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.
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Some of the most common questions you’ll get as a float center operator involve the cleanliness of the tanks. This post will be an introduction to some of the most commonplace sanitation methods used in float tanks. These are generally either chemicals that go in the water or devices that attach to your filtration system. We’ll be discussing chlorine, bromine, ozone, UV, and hydrogen peroxide, which accounts for the sanitation methods used on nearly every float tank on the market.
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Editors Note: This is a revision of a past blog post, updated to reflect the most current sanitation methods and standards
In a perfect world, you could just pour water and salt into a float tank and it would stay pure and clean and fresh and salty forever. In the real world, conditions in the water are constantly changing, so keeping your water safe and clean takes a fair amount of vigilance.
This post covers how we maintain basic water quality in the float tank, except for sanitization methods, which will be covered in their own beastly sanitation blog post. Stay tuned for that coming out next week!
Floating, mental health, and wellness
This post will explore the intersection of floating with the concepts, beliefs, and experiences related to mental health and wellness, with a focus on anxiety and depression. I’ll explore my own story as it relates to floating before diving into the current intersections of floating and mental health, with a look at past, current, and potential opportunities for research and personal growth.
Massage, Acupuncture, and Float Tanks… A Chat with Sandra Calm
We’ve seen lots of float centers that aren’t just float centers.
Many have massage, some offer counseling, some have yoga classes next door. Lots of people start out either by incorporating float tanks into a larger business, or with float tanks only being one of many modalities at their center. Being specialists in floating, Float On has not mastered anything else.
So, to help gain insight into this growing aspect of the industry, we contacted our old friend, Sandra Calm. She started up The Float Shoppe here in Portland with her husband and podcast sensation, Dylan Calm, back in 2011. When they first opened, they had just two float tanks, and slowly added acupuncture, massage, counseling, along with two more tanks. Talk about expansion!
She was more than happy to take some time for the industry to help us understand just what it’s like to run a center with multiple services by answering some questions.
