By Scott Nichols

If you have an EFT-based business, this time of the year is vital that you pay attention to what is happening. Most salons do great enrolling their customers with specials, promotions and sales, but when it comes to the end of the busy season, a large percentage of those EFT members cancel their memberships.

We like to have this idea in our mind that when a customer enrolls in a membership they stay a member for years, and some do, but most don’t. Working behind the desk, you get to know your customers’ names, their lives and their stories. You see that theses customers are enrolled in your EFT program, and you think this is great, but what about those EFT members you no longer see?

Let’s look at this closer: Today you are working behind the desk and you see 100 customers. Out of those 100 customers, 50 of them are members. On the surface, that is a great percentage – half of your customers coming in are EFT members! But February through May you have enrolled 300 new members each month for a total of 1,200 new members. So now today, you are seeing 50 members a day with a EFT membership and figuring for a week you will see 350 EFT members (less if they are tanning more than one time a week). So, what are the other 850 EFT members doing?

The whole point of this article is to focus on the customers you don’t see, as they are a bigger part of your business than you think. This reminds me of a picture I think most of us have seen before of an iceberg that is shown above and below the water surface. Above the surface we see about 10 percent of the true size of the iceberg, while below the surface, hidden from our view, is the other 90 percent. For many of us, this is how we see our business; we focus on the surface.

Everyone knows that the indoor tanning industry has two distinct seasons – busy and slow season. During the busy season, our hidden customers surface for a short while, then they usually go away. This is the time where we need to focus on keeping them as members year-round. Here are a few things you can do.

1. Have a strong “rescue” program. Instead of the customer looking to cancel, give them an option to freeze their membership at a lessor dollar amount. I love this, because you can put an expiration date on the freezes. When that membership returns to active, you have just sold another membership without having to sell it. This especially works for college students who normally would cancel during the summer, and at the start of the school year you would have to try and get them to come back in and sign them up.
2. Having a freeze for a lower dollar amount is much better than having someone cancel and receiving nothing. During the slow season, every dollar and membership counts.
3. Look for incentives to give the customer to keep their membership active. Temporary upgrades are a great way to help with this.

I challenge you to start studying your business, and look at it in ways that you haven’t before. It can look daunting and almost paralyze you, but start small and look for one objective you would like to accomplish each week. In a year’s time, you could make 52 positive changes to your business. I know that if you start today, in just a short while you will have a whole new perspective on your business.