Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Graham and Ashkahn consistently emphasize the importance of mailing lists, but today they dive in deep to talk about how to build a mailing list, giving their best tips and tricks to collecting emails and how to make sure you’re getting the right people signed up.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: All right.
Ashkahn: Hey.
Graham: Hello everyone.
Ashkahn: Welcome. Welcome to the podcast.
Graham: This is Graham.
Ashkahn: This is Ashkahn.
Graham: Today’s question is “you talk a lot about collecting emails, but what are some of the places I should collect them? I grab it from customers when they make an appointment, and I have a form on my website.”
So.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: Collecting emails. We do talk a lot about collecting emails because you have to. It’s very important. I’d say that having a big email list is actually probably your number one arsenal in marketing, to be honest. Way more than having a big Facebook page or a lot of Twitter followers or something like that, you know?
Ashkahn: In fact, part of the answers of this question is we in some ways view our Facebook page and Twitter following and things as good means of filling our mailing list.
Graham: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Ashkahn: We view those as part of the end point ideally would be for those people to be on our mailing list, rather than-
Graham: Every one of them.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: Ideally we would just take them off of Facebook and put all of them onto our mailing list where we control how we reach them and who sees what.
Ashkahn: Yeah. Right? That’s one of the big differences is Facebook can just stop us from reaching people, and they have. We used to reach a bunch of people, and then they started making all these algorithms and stuff.
Graham: Now, not so much, unless you pay them, yeah, money.
Ashkahn: But that doesn’t happen with email.
Graham: Yeah. There’s the promotions tab in Gmail, I guess, has been the closest development to-
Ashkahn: Right, and-
Graham: Pushing some things a little bit to the side.
Ashkahn: Better spam filters, or …
Graham: Yeah, but even with that, you’re still at least kind of guaranteed to show up in a section of someone’s inbox as opposed to, yeah, needing to pay the gods of the internet in order to deliver it or something like that.
So, email is important. Yes. Ways to collect them, first of all, you’re totally right. When someone makes an appointment, when someone comes in physically to float at your spot, that’s of course a great time to grab someone’s email. The Helm, for example, just uses someone’s email as their kind of account name, which a lot of softwares do.
So, the email is very built in to just interacting with a lot of booking softwares. Within that, there’s also this kind of differentiation between someone giving you their email address to make an account and make an appointment and also them giving you their email address and saying, “I want to hear from you. Please send me marketing emails.” Stuff like that, right?
So, even when you’re collecting emails or when someone comes in in person, like if they booked online, they didn’t opt in to your mailing list, often at checkout there’s kind of an option to opt in to receive marketing emails from people or not. When they come in in person, train your staff to ask for or ask them if they want to sign up to actually be on the mailing list when they’re at their appointment, right?
Even though you have their email address and it’s in the system, still confirming verbally that you’re allowed to use that to actually send them emails and to let them know about sales you’re having and upcoming events and things like that, I think, is a great way to actually get that activated kind of double opt in list built.
Ashkahn: Yeah. It really is, at least in our opinions, I would consider a float center, if we were to be sending just a ton of emails to people without asking them, to be kind of spam. I would think it appropriate that some email client would filter that stuff out.
So, that’s what I want. I want confirmation from someone that they do want to hear from us and that we’re not just kind of getting them because they had to give us their email in order to book an appointment with us.
Graham: Yeah.
Ashkahn: You have a stronger email list at that point. You know those people are interested. It’s a much more real representation of how many people are gonna want to read what you’re saying and actually be interested in sales you’re doing and various things like that.
Graham: Yeah. I guess just to kind of delve a little further even into the things you already said, so collecting someone’s email when they are making an appointment again. Use another opportunity when they’re coming in to confirm they want to get those emails, and similarly, when they’re making the account. Making sure to tweak and play around with the wording that you have on your website to actually check that box to subscribe to your mailing list.
Often something like “join our mailing list” is not the strongest pitch to actually give you their email addresses, right? Letting them know that they’ll get special deals that are only sent to people on the mailing list, they’ll get important news or invited to events, things like that. Show some benefit in your pitch to actually get them to sign up, I think, is an important one.
Ashkahn: There’s a lot of different ways on your website to optimize what you have going on, too, from just where it’s placed on your homepage, making sure it’s actually on your homepage somewhere, not buried somewhere on your site, and there’s various, there’s all sorts of smart pop ups now that you can customize in terms of how many seconds after someone gets to your page does it show up, and it can only show up to someone once and then it won’t bother them again every time they come to your site, or it can detect when someone’s finished reading and about to leave a page and try to pop up right at that point, and welcome gates and all sorts of different kind of fancy ways of trying to up your amount of people who are subscribing.
Graham: Yeah, and we use some of those, too, for our various websites just to, again, kind of optimize that amount of people who actually trust us enough or even know that the mailing list exists to give you their email address.
Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s funny because the question involves the biggest ways to get emails. So, outside of that, I don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff you see people do all the time when you go to events or something like that where you enter your email to be in some sort of raffle-
Graham: Trade shows in general, right? If you are doing any events or giving presentations out in the public, don’t think of it just in terms of passive education of the people out there, right? Actually getting incoming emails from the people in the audience I think is, yeah, is really worthwhile.
Ashkahn: It’s pretty much nice to keep in your mind as just a go to call to action. At any point, if selling a float on the spot seems a little unlikely or a little too much friction, even if you are doing that, it’s nice to just always be aiming for people to sign up for your mailing list. It’s a lot less of a commitment for people, but now you have a way of contacting them and reminding them that floating exists and sparking their interest in the future.
Graham: Yeah, we have another good episode on A/B testing. But you might want to check that out because one of the best ways to actually get people to sign up for the email list is not anything tricky or something it sounds like that you haven’t thought of, like Ashkahn was saying. It’s more just doing the basic things and doing them really well. So, actually testing your calls to action and the area of your website that you’re trying to get people to sign up for the email list, using a tool like Optimizely, something like that, could really help you actually get more people on board.
Yeah, similarly, I guess you just did an episode with Derek where you talked a little bit more about concise strategies for big giveaways where people are doing their email addresses, is what they’re giving-
Ashkahn: Yeah, we talked specifically about the ones that we did, like a kind of monthly float giveaway on social media specifically, and they win a year of floats sort of giveaway. Both of those were methods of trying to get people on our mailing list at the end of the day, and to provide some activity on our social media and stuff like that.
But really, that was part of the process for those, and we’ve even, when we were first starting out, just had slips of paper-
Graham: I was just gonna mention that.
Ashkahn: -outside of our door and a sign that said, “Give us your email and we’ll keep you updated.”
Graham: Or else.
Ashkahn: Literally it was people, we just hung a pen there and people would write their email on a piece of paper and slip it in our mail slot while we were in construction. So, and it worked. We got emails based off of that.
Graham: Yeah, which is, it’s kind of amazing that things like that work. But they totally do. You’re a weird business. We put up little descriptions of kind of what we were and our name up on the wall there, little early beginners’ guides that we had on a brochure holder, and yeah. Just loose pieces of paper and a pen up, and I guess just that external was interesting enough and they’re like, wait. What is this floating thing?
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: That it just enticed them to actually leave it, which is cool.
I guess a little more about converting, we started with converting people over from Facebook and Twitter, and then I just made some joke about getting all them, but it’s actually a really good place to grab people for your email list as well.
So, for things like that, linking over to posts that you’re putting on your site, it’s really, you can look at the Float On Facebook page and we do have a little widget that’s a “join the mailing list” kind of widget on there, but not, to be honest, not many people end up using that or just clicking and joining our mailing list straight from Facebook.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: So, it’s more like posting up content that you’re putting on your site. Interesting blog spots, or video interviews with clients, or something that you can then link to from Facebook and encourage people to come over, and from that page then you can try and collect email addresses is sort of a good way to go about it.
I guess just know that you’ll have to pay for that, right? As far as, it’s kind of like occasionally we decide to dump some money into trying to convert Facebook audience members into actual mailing list members because when you’re linking off your site, and especially when you’re linking to different content, videos that aren’t on Facebook, they kind of penalize you in the sense of not showing that content to anyone unless you pay for it. So, there’s sort of this transactional cost almost in converting Facebook fans or Twitter fans over into email list joiners.
Ashkahn: Yeah, at the end of the day, really doubling down on the things you’re already talking, you know about. Your website-
Graham: Yeah, you got this.
Ashkahn: And people coming in-
Graham: You’re doing good.
Ashkahn: Little, the thing is, you can run all these weird specials and crazy promotions and stuff like that as ways of getting people’s emails. It’s nice to do those too, but small tweaks to the main kind of fire hose of emails you have coming in to you to increase that size are in the long run gonna stack up month after month after month, if you can get 5% more people to sign up for your mailing list, those numbers kind of keep adding up. So, don’t forget about the basics, too.
Graham: Yeah. All right. If you have questions of your own, cruise on down to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.
Ashkahn: That’s right. That’s our website.
Graham: The little sub page of the website, too.
Ashkahn: Yeah, and there’s a thing on there to join our mailing list.
Graham: There’s a nice drawing of both of us.
Ashkahn: All sorts of stuff.
Graham: Yeah. Check it out.
Ashkahn: Check it out. Bye.
Graham: Bye.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Funding your center through Kickstarter – DSP 119
Crowdfunding has made so many projects possible that would otherwise not exist. It seems perfect for niche ideas, concepts that would otherwise never see the light of day, and passion projects that just need to happen. This sounds perfect for float centers, but there are some caveats.
Crowdfunding is time intensive and there’s not guarantee of success. Aside from that, there are some issues with it that complicate things for float centers that other crowdfunded projects likely won’t face. Graham and Ashkahn talk about the successes of float center crowdfunding and the not-so-successes as well.
Don’t Build Your Own Float Tank! – DSP 118
For anyone considering a DIY float tank, give this episode a listen first. This isn’t a discussion on the merits of doing things one way versus another or expressing an opinion on one side and playing devil’s advocate for the other. Graham and Ashkahn know painfully well from personal experience the pitfalls of falling into the hubris trap of thinking you can build your own float tanks. They built two large open tanks in Float On and even years later they still cause headaches.
What’s more, they’ve spoken with dozens of people who’ve also gone through this themselves and heard their horror stories after they didn’t listen to the advice of not doing it.
The perception that it can be a cost-cutting measure or a more reliable way to get an operating float tank in your center by going DIY is generally pretty flawed. There’s so much to it that you just can’t consider before the fact.
Should Your Float Center have a Blog? – DSP 117
This seems like a good idea on paper. It helps with SEO stuff for Google. It gives you an outlet to write about floating and share information about the industry. And it seems to fall in line with something that other businesses do, right?
So what are the downsides? How much time and effort does a blog really take? What sort of impact does it have for a float center? Graham and Ashkahn lay out the pros and cons as well as things you may not initially consider about the responsibility of having a blog.
Thoughts on Buying Yelp Ads – DSP 116
There are lots of businesses that experience the dogged persistence of Yelp sales people calling them. Float On has done both buying Yelp ad space and living without it and Graham and Ashkahn break down exactly what that experience was like.
They also go into exactly what Yelp ads mean and how it impacts your float center (or doesn’t, as the case may be) as well as how well Yelp stacks up in comparison to other ad sources.
When is it Time to Open a Second Float Center? – DSP 115
Okay, so… Float On only has one location (not counting Float On Hong Kong) and there’s certainly a reason for that. Graham and Ashkahn have toyed with the idea of opening up another center multiple times throughout the years but something else always came up. As they’ve met more people in the industry, they’ve seen some of the pitfalls and successes from people opening additional locations, franchises and whatever else. They share their thoughts on when they think it’d be best to open and why they say to wait a little bit.
Latest Blog Posts
Much Ado About Nothing
Today, I’d like to talk to you about nothing. But first I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Ashkahn, and I’m one of the co-founders of Float On. I’ve spent the last 2 years of my life entirely devoted to these magical boxes we’ve all discovered, and...
Past & Present of Oasis & Future of Floating
My focus here/now will be on the past [portion of this 'assignment'] that set me up to be involved in floatation work... It was probably inevitable that I would end up involved with float tanks .... When your last name is Wasserman, which means 'waterman' in german*,...
Past, Present, Future
My life is focused around balance. This is the key to everything I do; A balance between cosmic vows of spirituality, family, and the business with the scales constantly being tipped back and forth on the scale.To understand why I am involved in the Flotation Industry...
The Art of Managing Expectations
When considering opening a floatation center, I came across the following story that helped me understand the process that I was going to be going through as the owner of Float Matrix. There once was a plumber who was excellent at what he did. He knew everything...
