in a pricing race to the bottom, where other salons might easily win.
Adding a membership program stops you from competing on price by giving you another way to differentiate your salon: an enhanced client experience by connecting with their emotions.