If you don’t already sell memberships, consider adding them to your sales mix. In addition to providing a predictable revenue source, they also help to increase customer loyalty and, when designed properly can increase average ticket sizes as well.

The First Step: Design Your Membership Program

Your first challenge is to design a membership program that appeals to customers in price and benefits, while also achieving your revenue goals. To design a membership program, you can start by identifying your customers’ service preferences as well as ways to increase the customer’s average ticket price. For example,

• If you want to create a membership exclusively for your male clientele, find the most popular services consumed by male customers. You can bundle these services at a slightly discounted price along with less popular services into the membership. This is a great way to get customers to try a new service that they hopefully will adopt as regular services.
• If you want to divert traffic from your busy weekends to low-peak days, consider creating a membership that offers your popular services at discounted pricing only when the customer comes in on specific days or during low-peak hours.

Consider Payment And Validity: Recurring Memberships Vs 1 Year Memberships

In the last few years, recurring memberships have become increasingly popular. Recurring memberships typically offer services that are redeemed on a monthly basis. For example a recurring membership, might include:

• One free massage every month for 12 months. Offer variations of this with 2 scrubs and 2 facials that can be used any time in the 12 month period.
• One haircut every month for 6 months.
• Any type of nail service every month for the next 12 months.

Recurring memberships work very similarly to a traditional 1 year membership, but are managed slightly differently. For example, you will likely need to allow for a limited number of roll-over services, which enable a client to roll their service over to the next month if required. Or, the ability to freeze a recurring membership on request of the client. Recurring memberships are also perceived differently by clientele and offer you a new way to position a seemingly new offering! As you design your membership program, consider whether a recurring membership fits your needs.

Also read: salon management software

Promote Your Memberships

After designing your membership program, you’ll need to promote your offerings. Some ideas to market your memberships:

• Target the right membership to the right customers. To do this, you’ll need to map who the membership was designed for with that group of customers. By targeting your message, you’ll see higher response rates.
• Encourage staff to sell more memberships. This requires training as well as incentives to sell memberships.
• Promote memberships online as well as physically at your center

Creating a successful membership program requires a number of things to come together. Zenoti (formerly ManageMySpa) helps you do just that with tools that assist you in identifying the right memberships, promoting your memberships and managing the sales, redemptions, collections and other administrative functions to run a membership program. (Read our case study on how Apollo Life generates additional revenue with Memberships). To learn more about how Zenoti can help you, request a personal demo.