How to Sell Salon Memberships – and Bring in Cash Up Front!
Marnie here,
Almost every day, one of our Client Attraction System members from somewhere in the world writes to me with a question starting with something like “What do you do in such-and-such a situation…”
But sometimes, I can almost hear the excitement in their voice as they reveal their joy at a promotion that went ‘above and beyond’.
One such Member is Deirdre Cruell of DCStudio in Killeen, a couple of hours south of Dallas, Texas.
Deirdre had originally come to us for help to re-build her existing website, so while my team of designers and technical specialists were doing that, she joined the Client Attraction System marketing & training program…
….and took ‘Massive Imperfect Action‘ right away.
Deirdre wanted a sudden injection of cash. So she studied the Membership Sales module and ‘how-to’ videos in the Client Attraction System and got to work. Here’s how she describes what happened…
Isn’t that amazing?
Power to you Deirdre!
Of course, Deirdre’s far from being a ‘loner’ in successfully selling memberships.
All over the world, our Members are doing exactly the same, following exactly the same system and using exactly the same tools and marketing templates in the Client Attraction System 2.0, and often getting even bigger results.
What would an instant cash injection of $10,000 or $20,000 (or even more!) mean to you and your business?
* Pay an overdue tax bill and get that weight off your shoulders?
* Buy that piece of machinery you’ve been lusting after?
* Allow you to finally get that long-awaited salon renovation underway?
This is how Vivienne Bartle in Tasmania describes what happened when she implemented the Membership sales program in the Client Attraction System…
Selling memberships and bringing in all that cash up-front isn’t difficult.
It’s just a process, one that if carefully followed, always results in success.
All it takes is
* Allowing yourself time to promote
* Not simply running an ad on Facebook and Instagram and hoping that’s all you need to do
* Setting up a waiting list and allowing clients to put their name down for when you release the memberships
* Having the right promotional material (material that’s already been proven to work. Why re-invent the wheel?)
It’s why the Membership Module in the Client Attraction System is so important. It takes you through exactly the process, step-by-step, so you don’t have to just guess.
If you’re worried about not being able to do what Deirdre and Vivienne and so many others did, fear not!
As a Member of the Client Attraction System, you get as much hand-holding and actual one-on-one support as you need. Yep, guidance all the way, right from the very beginning.
49 of the 75 available spots in the course are already taken, so if you’re thinking “It’s about time!”, you’re absolutely right.
I’d hate to hear in a year’s time “Oh, I wish I’d done that….this year’s looking no better than last year!”
Want to bring in a PILE of cash to your beauty or hair salon business, but don’t know where to start?
Louise Adkins of Lavish Skin in Benalla, Victoria has been a Member of WSM’s Client Attraction System for 10 years, but she’d never tried selling memberships to her clients like this before.
In this video, Louise describes how she followed the Membership strategy, added a few flourishes of her own, downloaded one of the Salon Membership Promotion Templates from the Client Attraction System– and got to work!
Result: $31,000 in one-day sales, plus more to come.
Here’s how she did it…
Now, for just ONE DOLLAR, you can TEST DRIVE the exact same system Louise uses to drive her salon’s marketing.
Too many salon owners spend money on an ad, or a flyer, and somehow expect a flood of customers simply because they placed the ad. It’s an enduring mystery to me how so many business owners think the mere running of an ad should be enough in itself to generate business.
Yet the information about what makes great advertising – for the salon business, for any business – has been public knowledge for more than a hundred years.
It was six o’clock on a May evening in 1905 when John E. Kennedy sent a note up to A. L. Thomas, the senior partner of the Lord & Thomas advertising agency. Thomas was just getting ready to leave the office when the messenger brought him the note. It read as follows:
“You do not know what advertising is. No one in the advertising business knows what advertising is. No advertiser knows for certain what advertising is. If you want to know, tell this messenger that I should come up. I’m waiting in the lobby downstairs.”
It was signed: “John E. Kennedy.” Thomas read the note with an amused smile then handed it to Albert D. Lasker, the junior partner in the firm and said to him, “Well, you have been asking this question for years and nobody has yet satisfied you. Maybe here is the answer…You see the man.”
Albert Lasker saw Kennedy that night. It wasn’t until 3 o’clock in the morning before they left the building. And when Lasker left that night, he had the answer to what advertising was. What Kennedy told him that night was simple. Advertising is
SALESMANSHIP-IN-PRINT.
Salon advertising doesn’t get much worse than this. It smacks of pure laziness, ignorance and desperation. With advertising as pathetic as this, the salon deserves to fail. And it’s so easy for a competitor to counter with “We fix $5 haircuts.”
And the core skill of ‘salesmanship in print’ is in creating a compelling offer – then building a story around that offer which virtually forces the reader to keep reading.
Most business owners are too lazy to bother with this. About the best that most can bother with is a plain and simple discount. For example,
“Half price waxing!”
That’s not an offer. All it does is train your clients to expect a discount. It devalues what you sell. And it takes money right out of your wallet.
But it doesn’t take much effort to do so much better. Take a look around at what you already do in your salon or spa – things you currently provide your clients for free, in the normal course of business.
Now, what if you put a notional value on each and every one of these things?
A stylist will typically give a client a brief scalp massage during the shampoo. A beauty therapist might, in the normal course of doing a facial, relax the client with a soothing hand massage, some eyebrow grooming, perhaps a mini pedicure.
All of these things have a value. Yet, if they’re merely provided as a freebie, without declaring that value, then in the client’s mind they are worth…nothing.
It’s only when you clearly ascribe a defined value of each and every ‘extra’ service that you provide, that you create in the mind of the client what we call in marketing ‘perceived value’.
Worldwide Salon Marketing member salons will know all about this. The hundreds of ad, flyer and sales letter templates in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit, and in the Members Only ‘sealed section’ of this website, all contain some form of what we call
value adding.
Once you ‘get’ this, it suddenly becomes easy to create massive added value – and it allows you to actually increase prices under the valued-added ‘shelter’.
One of the greatest frustrations for many salon & spa owners is NO-SHOWS! They’re expensive, time-wasting and profit-sapping. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this webinar, recorded with successful Brisbane salon entrepreneur Anita Clements of Twisted Desire, watch and listen carefully as Anita explains how she eliminated no-shows forever – and discovered many other ways to take money from clients UP-FRONT.
Quotes
“I feel I’ve moved from Hairdresser to Business Women”
“You have my back”
What changes have happened?
” The biggest change is now my VIP events are profitable now – they were not before”
“My Staff are now interested in marketing where as before they were not – we’re making money now”
Taking deposits “I was very nerves to begin with but now with any VIP night we take money up front”
How did you implement taking deposits? ” We started doing this in January, we took a big hit because of not taking deposits. I felt very nerves about taking money off existing cleints. So we started small and any new cleint that is having any chemical treatment has to pay a deposit. We have a script and we have no problems with people paying them. ”
What did that do to your no shows.
“We have almost no no-shows now. We have got rid off all the time wasters who would book and not turn up”
“Our salon is now full of good customers”
What happens when people say they do not want to pay a deposit”
“Well it just means that we don’t get bad clients”
“If they don’t want to pay a deposit they can always just pop in and if we are not busy we will see them without a deposit”
“They tend to spend more money when they pay a deposit because the bill on the day is less”
“its made us a little more exclusive than the salon down the road”
“Its almost been a year and we’ve not had one person not show up or not call us”
“We take deposits for VIP events – if you pre pay you get a great package on the night (no discounts just added value) and mostly we are getting money from our existing cleints”
“The last VIP night we made $3,000 just from 2 packages and they could not wait to book in”
“We are doing the local Christmas market and take a stall and we are selling vouchers there at the festival”
“We’re also do the Christmas tree thing off the membership site – we don’t change a thing just run it straight off the system”
“We also did an Events and pre-sold Mini Membershps and made $9,000 – then I got scarred and pulled the pin but I should have done more”
“We don’t need bank loans anymore we just pre sell a mini membership – it just becomes a game, its no longer any struggle!”
I’ve lost count of the number of times over the past 10 years I’ve been accused of advocating ‘tacky’, so-called ‘unprofessional’ or ‘cheap’ marketing for salons and spas. In one memorable instance, a member of the ‘upper echelon’ of the beauty industry, a veteran of some 30 years, approached me during a marketing seminar I was giving and snootily told me “no self-respecting proper company would lower themselves to using your sales & marketing tactics.”
Well, I told her then, and I’m here to tell ya now, she was wrong in every possible way.
Have you heard of Time Magazine? Yep, the very same, establishment publishing giant that’s documented the movers and shakers of the world since 1923.
Like all publishers, Time makes its money from advertising, and to a less extent, subscriptions.
Now, nobody would ever consider Time Magazine any kind of hip, brash, swashbuckling outfit. Certainly not the kind of ‘old-money’ business that’d consider doing something even remotely ‘trashy’ or lowbrow just to boost its market share.
Um, well, yes they would.
Here’s a Time offer that arrived in WSM Director of Online George Slater’s mailbox this week. Yes, a full-color, four page direct mail piece offering
FREE WATCHES!
…in exchange for a drastically-discounted, 54-month subscription. (Watches. Time. Get it?) Now, for the serious student of marketing, this is worth studying. There’s nothing new here. Time is using one of the oldest, tried-and-tested, bait ‘n switch marketing strategies in the book. Because they know that people will often buy the product just to get the free bonus.
You see this exact strategy every time you browse your local newsstand; a free DVD or CD, glued to or packaged inside the magazine. Only a handful of people actually want the magazine. But many more just want the bonus CD. In Thailand, the Talisman Billiards Company gives away a free golf shirt with every order over $100. “I do see people increasing their order just so they can get the free shirt,” says Talisman owner Tony Jones.
This strategy works in almost any business. Salons and spas are no different. Got a cupboard full of products you haven’t been able to give rid of? Give them away, with an offer tied to an appointment for a service. “Yours Free” has for more than a century – and remains – one of the most powerful phrases in any marketing arsenal.
Asking clients for cash up-front puts the fear of god into many salon owners – but not for Anita Clements of Twisted Desire in Corinda, a suburb of Brisbane. Using marketing templates she simply downloaded from the Worldwide Salon Marketing Million Dollar Resources Library, and some guidance on how to use them, Anita planned and executed a Membership drive that netted $9,200 in up-front sales – in two days, from just a handful of her many hundreds of regular clients.
In this video, Anita explains exactly how she did it, and followed it up a day later with a VIP ‘Blonde Night’ that attracted 30 clients brought in another $3,000 in bookings and product sales. (It’s salon marketing like this that’s helped Anita get ‘off the tools’ and work on the business instead of in it.)
Have you heard of Time Magazine? Yep, the very same, establishment publishing giant that’s documented the movers and shakers of the world since 1923.
…in exchange for a drastically-discounted, 54-month subscription. (Watches. Time. Get it?) Now, for the serious student of marketing, this is worth studying. There’s nothing new here. Time is using one of the oldest, tried-and-tested, bait ‘n switch marketing strategies in the book. Because they know that people will often buy the product just to get the free bonus.
Billiards Company gives away a free golf shirt with every order over $100. “I do see people increasing their order just so they can get the free shirt,” says Talisman owner Tony Jones.
