Design, Price, and Sell Salon Memberships ... Without Losing Your Mind

Steady, recurring membership income is not a nice-to-have anymore in your salon business. In fact, it's my personal belief that businesses without a little bit of predictable income aren't going to make it into the next phase of growth. But what if your salon memberships could design themselves, price themselves, and even sell themselves? Well, today we're going to put AI to work in your business and show you how to turn memberships into your smartest income stream yet. All on Build Your Salon Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming in your ears again with another dose of Wise Owl Wisdom, this episode brought to you by our friends at Zoka.com, the AI-powered platform that guarantees new customers for beauty professionals. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. As we launch ourselves headlong into September. And my goodness, if you're here in the UK, you'll appreciate that summer definitely feels like it's over. My God, autumn arrived almost overnight and we've all got cardies on and long trousers for the first time in weeks and weeks and weeks. So how was August for you? I've had some really quite startlingly good results coming from my coaching group. Usually August is a bit of a tough one for most of my coaching group members, but we've had some really strong financial results coming in. So how was it for you? Why not reach out and let me know? Phil at buildyoursalon.com. You know, I love hearing from my salon owner friends. And today we get to, well, frankly, darling, we get to touch on two of my little G spots. The first being salon memberships and the second being AI. Salon memberships, of course, the very best way that we can create predictable income to build loyalty in your salon business and give you some breathing space in your finances. And I know that I keep banging the drum for salon memberships. And it's because I still see so many of you struggling, living hand to mouth, not knowing whether you're going to be able to meet all of your financial obligations in the next month. And you could really do with that predictability. We are living in very uncertain times. You need that predictability. Your customers need that predictability. It really, darling, it really is a no brainer. And the good news is it's getting easier and easier as more of our salon software providers finally get on board after your Uncle Phil banging the same drum in their ear for the last 10 years or so.

So we need our salon memberships. And it's not just about locking clients into a subscription. It's giving you that predictability. It's taking the pressure away from filling every single appointment slot week by week. It takes some of the pressure and the effort off your salon marketing. And when they're done right, they will smooth out some of the ups and downs in your cash flow. But today, I don't want to just convince you why salon memberships are a great idea. I want to show you how we can make them even easier with the help of AI, because AI is a magnificent tool which could really help you get memberships together much more quickly, get them implemented much more simply and marketed much more effectively. So where do you think we can fit AI into our memberships? Well, the first step, or at least the way that I teach memberships, the first step is to identify who our membership is going to be for, even before we decide what's going to be in the membership. And the biggest mistake that I see people making is they decide what the membership is going to look like before they figure out who the hell is going to buy it, darling. And that is back to front. What you're much better off doing is deciding what you want memberships to do for your business in cold, hard cash terms. Then figure out who the best clients are to help you achieve that goal. Then we can build a membership they're going to absolutely salivate over. And AI can really help us there because we can feed artificial intelligence with huge amounts of data. It's really good at wrangling lots and lots of data. So we could be feeding it service histories, booking frequency, feedback forms from your customers, audience insights. And then instead of guessing who a really good membership customer is going to be, we can get AI to analyze all of that data for us. And then the next step, of course, we'll be helping letting AI help by suggesting packages, membership subscriptions that clients are most likely to love. So we're going to use that analysis from AI and then turn it into a bit of a brainstorming partner who can see patterns that you might miss,

come up with suggestions for opportunities that may not be completely obvious to you. And also it's going to help you get away from some of that confirmation bias because so often I see people chewing different ideas on memberships and they keep going and keep going until finally I turn around and say, yes, you can do what you want to do. Well, AI is not going to do that. It's going to come up with the best suggestion, the best fit for your clients in your business, whether you want to hear it or not. And darlings, a little bit of tough love, particularly when it's your own business, can go a very long way. The next hurdle that really slows people down when they're putting memberships together is pricing. And pricing a membership can be tricky because we want to cover costs, obviously, but we want to deliver amazing value and make a profit too. And sometimes that means a bit of backwards and forwards. It means trying a price out, seeing whether it works or not on paper and then going back to the drawing board and chewing things up again and spitting out a different result and maybe changing the bonuses or changing the structure of the membership until we get a pricing combination that works for everyone. Well, what if AI could help you do that really, really quickly? So my suggestion would be to train AI with your pricing logic, teach it how you price a salon membership. Then you get to play with different scenarios all day long. You'll be able to try out different combinations of services, different bonuses, and an AI will keep spitting out different prices until you hit on something that you think may work. And then for bonus points, my love, and this is where we get to completely geek out, why not combine that with our audience insights from stage one? Because then not only could we be using something like ChatGPT to help us come up with a price, we can also ask it how it thinks your clients might perceive each option. Now, it's not going to get it dead right every single time, but if it's taking those insights from step one, combining it with different pricing models from step two, I think you're pretty likely to come up with something that your clients are going to enjoy when you finally get around to launching it. More on this after a word from this week's sponsors.

My salon owner friends, building a steady clientele and keeping your calendar full can be challenging. Zoka is the must-have tool that makes it so easy, you'll wonder how you managed without it. It's an AI-powered platform that acts just like your own marketing team, designed to help your salon get discovered online and consistently attract new clients. Zoka optimizes your online presence so you rank higher on Google, turning online searches and inquiries into confirmed bookings, and it even follows up to keep happy clients coming back again and again. Essentially, it's like having a 24-7 receptionist, marketer and booking assistant all on autopilot. The best part is Zoka promises guaranteed new customers for beauty professionals. Over a thousand salons and spas already trust Zoka, and they're seeing higher Google rankings and fully booked businesses. If you're ready for consistent bookings and steady growth, check out Zoka.com, that's Z-O-C-A dot com, and see how Zoka can fill your calendar with clients. So we've mapped out the kind of membership that we might want. We've priced it smartly, using AI to help us with all of those calculations. The next bit that causes quite a few people a problem, particularly if you're trying to use software which doesn't support salon memberships, is the tracking of payments. And without salon software to help, well, what about using AI to help you come up with something that helps you track those recurring payments and flags those missed ones? Now, I don't think this is necessarily something that AI can handle on its own. So what about building yourself a little app to do that? And you don't need to know anything about coding anymore, because there's a whole new chunk of AI out there called Vibe Coding, which is basically where you can build little applications to help you with all sorts of everyday business tasks just by chatting backwards and forwards. I've got some brilliant examples of this in my Get Smart, Work Less With AI program. But I've used it a few times in my own business. Firstly, I've built a little timetable app to help people land in the same place at the same time as part of my retreats. I've also built myself a little invoicing app because I don't very often have to generate invoices.

But when I do, I've always felt it takes a disproportionately large amount of time. So now I can create invoices in just a couple of clicks with my own bespoke app. And you could be doing this, too. So we could be building an app which tracks and monitors the payments that are made as part of our memberships to make tracking those recurring payments super, super simple. And then, of course, once we've got all of our ducks in a row, well, we're going to want to make sure that our customers hear about our membership and that they are salivating, absolutely foaming in order to sign up. So we can use AI to help with your marketing and launch. And because we've already given AI your audience insights, it's going to do a much better job at creating a compelling launch plan, too. So maybe it's as simple as needing a set of social posts. Well, AI can draft them. If you want an email flow, well, of course, AI can structure it. If you need a video script, why not bounce back and forwards with your AI pal to help suggest angles and hooks that match your salon's tone of voice and the needs of your audiences, too. So what are we going to do? What tools are we going to be using in order to make memberships a lot simpler? Well, a few simple tools to try. The first would be ChatGPT for that idea generation, for that audience analysis, for coming up with those pricing models. And by the way, if you're on a paid for version of ChatGPT, I'd be building a custom GPT for membership pricing. And certainly for generating marketing copy, ChatGPT can tick all of those boxes for you. What it won't do, though, is build you a little web app. It can code with you. But for building a web app, I'd be heading over to an app called Base44. Base44.com recently purchased, I think I'm right in saying, by Wix. Really super simple. In fact, the simplest vibe coding platform that I've managed to come up with. And then, of course, we should be really putting some pressure on our salon software companies to get memberships built in and get AI integrated to make these tasks as easy as possible. So put that request in with support. They'll be analysing those support requests. And hopefully we can start seeing some of these things as standard features in our salon software very, very soon. So what are you going to do? What's your step-by-step action plan? Well, I want you to start working with AI

and sketch out a new membership for your clients. Throw some client data in, see what ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude comes up with as far as a membership, as far as pricing, as far as a launch plan is concerned. And then reach out and let me know what you came up with. I would love to hear from you on this. And I'd love to be sharing some of your membership stories with my wonderful Build Your Salon audience. Also reach out if you'd like to be a guest on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. Phil at buildyoursalon.com, my email address. You know I'd love to hear from you anyway. Today's episode was brought to you by Zoka.com, the AI-powered platform that guarantees new customers for beauty professionals. Don't forget to click the link in my description. Of course, they'd be happy to chat to you, demonstrate the platform, and I'm sure I'll be hearing about your success story with Zoka by your side in future. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes, and ears with a nice interview episode on the next episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. And until then, take care. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty, and more successful tips for business owners. All on Build Your Salon.