Getting Members to Float More Often – DSP 316

Single float memberships have become increasingly more common in the float industry, typically with the option to purchase additional floats for the month at a discount. But how do you properly incentivize those members to float more than a single time per month?

Ashkahn and Derek talk marketing tips to keeping your float center top of mind and making sure your members are active regularly.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Ashkahn: Word. Hey everybody.

Derek: What’s up?

Ashkahn: This is Ashkahn.

Derek: This is Derek.

Ashkahn: We got the Ashkahn, Derek radio hour happening here. It’s probably going to be more like fifteen minutes.Not an hour. Didn’t mean to get you guys all excited.

Derek: Gotta get home.

Ashkahn: Alright, cool. Want to hear the question?

Derek: I guess.

Ashkahn: I’m not gonna say it if you’re not that enthusiastic about it.

Derek: Yes, Sir. Please! Can I have another?

Ashkahn: Oh great, sure.Yeah, yeah. Let me read the question here. It is, “I do the single float monthly membership, with additional discounted floats. How do I get my members to come in more than once a month?”

Derek: Gotta get those floaters floatin.

Ashkahn: So, yeah. I mean this is a really popular membership structure that we see out there, right?

Derek: Right, we even jumped on that bandwagon.

Ashkahn: So, we even do this. And the basic idea is that, you know, this is as opposed to the kind of like four floats a month or eight floats a month type memberships where it’s, you’re getting this kind of monthly package of floats. A lot of people will set it up so you pay, a small fee every month and you get one float with that fee, ya know. Whatever it is fifty or sixty dollars or something like that. And then you can buy additional floats for that same discounted rate, you know as many times as you want to float.

Derek: Or some people even do it cheaper, right?

Ashkahn: Or, or yeah. Your first one is a certain price and additional ones are cheaper. There’s a lot of ways of kind of altering things from there. But this person is struggling with the fact that people are getting this and then just floating that one time a month and then waiting. And then floating again.

Derek: You know, I remember when we went to the tier, to the single plan. We were concerned that people would only float once a month now. You know we had all these members like wow, were just basically like cut our membership down dramatically.

Ashkahn: I mean yeah, but basically is the downside of a membership structure like this right? I mean that’s called like a one float a month membership. Alright, when someone has four floats a month or eight floats a month, getting all those floats upfront and paying for them upfront definitely creates more incentive to go use them.

Derek: Right.

Ashkahn: Like I hey I got, I just paid for eight floats I’m going to go book myself in so I have, so I can use these floats that I already have. And switching to this structure I mean this is literally the fear we had and I think and not an unrealistic one to consider when you have this structure.

Derek: I mean in similar ways we would get those eight float a month people to book their floats so they don’t pile up we can do some of those strategies or the first one that comes to my mind is, when they come in for that one float and they’re done, ask them when you would like to see them next. Or they like to see you next.

Ashkahn: I mean there’s general strategies for getting any of your, of your customers to rebook and be recurring customers. But I feel like, you know, what we’re doing when we’re giving discounts or memberships and you know, anytime you’re doing anything that’s different than your base float pricing your doing some sort of price to incentivize or encourage some sort of behavior so; the first thing that comes to my mind is adding some rules or some more structure that encourages this behavior of people coming in more often. When we did this that was our big fear too that all of a sudden if someone was on a four float a month membership and now they have this one float a month membership are they going to have that same incentive to float those three extra times in the month or because it’s like a small pain point every time you gotta decide to spend money is that going to be discouraging that behavior?

So we built into our structure a couple things that we thought would continue to encourage people to float more regularly. One of them is our membership structure is really flexible in terms of sharing. You can bring a friend and they can get the same price as you. You can bring ten friends in and they’ll get the same price as you. We’re super lax about it because we think that’ll encourage people to come back, ya know.

Derek: Right. So it mean, if people are going to float once a month anyways but you allow them to share that membership and they bring a friend. That’s kind of like a single person buying two floats.

Ashkahn: Yeah, or if they have friends in town and they want to come get in the float it creates the kind of much easier path for people to make that decision or to feel good about coming in and floating and using that deal again.

Derek: Another thing we did to encourage people, you know, to float more often is we introduced the unlocked unlimited option.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I mean that was literally, that came out of this conversation.

Derek: Right.

Ashkahn: Was, what do we do to make people keep floating more regularly and our goal was, or the way we tried to meet that goal was by setting something that you would achieve after a certain amount of floats in a month.

Derek: Right.

Ashkahn: So for us, it’s after six floats in a month, all the rest of your floats that month become free.

Derek: And we ran numbers to make sure that we weren’t gonna basically lose the house running six so-

Ashkahn: We crossed our fingers a little bit.

Derek: We did. With the two, four, and eight I think we figured out the average member floated three times that month and then the high, like the top twenty-five percent most frequent floaters floated like five times so that six was encouraging even floating even more. So I think maybe three of all of our members floated more than six times. So really, you know getting people to float more is going to be the goal of that unlocked unlimited.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and we thought of a lot of other things too, you know. Things becoming half price after three floats, you know some sort of incentive point, that would benefit people floating once a week or-

Derek: Yeah, we wanted to keep the pricing no-brainer, like consistent. We didn’t want people to think am I on my third one yet or is it my second one yet, does it get cheaper after this? We just wanted the same consistent price.

Ashkahn: Yeah. And I know of floats out there that are like from floats one to 1-3 it’s this price then 3-6 it’s lower then 6-9 it’s lower and like, so there’s lots of different ways of going about this but-

Derek: Yeah, I heard someone at the Float Conference come up to me and ask, well what if every float it just got ten dollars cheaper until it became free. It’s like well that’s complicated.

Ashkahn: Right, Yeah. There’s two difficulties with things that get that elaborate. One is not a lot of software out there is good at handling all these crazy rules you came up with for how something should work. So that’s hard

Derek: Manual work on your plate

Ashkahn: So yeah might be a lot of manual work and tracking things on your side. And also it’s just confusing for your customers. You know, at a certain point your customers aren’t going to spend an hour trying to understand the intricacies of your pricing model. Something simpler is going to stick in their head easier and is going to be more tangible to them. So that was one of the things that led us to simplify. We were even thinking of doing a, you know, the half price of this, then unlimited of this then eventually we just cut it towards, towards being as simple as we could make it while still having that kind of achievable incentive point there.

Derek: So, let’s recap in my mind. We came up with three options so far, one was the unlocked unlimited, you know. Then we also had just asking when they’d like to float next and then making it sharable. What are some other ways you can get people to come in more?

Ashkahn: I mean what’s interesting to me is that even when we did have memberships that were like the four float and eight float a month, things like that and two floats a month. I mean one of the problems we were hitting is that people weren’t coming in and using all their floats.

Derek: Right

Ashkahn: So I should say that your membership structure alone is not going to make or break peoples behavioral habits. One of the reasons we switched membership structures was because people on four or eight floats a month were racking up a bunch of floats on their account and then they had so many floats on their account that they were like “Hey I should pause my membership, I have all these floats built up”.

Derek: Then they never go back and use them.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so you know, well, those membership structures do incentivize things more its not like those are perfect either. Just by someone having floats it’s going to mean they absolutely use them on a rigorous, on a rigorous schedule.

Derek: Well and I mean your everyday marketing is just an awareness generator to get people back into the mindset of thinking about floating so I mean the more your posting on social media and people are seeing that they might, “Hey I had a really rough week I must get back in there”. You know, just, everything you’re doing outbound is going to remind people you exist and could encourage people to float more often as well.

Ashkahn: Yeah. So I mean all of that is kind of feeding back into itself and you know at a certain point none of this is going to be perfect like your not going to get all of your members to become weekly floaters.

Derek: Right.

Ashkahn: And people go through phases too is what I’ve noticed. People will be super on it and floating two, three times a week for six months and then something in their life will change.

Derek: Right.

Ashkahn: And you won’t see them, or they start floating once a month or you know we just have people all over the place in terms of, you know they’re either going real strong for a period and we have other people who have been floating with us every week for four or five years at this point.

Derek: Right.

Ashkahn: And are really consistent and even through the changes in our memberships have kept up pretty much the same habits despite us altering things and changing things around.

Derek: And I also feel like if you try to incentivize a little too early like try to get those people activated sooner than later and then you have to pull that away for some reason, like if you stopped your multi-tiered discounts or anything like that, that now your setting up a bad example or bad taste in people mouth that things changed. So I don’t know if I really want to encourage people coming in at like, you know, special incentivized gimmicks like “if you were here three times this month you get the fourth one free” or anything like that. If that’s going to be the case make that all the time thing, make that your unlocked unlimited, something people can shoot for. I don’t know if I would incentivize them to kind of temporally boost their membership habits by, you know, short term campaigns.

Ashkahn: Yeah, I mean having something on going is, is nice too because it allows people some flexibility in their own schedules. We definitely have people that float a couple times each month then one month really go for it.

Derek: Right.

Ashkahn: And you know this month there like “Hey, you know I think I’m gonna try floating like three times a week”. And it’s cool for them to already have a membership that allows them to take advantage of that and go for that and have it become cheaper.

Derek: Right.

Ashkahn: And yeah, so far with, even with allowing this we have, at this point, I think around two hundred and fifty members and you know the rule applies for all of them. Past your six float of the month the rest are unlimited. It’s not, it hasn’t been out of control or anything like that. It’s not like the schedule is totally full of people who are floating for free all the time.

Derek: So when people are members, if you want to activate them you can possibly put them into a separate email campaign. So everybody get a reminder to float once a month when they get that bill, but let’s say half way through that month they get a second email that’s like or after they float they get an email saying “Hey it was great seeing you, hope you can book another”. So you don’t have to do that in person you can always have email options to get people to schedule their next float, make it really easy cause there’s a button with a link to the cite that they’ll go and book on.

Ashkahn: Yeah we also just try to do nice things for our members.

Derek: Yeah.

Ashkahn: Give them gifts.

Derek: Giveaways-

Ashkahn: Randomly every year, from time to time or we have presents who, for people who have floated with us-

Derek: Hundred times-

Ashkahn: Hundred times which are almost always our members. So just kind of those little touches here and there. Especially those unexpected touches I think are things that make people more invested in coming back in and you know, gets people more into the idea of floating with you more often.

Derek: So moral of the story is if you stay top of their mind they’ll think about you when they need you.

Ashkahn: So yeah, I mean good question. It is by doing a one float a month membership you’re literally encouraging people to float once a month so probably the biggest thing is-

Derek: Education. Just let them know why floating more is more beneficial to them.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and thinking about maybe adding some rules to your membership structure to encourage some slightly different behavior.

Derek: Yeah, but it’s, it’s gonna be a good change for your business. Gettin that one float a month.

Ashkahn: I’m looking forward to it. It’s gonna be great for you.

Derek: Yeah, wait their already on it. Yeah, you are.

Ashkahn: Yeah, okay. Cool.

Derek: Another question

Ashkahn: Another question done, boom. Yeah.

Derek: Another one tomorrow? Let’s do it.

Ashkahn: Okay, Where should people go if they want to write us questions Derek?

Derek: Gee, Ashkahn I think floattanksolutions.com/podcast is an excellent source.

Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s a great answer.

Derek: Thank you

Ashkahn: Yeah, okay.

Derek: Well, okay people go do that now.

Ashkahn: Right

Derek: Bye

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