Run a Membership: Turn Regulars Into Subscribers

Most venues have between twenty and two hundred people who would come more often if they had a reason to think of you first. A membership is that reason, and it charges for itself.

The financial shape is different from everything else on this list. A voucher is money now for food later. A membership is money every month, from people who were already coming, in exchange for making them come more.

Who it is for

Venues with genuine regulars: neighbourhood restaurants, coffee shops, wine bars, anywhere somebody might go weekly. It works badly for places people visit once a year, and extremely well for the café where forty people are already in three times a week.

What you can offer

You are not limited to a discount, and a discount alone is usually the weakest version.

• A credit balance that tops up every cycle — pay €40 a month, get €45 to spend
• A standing discount on everything, or on a category
• Free items — a coffee a day, a glass of wine with dinner
• Booking priority, or deposits waived
• Member-only events and promotions, which is the one people actually talk about

The strongest memberships combine a small tangible perk people use constantly with something exclusive they could not otherwise buy. The daily coffee makes it worth paying for. The members' supper club makes it worth telling people about.

Pricing it so it survives

Two tests, and a membership needs to pass both.

A normal member should feel ahead. If somebody uses it the way you expect and ends up level, they cancel at the first quiet month. Build in a visible margin for them.

You should be ahead on the behaviour it causes. Not on the fee alone — on the extra visits. A €40 membership that costs you €45 of food is fine if it turns a fortnightly customer into a weekly one, and a disaster if it just discounts somebody who was coming anyway.

The honest way to check is to look at what your regulars already spend, and price so that the membership pays for itself at roughly their current rate. Everything above that is the upside.

Pause, rather than cancel

Switch pausing on.

Somebody going travelling for two months, or having a tight January, has two options: pause, or cancel. The first is a member who comes back. The second is a customer you have to win again from nothing.

It costs you two months of fee and saves you the member. That is almost always the better trade.

Gifts, households and coalitions

Three variations worth knowing about, because each solves a problem the basic version has:

• Gift memberships work like gift vouchers, and are bought by the regular who wants to bring somebody in.
• Family plans put several people on one membership. A couple who both eat with you should not have to buy two, and making them is how a good idea dies at the checkout.
• Coalitions let several independent venues share one membership, with the money settled between them based on where it was actually used. For a group of venues in one town, that is a far better proposition than each running a card nobody carries.

When a card fails, and why that matters more than churn

Most memberships that end do not end because somebody decided to leave. They end because a card expired.

A failed payment is treated as a problem to fix rather than a cancellation: the member is told, and given a chance to update the card before anything stops. It sounds like a detail and it is worth several points of retention a year, because a customer who never chose to leave will almost always fix the card when asked.

The thing to avoid is the opposite behaviour, which plenty of subscription systems have: silently cancelling on the third failure, so somebody discovers at the counter that they are no longer a member. That is a bad conversation to have with a regular, about money, in front of other customers.

What it costs

• 8% of what members pay

No platform fee for running one, nothing per member, nothing if nobody joins.

A worked example

A café charges €30 a month for a membership that includes a coffee a day, Monday to Friday, and 10% off food.

Sixty people join. That is €1,800 a month, of which Mosey takes 8%, leaving €1,656.

A member who takes their coffee every weekday uses about 21 coffees, costing the café roughly €0.70 each to make — €14.70 against €30. Most members take twelve or thirteen, not twenty-one, so the average is better than that. And the membership brings them in five mornings a week, where they buy pastries and lunch at full price.

That is €1,656 of predictable monthly revenue from customers who already existed, plus the visits.

The first cycle and the 14-day right

A member has a statutory right to withdraw within 14 days of joining. Where they have not used any benefit at all, Mosey refunds the first cycle in full, automatically.

That is more generous than the law strictly requires — the Directive would allow a deduction for the part of the period already served. It is deliberate: working out what a fortnight of a supper club membership was worth is a judgement, and the automatic path only ever runs on facts that can be checked. A part-used cycle reaches you as a refund request instead, with the details, and you decide.

What it connects to

• Run a loyalty programme — free, and the natural step before a paid membership
• Run restaurant promotions — which can be made members-only
• Sell event tickets — the members' night people actually talk about
• Mosey Tap — how a member perk is claimed at the counter
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page