Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
How many times has a float center owner had a first time floater come out of the tank and said something along the lines of “that was amazing! I need to do this every week!” and then they never see that person again? How do you get them to come back without committing to a membership or a high ticket package of floats?
Ashkahn and Graham share their thoughts on this exact problems and some of the creative solutions they’ve implemented at Float On to combat it. The key, for them, has been keeping it simple and making it accessible.
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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Ashkahn: Alright, hey, how’s it going everybody?
Graham: Hey loyal listeners. I am Graham.
Ashkahn: And I am Ashkahn, and let’s get down to business. I’m going to make that our tagline. “I’m Graham, Ashkahn, and let’s get down to business.” It’s going to be a thing from now on.
Graham: That sounds great. So our question for today is, “aside from memberships and packages, is there any other way to reward frequent floaters? They aren’t looking to buy on a consistent basis, but I’d like to keep them coming back.”
Ashkahn: Nice. Yeah, I mean there’s lots of ways to reward people.
Graham: Sure. Under-the-table bribes.
Ashkahn: Just kind of rubbing their shoulders when they come in. Yeah, we’ve tried some things in the past that weren’t memberships or packages but kind of incentives for people to float again.
Graham: Yep, and the first thing we tried is doing nothing. I guess just offering floating at a single price was the first thing we tried outside of that. Not really an incentive, I guess, it’s more just a we’re not having any incentive, so you still should pay the price that we’re asking. That did okay, but you’d have people coming in who’d just swear up and down that they were going to return and they didn’t, so it’s pretty obvious you need something to incentivize people beyond just their passion once they get out of the tank to take that step and come back.
So before we did any memberships though, we had some other programs. For example, we did a float chain, where if people scheduled their next float when they got out of their float that they were coming in for right then, then they could get $10 off of the next float that they scheduled. And you could do that indefinitely, so theoretically if you just always scheduled the following float when you’re getting out of your current float, then you could save $10 off of every float that you were having.
Ashkahn: We also did one where if you were to bring a new person with you who hadn’t floated, you’d both get $10 off your float, and if you brought two new people in you’d get $20 off your float. They’d each get 10 off their float. So kind of a good way to get people not just coming back themselves but coming back with somebody, a new person.
Graham: Yep. And was that it for just straight discounts?
Ashkahn: I feel like we had one more. I can’t remember-
Graham: It was the internship program that we had up on the wall there for a while.
Ashkahn: Anyway, there’s a lot of creative things you can do. There’s all sorts of stuff you can come up with that are ways to give people cheaper floats for some sort of reason. But I don’t know, in the end, we had problems with some of that stuff. Things got complicated with all these multiple different types of incentives.
Graham: Yeah, so let’s back up and talk about each of those independently, and these are just two examples, like Ashkahn said, that you could do. I’d say the primary problem actually with both of them was simply that people were coming in and not actually using them, and we’d have to remind people, and especially with the referral one and kind of coming in with friends and stuff like that. If someone came in with two friends and didn’t mention it, and we didn’t force them to take the discount and then they later realized it, everyone was upset. It’s $40 they could have saved, and so then we’re in this interesting position as a business where it’s like, “Well, they were willing to pay full price, but they might get upset if we don’t let them know that there is a potential discount.” So it sort of feels like we’re leaving money on the table or being a little dishonest with people, which is an interesting thing to have to weigh back and forth.
Ashkahn: Yeah. And at the end of the day these things, they’re just a little bit more fragile than memberships and packages. There’s something about a membership or a package where you’re kind of just making that decision one time, and then you’re in this thing. The status quo becomes you staying in it, as opposed to these one-off incentives really rely on people actively taking you up on it over and over and over again. And so in terms of just the general stability, long-term stability, we’ve found that memberships and packages and keeping that as what we really want people to do is, is been more useful for us then trying to come up with creative one-off discounts.
Graham: And even above that, we’ve just sort of moved towards memberships being the ideal thing to move people towards. Even packages, we’ll still offer them, but we kinda keep them secret-menu.
Ashkahn: Yeah, they’re not on our website, they’re not the prices when you come into our shop. They’re just like if someone specifically asks.
Graham: Yeah, and it kind of makes sense. With packages you’re incentivizing spending a lot of money with you all at once, which is great. It’s always nice to have an influx of cash. But with memberships you’re rewarding staying on with you and loyalty and sticking around with your business and making this a part of your life and a habit. It’s just so much more powerful if you can have someone who is a regular customer, who’s coming in month after month, and typically, even though it’s not a giant purchase all at once, kind of tortoise and the hare style, those people who are with you for a long time end up giving more money to your business, and ultimately I think better word-of-mouth because it being such a habit is so powerful for people’s lives and the story they end up cultivating around floating.
Ashkahn: Yeah, so this person’s question was about people who don’t want memberships and packages, aren’t coming in really on a return basis.
Graham: Wait, sorry, we’re answering a question?
Ashkahn: Talking about memberships again
And I think one thing to think about is, you could structure your memberships in a way that allow for more causal people to be involved in it. There’s the rules that you can set for your memberships that I think take some of the pressure off of it seeming like a huge commitment, like allowing people to share their floats and allowing some different scales of what people are paying each month and what they get out of it. You can make it an almost easier membership to have that doesn’t feel like, “Boy, if I’m not floating every week I’m totally getting kind of screwed on this deal,” or, “I really need to be floating a lot for this to be the right decision for me.” Building in stuff like that into your membership structure to me almost is more ideal than trying to come up with something outside of memberships as a way for people to still come in.
Graham: It’s true. Even with our membership is $54 a month for a single float, as opposed to $77 for the cost of a regular 90-minute float with us, and I feel like even if people aren’t in Portland for months at a time, it means at most they’ve kind of accumulated two, three, maybe four floats over the course of the three, four months they’re gone and then they’re back in town.
Ashkahn: Which roll over, they can give them away.
Graham: There’s no expiration on them.
Ashkahn: There’s no expiration. We’re really setting it up so that it doesn’t feel like a burden.
Graham: So yeah, that is totally an alternative. It can still be a membership, it’s just when they’re not using it, it doesn’t really cause them any problems, which is a very nice alternative. Little shout out as well to a online company run by a float center owner who is one of the first people in the float industry who we met, which is Kane down from Float Matrix, who runs RewardMore, which is kind of just an entire alternative structure to memberships, which I guess is worth mentioning, kind of like our float chain but a little more broad, which is just, if someone floats and then they float again within a set period of time like a month, then the cost of that float goes down, and if they then float again within the period of another month, the cost goes down again, so it’s kind of these stepping stones towards getting cheaper floats, as long as you are making it a habit. And then if you don’t float within a month, you kind of go back up to the rung above, so floating gets a little more expensive but maybe not full price. You don’t float two months in a row and all of a sudden you’re kind of back up to the regular, full-price float.
I kind of like that. It’s like the everyone’s a member sort of philosophy implemented in a-
Ashkahn: Just kind of a light kind of incentive for everybody coming in to come in more frequently.
Graham: Yeah, ’cause the downside of memberships is everywhere knows that members are awesome. Everywhere knows that recurring revenue is absolutely what you want, so everyone wants you to join their club, and as a result we’ve developed kind of thick skin and we get really wary of the movie membership pitch and the grocery store membership pitch and the rock climbing membership pitch, and yes, even the float center membership pitch. It’s probably like the fifth membership pitch they’ve received that day. So when someone’s just auto-enrolled in the program, you’re just saying, “Hey, you don’t need to buy anything, but if you come back regularly, you get rewarded.” There is something nice about that that I like, even though we haven’t played with it that much outside of our kind of first opening float chain-type thing that I mentioned before. More secondhand, I guess, for other systems that different float centers out there are using.
Ashkahn: And the trickiest thing about all this, and we’ve mentioned it before, and it’s good to remember in conversations like this, is if you offer too many things, all of a sudden your pricing becomes really complicated. It’s really easy for complexity to be added. If you have two different lengths of float and maybe some massage, and you have all these different fancy membership and packages and different incentives, at a certain point you have 30 different options for someone to choose from for essentially the same service, and that can just lead to choice paralysis in people. That’s why we don’t even put packages as a thing that we list publicly, is just because we want to make sure our pricing menu is kind of as simple as possible and doesn’t seem overwhelming to people.
Graham: So the more rules that you start adding onto things, and this is also, I guess, another one we didn’t talk about is this idea of float challenges, or, “Hey, float a set number of times during a specific period and earn certain rewards and points systems.” I’ve seen kind of points systems-based reward mechanisms. We even drew out this whole crazy points scheme before we ever opened Float On for what we could reward people for, and even reading books and doing reports and stuff like that might save people off of their floats ’cause they’re more educated now. And again, it’s not like you’re just one part of a very complicated life that many people are living.
Ashkahn: That’s a philosophy lesson for the day.
Graham: The idea to ask people to just invest that much of their brainpower into understanding your entire system and keeping up with it and then playing the game, it seems like too much. It seems like too much to ask of the cognitive interest of most of your floaters.
Ashkahn: And we just know that stuff like that’s overwhelming to people and leads to them not choosing things because it’s just intense to have to make big decisions like that.
Graham: Yeah, so much so that when we were deciding what our points scales would be, we were like, “Eh, let’s just not have any of them.”
Ashkahn: Yeah, so there’s lots of-
Graham: There’s an answer in there somewhere.
Ashkahn: There’s an answer somewhere. Good luck finding it, and if you have other questions that you would like as thoroughly answered as this one, you can go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
Graham: And be sure to mention “answer thoroughly” right there in the question so that we know.
Ashkahn: So we know. Alright, that’s it for us. We got down to business.
Graham: Yep. And now let’s let you get back to business.
Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s going to be our outro from now on.
Graham: Oh god.
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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.
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