Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Email is a valuable channel for communicating with your floaters. While you can use it to gather feedback, send appointment reminders, and share relevant news from your center, you never want to spam your clients. In fact, you want them to love floating at your center so much that you don’t need to spend time writing persuasive emails in order to lure them back.
In this episode, Ashkahn and Graham talk about how, when, and when not to send emails to your customers.
As always, see below for relevant resources and the full text of the episode.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Okie-doke-a-rooney. Today’s Daily Solutions question is:
Do you offer any emails after someone floats at Float On?
Ashkahn: We do. We send an email after they float. And that email only gets sent 90 days after they float — potentially.
Graham: Potentially. And if they float again within that 90 days, it doesn’t get sent out. So, it gets sent 90 days after someone’s last float, which may never come. If they’re just the best customer in the world, then they may never get that email.
Graham: That’s all we do, email-wise, in terms of something automated that’s tied to floating.
Ashkahn: We might also start doing something, maybe a few days afterwards, for a little feedback email just to kind of, it might even be just a smiley face and a frowny face. And they click on whether it was good or bad, just to get a little feedback from our customers a little more regularly.
And I’m not sure if that desire has come up now that I, as an owner, am out of the shop a little bit more. But something to be actually gauging the temperature of how floats are going much more closely to when they actually happen than 90 days afterwards like our current email, has been sort of a desire that I have.
Graham: What other emails have you heard of people sending out?
Ashkahn: First of all, the email that we send out is a little bit different, I think, than some people’s. So I think one of the most common things that people do when they’re sending out an auto-email responder is that they’ll offer someone a discount if they haven’t been in in set amount of time. Or they’ll do a little follow-up and do some more education about floating.
I’d say they kind of take one of those two paths — someone hasn’t been in in a little bit, so let’s follow up and either offer them some money off so they’re more likely to come back, or tell them some cool things about floating, or send them some news stories so they remember how awesome it is, so they want to come back.
Those are the two most common paths. With our email, we went kind of a different route. If you know the Float On marketing mentality, then you know that we are not really keen on discounts. So, we were very unlikely to go down that route. So, we actually just send a feedback email. We just do it 90 days later.
And our hope is that by sending this feedback email, it does two things. It actually gets feedback from some people who might not have given it, so we can collect more information about how we can improve. And in the process, maybe they’ll realize that they didn’t actually have any feedback to give us, their float was awesome. And thinking about that might make them want to come back in.
So, that’s kind of the philosophy behind it. And I just got it pulled up here too.
The subject is, “Was everything okay with your last float?”
And it just says,
“Hi (name), it’s been a few months since your last float, and I wanted to reach out to make sure that you had a good experience when you came in. If there is anything that we can do better, please do point it out to us. You can send an email along to feedback@floathq.com with any criticism or praise, if it’s appropriate, from your float. We’re always trying to improve, and it feels like our center has new changes and upgrades every day, in large part because of the great feedback we get from our customers. Hopefully I’ll see you in the shop soon. In the meantime, float on.”
Graham: It’s a nice email.
Ashkahn: Yeah, not too bad, huh?
So that’s all that we do for our emails. And again, I think that the other ones follow that route of, whatever you’re doing, you’re trying to reel them back in. And in my mind, it’s just this balance between, of course you want to send out emails and get people back into the shop, and you really don’t want to annoy them, so you don’t want to send too many emails.
Graham: It’s definitely important to think about someone’s full process going through, because it’s pretty easy to slip into getting real email-heavy, right? Because let’s say they make an appointment and you have, like, a confirmation email that gets sent to them. That’s an email. And then a lot of places have reminder emails, maybe 24 or 48 hours beforehand. If once they buy something, they’ll get an email receipt emailed to them.
And then, if you have another email right after their float asking how it was, and then an email three months later. All of a sudden, someone coming in to float with you one time gets, like, six emails from you as a result of it. And that’s never the goal. You’re taking everybody’s email, and you don’t want to kind of break that trust with them and end up kind of being spam-y with the powers that you have.
Ashkahn: Yeah, so at least for us, that’s kind of why we decided on only having one of these things, and it only goes out well after their float, so 90 days. So, although they kind of get front-loaded with these emails about their appointment, they won’t hear from us again until three months later, which feels like a very generous amount of time.
Graham: Yeah. We also don’t put people on our mailing list if they come float with us. We do have a separate mailing list that people can sign up for, but we’re not just sending anybody who floats with us a bunch of emails afterwards regardless. So, we try to be kind of considerate with people’s emails, because we know we’re asking them, everybody, to give us an email.
And for the most part, it’s really useful for us, being able to send them a reminder, being able to send them a receipt, being able to contact them if they left something behind in our float center. Those are the reasons we need their email and we want to to, again, maintain that trust so that we’re not bothering people or making them regret giving us their emails.
Ashkahn: Alright guys, have a good one out there, and as always, slam it and jam it.
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The Float Tour Blog – Issue #28
Home sweet home! After so many months on the road, it was strange being back here in Portland. We were exhausted, excited, and a little travel weary. The first night back, I slept in my own bed for the first time in three months and the world just melted away.
Having travelled across the United States, I’m reminded of how insular Portland is. We are aggressively fixated on keeping things local. Local beer, ketchup, bikes, pet food, pillows, phone cases… it’s part of our charm. We want to reward people for living here and being a part of the community. It’s so pervasive that, after living here for so long, I kind of forgot that Secret Aardvark hot-sauce isn’t available everywhere, and that most cities don’t even recycle, let alone compost.
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #27
Our northern neighbor – a sister city, of sorts – Seattle is the largest metropolitan area in the Pacific Northwest. It’s the land of Microsoft and Kurt Cobain, and the culture here embraces both simultaneously. It’s tech business professional in the front and rock n’ roll grunge in the back. This blend creates a perfect storm of high energy business life and high energy nightlife, making relaxation a valuable commodity. Floating helps fill the void left by nightmarish traffic and overcrowded restaurants.
Given that it’s so close to home, the float centers in Seattle are a lot more familiar to us. Our visits here were more like a high school reunion than they were like the first day of school. During some of our visits, we were picking up conversations right where we left them.
The Float Tour Blog Issue #26
Vancouver is the largest metropolitan area in Canada, and third largest on the West Coast. It’s a major hub for international trade, with one of the largest ports in the world, giving it a large migrant population, mainly from Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. It’s also been a long-time home to the Canadian film industry, and has even been nicknamed “North Hollywood.” Dozens of film and television productions from major studios film here every year.
Vancouver is very much an international city. It has large boroughs dedicated to varying cultures, including one of the largest Chinatowns in the world. The society here is more receptive to new ideas, always looking for the next big thing; it’s not surprising that floating has blown up in Vancouver as much as it has.
In the last 3 years, 10 float centers have opened up, most of them being larger 4–6 tank centers. The really interesting thing is how they all opened within the same short amount of time about 1 ½ to 2 years ago, within months of each other.
The Float Tour Blog – Issue #25
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