Salon Memberships That Work | Build Your Salon

Most salon memberships fail within three months. Not because salon memberships don't work, it's because they got the execution wrong. Here's what's actually killing them. All on. Build your salon. Hello. Hello, hello. My salon friends, Phil Jackson here, your Queen of Salons and your queen of memberships, coming all over the internet with another dose of wise owl wisdom. Apologies for snickering at the beginning of this episode. It's because I've just caught sight of the thumbnail, which has used an AI generated version of me and I look like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards, more stubbly and old looking. And if that's actually what I look like, please reach out and let me know and I will go back to audio only episodes anyway. What are we talking about today? Everyone's talking about memberships, but there's so many people getting them wrong and there's a lot of people that are throwing the baby out with the bath water. My darlings, I had a comment on LinkedIn. I don't very often go on LinkedIn. It's a bit grown up for me, but I had a comment on LinkedIn because I was talking about memberships and someone got very stroppy saying how memberships were a terrible idea and how they couldn't possibly work. And my argument was, darling, just because you can't make it work doesn't mean it doesn't work. And lots of people are seeing salon memberships as kind of the magic bullet, the answer to the cashflow rollercoaster. And honestly, it can be all of those things. I'm in a wonderful position. I've been midwife at the birth of hundreds, if not thousands of salon memberships by now, and a well-run salon membership can transform your salon business. I've seen it happen more times than I can possibly count, but an awful lot of salon memberships will fail. They don't fizzle, they kind of crash or they don't actually take off in the first place. And then the owners start to feel a bit defeated and fall out of love with salon memberships as a concept. And the failure has got nothing to do with the model. The model works. It's the execution that lets people down and they call me queen of memberships for a reason. I've been teaching this for over 10 years now. I've helped salons from solo operators in home studios to big high street teams, build membership programmes that actually work. And today I'm going to show you exactly why most memberships die so that yours doesn't. You're going to do things the right way, aren't you? At the end though, I'm going to tell you about my salon membership programme called Memberships Made Easy and I make no apologies for plugging it. It's a brilliant programme and it will cut out an awful lot of wasted time for you. So firstly, three things. Why is predictable income non-negotiable? Then we're going to talk about how to structure a membership simply enough that you can get it launched in a week or so. And then I'm going to talk through the silent killers, the assassins that will take your programme down before month three. So firstly, why does predictable income mean so much? Without predictable income, your income is on a rollercoaster. You're jam-packed one month, ghost town the next. Summer is busy, or maybe you have a summer slump. We get the post-Christmas drop-off. Those random quiet Tuesdays that make it very difficult for you to run a business make it hard to know when you can reinvest in the business, when it's okay to grow, what you can afford to spend even. And I got caught in this trap myself. I thought the business was doing really well, but the pattern was we were running up an overdraft one month, paying it off the next month, running it up the next month, paying it off the next month, and it was those spiky takings that made it impossible to plan on reinvesting and training, buying equipment, and paying myself properly felt absolutely impossible. Now, memberships reduce those peaks and troughs and depending on how far in you go, if you're going balls deep, darling, we can fix those spikes once and for all. But if you just want a few memberships, it takes the top off the peak and it takes away the bottom of the trough as well. It creates a baseline of income that's in your account before you've done a single appointment. In the early days of my memberships, it was fantastic because all of our membership income came in on the first of the month. Sometimes the first of the month was a Sunday or a Monday, and we didn't open on a Sunday and Monday. So the best day of the month, most profitable day of the month, we hadn't even opened the salon doors for goodness sake. But even solo operators with low overheads, we'd still have that volatility. You only need maybe 500, a thousand pounds a month on membership income to really give yourself something that you can build from. You know that your overheads are covered before you've even touched a client. And every booking on top of that is profits. So smoothing those peaks and troughs takes away a lot of anxiety. I used to call it the first of the month anxiety. It was the feeling that I had after all the wages had been paid at the end of the month. It was the feeling that I had that we weren't going to be able to cover all of those direct debits and standing orders and the rent that all seemed to come out at the beginning of the month. This is smart business. It's turning your financial planning into a strategy so that you know when it's okay to invest, when it's okay to hire, when it's okay to pay yourself because you've got that foundation to build from. Next up, I want to talk about structuring your membership simply so that you can actually get it launched. Lots and lots of salon owners, and actually I'm looking specifically at you beauty guys now, you love making things more complicated than they need to be. So they start picturing complex software, tiered packages, lots and lots of admin before a single person signs up. And that's where you go wrong. You overcomplicate it and the complexity kills the momentum. You don't need tiered memberships. You certainly don't need anything like a point system or a discount club, and you absolutely don't want to build a discount club. It's the fastest way to destroy your profit margins. Your membership income, your membership customers should be the best, most profitable customers that you have, okay? And we're going to do that by increasing the value to those customers, not by discounting. So first of all, we need to nail the offer and that's choosing one service or one small group of services, which has a high margin. We're going to keep it super, super simple. Lots of people think if they layer lots of things into a membership, they make it more popular. Actually, the opposite is true because if you've got, let's say in a beauty salon, you've got some people that are interested in a facial, they might sign up for a facial membership, but a lot of salon owners will say, I'll include some waxing in there, or I'll include a pedicure in there once a quarter. Problem is if they're not interested in a pedicure, even if the facial membership makes sense on its own, they're not going to sign up because they're not getting value out of every aspect of it. We're going to make sure that we're pricing profitably. We're not going to be building a discount club. But I will say that you have to make sure you've got your prices right first. If you try and build a membership over shaky pricing, all you're going to do is magnify the problem and you're going to resent people coming in. That's not what we want. I want you to look at a day full of membership customers and think, yippee, this is fantastic news. Not roll your eyes because you're not quite sure whether you're making any money or not. So that's my acid test. If we filled your week with membership customers, how would that feel? Would it fill you with excitement or would you have a little feeling of dread? If you've got those feelings of dread, we've probably priced it too cheaply. Then we're going to add in step three is to add in simple low-cost perks. So whether it's priority booking, whether it's access to certain team members, certain time slots, certain product ranges, certain services, perhaps we're going to have member-only events. These things cost you almost nothing, but they create a sense of belonging. They create a sense of VIP, they create a sense of something special exclusivity that keeps people inside your membership. And then it is time to launch. And we're not going to do this as a huge marketing campaign. This is certainly not something for your new clients. In my salon, we didn't even talk to people about memberships until they'd been in for three visits. On the first and second visit, they're still kicking the tyres, they're not quite sure. It'll be like joining a gym that you've never visited. It just doesn't make sense. And you could end up with a lot of cancellations, a lot of what we call churn on your memberships. So what we're going to do is wait until people have started to build some loyalty, and then you are going to decide who gets invited to join your membership. Make sure they know they're founding members. Give them the first opportunity. Get your first 10 or 20 members from people who already love you. That will prove the model. It will build your confidence and it will also get some people who are going to shout about it. And this works whether you are a solopreneur working from home, whether you are a high street salon with a team, start simple and build from there. So where do people go wrong? Month one's going great, everyone's excited. Month two, perhaps we've got a few sign-ups, but not as many as we thought. Month three, things start to unravel, and I've seen this happen dozens of times. It's like a slow bleed from these multiple mistakes. And killer number one is you're targeting the wrong customers. I want you to think about your customers on a continuum that runs from one to 10. And the number ones are only in when they get given a gift voucher. They're the ones that are hanging around on Facebook waiting for a discount. They're going to other salons in between visits with you. There's no customer loyalty there. The number tens would crawl over hot coals and broken glass to make sure they get an appointment with you. They're your diehards and your memberships often neither. The effort that you put into a number one turning them into a loyal customer is going to be massive. You're never going to be able to get that level of loyalty unless you are doing huge discounting. Your number tens, they're already profitable, they're already giving you everything they have. We don't need to turn those into members. Your memberships are for the sevens and eights, they're for the solid regulars that visit fairly consistently. And if you could just get them in very consistently, you could get much better results from them. They're the ones that are going to, we're going to take a seven or an eight and turn them into a 10 using a membership. That's where we're aiming. Number two is not engaging after people sign up. So the money leaves their account, they come in, they leave. We need to acknowledge that these people are members. We need to acknowledge that they've signed up for an increased level of loyalty. They're not getting any perks, they're not getting any communication that makes them feel like they belong to something. It just feels like a standing order. And when we get into that transactional process, that's when cancellation comes and rears its ugly head. We want people to feel special from day one and every month thereafter. That's how you keep people inside. So those members need nurture. They need member-only emails with useful content, perhaps a surprise sample at their next appointment, a little personal message if they haven't booked this month. A little something left behind reception for them. Next time they come in, small touches that just take a few moments, but remind them why they joined. This is what separates a membership community that's thriving from just a direct debit that people forget that they've got and then ultimately cancel. Killer number three is not noticing the drift. So if a member misses a month, you chase them. If they haven't got bookings made, we're on the phone to them, not just automated text messages. Actually, take the time to call them up, make sure they're okay, make sure they're coming back. We know that we've got automated reminders that go out every four or six weeks, but for members that's too long and it's too impersonal. You need to be checking in on people personally, telling them that you've missed them. Making sure that they get booked in, that one message will save more memberships than any amount of marketing ever could. So stop thinking of memberships as this kind of passive income, treat it as an active membership relationship. Do that. And then month three turns into month 12, which turns into month 36. Our retention year on year is always above 95%, usually a hundred percent. So there we have it. What do you think? Have you got salon memberships working in your salon business? I'd love to be interviewing you on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. If you have my email address, scrolling at the bottom of the screen right now, phil@buildyoursalon.com. If you'd like my help with this, of course, I have a programme, I'm the queen of memberships. I know this better than anyone, and it's what I do best. Head over to queenofmemberships.com, all one word, queenofmemberships.com and get access to my Salon Memberships Made Easy programme. It's a five-step process that goes into a lot more detail than we ever could on a podcast. It's going to make sure that you hit the ground running and gets some beautiful recurring income in your salon business in just a few days' time. Just a few short days until I'm coming all over the internet again with another dose of my wise owl wisdom. And until next time, take care.