Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
This year at the Float Conference, Derek hosted a marketing forum and took questions that he wanted to share with everyone here.
This episode focuses on how Float On handles memberships, including tiered memberships and how to gracefully transition from one type of membership to another.
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode not currently available
Greg: So I’ve been using the tiered membership style since I opened two and a half years ago.
Derek: Okay.
Greg: Since about two years ago I’ve been wanting to switch down to the single type of membership, and just wondering if you, especially Derek since you guys did it after six years, can provide ideas on how to do that? I think I have an email from you guys from when you did that.
Derek: Right.
Greg: Yeah, just ideas for switching that.
Derek: Anytime you have to bring news to people, and this wasn’t necessarily bad news. This was news of, you’re not gonna have to pay $110 a month, you’re now gonna have to pay $54 a month. If it was bad news like a price hike or anything like that, that’s different. If you’re raising your membership prices, you really wanna try to spin it into a celebration because you’re gonna get upgrades and stuff like that. But if you’re actually just going to laterally move from breaking down what your lowest package is, let’s say, or maybe picking a price point that benefits the center. We made sure, when we picked our price point, if anybody was going to be paying more at that, we grandfathered them in.
So that was one of the key things that when we did this, it’s like, “Hey, we’re switching up our memberships.” We added some things we never added before, so it created this newness, this excitement. We call it unlock and limited. So it you float six times that month at your membership rate of $54 per float, you can float the rest of the month for free.
And so that was a key thing that people like, it kind of gamified it almost. It kind of made that like, we have a dozen people every month floating unlimited, and they’re loving it, and those are your best floaters and they’re actively talking about it. So creating little extra things is what we did. Again, making sure all of your existing members never pay a cent more. So grandfather the old rates in. Like, there’s some people still paying $35 a float for their membership. But we wanna take care of those people ’cause they’ve taken care of us.
There is some growing pain in it. I’m not gonna lie. You’re gonna watch these numbers, and you’re gonna watch this monthly recurring revenue of X number of dollars, dramatically dropped to if they all floated once a month. And then you’ll watch that grow back up as they continue their habits they’ve already had. And you’re gonna have more people excited. So yeah, some people may float less, but it’s offset by more people floating, and more people floating at your center, as we all know, is great for word of mouth.
Gloria or Cindy, you wanna add anything to what you would do in a situation where you have to go from one structure to another?
Gloria: Yeah, we did, again, fairly early on but we did have a handful of members in each tier. I would just say rip the Band-Aid off and give them grandfathered pricing and really, figure out how many does it affect. Most of the members are probably in the first year anyway, which is gonna be in line with whatever you probably stick with. So does that affect 30 members, 20 members. I mean, if it’s under 50 people, you might want to call every one of them. But if it’s thousands, then yeah, do a mass email. Right? But yeah, I’d say rip the Band-Aid off. It’s so much easier.
Greg: So did you guys just send the same email to your entire mailing list? Or did you have an email towards just your members?
Derek: Right.
Greg: Did you make phone calls to every member?
Derek: Right. We segmented out. So you’re gonna have a different conversation with the people that their lives are changing more, and then those customers who aren’t members, you’re gonna have a new, exciting conversation. Floating’s even more accessible than ever before.
Greg: Okay.
Derek: Right? And again, We did another thing that was actually, If anybody knows Float On culture, it’s super loosey goosey, easy, yeah, you can get whatever you want with us. We actually added a three month commitment to our membership. We’ve never had commitments. And we did the numbers. We’re numbers people. We looked at everything and we looked at a lot of our churn when we were on the tiered memberships, is couples floating that just wanna get a cheaper price so they sign up and cancel like, after their float. Right? They’re just signing up for membership, get the better rate, ’cause there was no commitment, and then they were never coming back. So we had a lot of churn people wanting to save on two floats or on four floats if they’re having a party.
So when we dropped it down to that one price point, we asked for a little bit of commitment. So people did drop off, but they were probably gonna drop off anyways. And then when the three month came around, we’re like, “Oh no.” Those people stayed. It actually did what we wanted to do. We were happily surprised.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Using Ozone in Float Tanks – DSP 340
Ashkahn and Graham talk about Ozone in this episode. Everything from different types of ozonators to the efficacy of it as a water treatment system compared to other systems.
Ozone is very effective, but there are concerns about its use that aren’t present in other types of water treatment, and fortunately the guys give us a lot of information on what to consider when putting together our own systems.
Credit Card Processing – DSP 339
Graham and Ashkahn delve into the wild world of credit card processing. There’s a massive industry of businesses that exist between when your customer swipes their credit card and when it goes into your bank account. The industry seems to be designed to be confusing and some companies only perform certain tasks, making it very difficult to compare services.
The guys give their advice on how to handle finding the right credit card processor for float centers and what to look out for when you’re on the hunt.
Floating While Pregnant – DSP 338
There are tons of anecdotal stories about pregnant people having great experiences with floating, but what are some of the things you should consider if you’re going to encourage floating while pregnant.
Graham and Ashkahn share what they’ve heard about it and how to frame the conversation with an expecting parent while still covering your bases from a liability standpoint.
Giving Shares of Your Company – DSP 337
A lot of small businesses have a romanticized idea of what “shares” in a business actually mean. Float On did, once upon a time. What does it mean to give shares of your company to someone? Is it a good way to reward a valuable and dedicated employee? Are there other, more appropriate rewards that you can offer instead?
Graham and Ashkahn review this question in detail, sharing many questions that any float center owner should consider before offering an employee ownership of your company.
Is a Business Plan Necessary When Buying an Existing Center? – DSP 336
Do you need a business plan if you’re not building a business from the ground up?
Graham and Ashkahn chime in and give a solid “maybe” as a response. It depends on a lot of factors, for sure. Do you already have financing? Are you maintaining the existing business model or revamping it?
Latest Blog Posts
Beginner’s Guides from Everywhere!
If you’re not familiar with the Beginner’s Guide, it’s basically our intro brochure at Float On. About 5 years ago now we made the creation files easily available so folks could edit it as they pleased and sent it out to everyone with an open invitation to do with it as they pleased for their own centers. We know most centers don’t have graphic designers on staff so it seemed like a nice way to help others have reliable, easy to access information for their clients and also serve as a way to save them time and money from having to create their own.
The result of this is that years later, dozens and dozens of centers have a version of these brochures, some of them not even realizing where they originated from. Naturally, we’ve taken a copy from all the centers we’ve visited and we thought we’d share some of them with the rest of you.
The Daily Solutions Podcast – Our Top 5 Episodes from March
Here we go again. Another month, another difficult choice of deciding which episodes will make it into the Top 5. We had some really killer episodes this month, including our 100th episode and a special interview with Justin Feinstein. Here are the episodes that we...
Float Success Story – Float Los Alamos
At the Float Conference every year we hear inspirational stories from float center owners who have carved a piece of the industry out in their salty image. Everyone defines "success" in their own way, and we thought it would be cool to share what that meant to some of...
The Daily Solutions Podcast – Our Top 5 Episodes from February
Well, we’ve done it again. We’ve gone through an entire month listening to Graham and Ashkahn share their floaty knowledge. In any case, here are a few of our favorites from the month of February. We're almost at episode 100 (in which we have something special...
