Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
Email is a valuable channel for communicating with your floaters. While you can use it to gather feedback, send appointment reminders, and share relevant news from your center, you never want to spam your clients. In fact, you want them to love floating at your center so much that you don’t need to spend time writing persuasive emails in order to lure them back.
In this episode, Ashkahn and Graham talk about how, when, and when not to send emails to your customers.
As always, see below for relevant resources and the full text of the episode.
Show Resources
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: Okie-doke-a-rooney. Today’s Daily Solutions question is:
Do you offer any emails after someone floats at Float On?
Ashkahn: We do. We send an email after they float. And that email only gets sent 90 days after they float — potentially.
Graham: Potentially. And if they float again within that 90 days, it doesn’t get sent out. So, it gets sent 90 days after someone’s last float, which may never come. If they’re just the best customer in the world, then they may never get that email.
Graham: That’s all we do, email-wise, in terms of something automated that’s tied to floating.
Ashkahn: We might also start doing something, maybe a few days afterwards, for a little feedback email just to kind of, it might even be just a smiley face and a frowny face. And they click on whether it was good or bad, just to get a little feedback from our customers a little more regularly.
And I’m not sure if that desire has come up now that I, as an owner, am out of the shop a little bit more. But something to be actually gauging the temperature of how floats are going much more closely to when they actually happen than 90 days afterwards like our current email, has been sort of a desire that I have.
Graham: What other emails have you heard of people sending out?
Ashkahn: First of all, the email that we send out is a little bit different, I think, than some people’s. So I think one of the most common things that people do when they’re sending out an auto-email responder is that they’ll offer someone a discount if they haven’t been in in set amount of time. Or they’ll do a little follow-up and do some more education about floating.
I’d say they kind of take one of those two paths — someone hasn’t been in in a little bit, so let’s follow up and either offer them some money off so they’re more likely to come back, or tell them some cool things about floating, or send them some news stories so they remember how awesome it is, so they want to come back.
Those are the two most common paths. With our email, we went kind of a different route. If you know the Float On marketing mentality, then you know that we are not really keen on discounts. So, we were very unlikely to go down that route. So, we actually just send a feedback email. We just do it 90 days later.
And our hope is that by sending this feedback email, it does two things. It actually gets feedback from some people who might not have given it, so we can collect more information about how we can improve. And in the process, maybe they’ll realize that they didn’t actually have any feedback to give us, their float was awesome. And thinking about that might make them want to come back in.
So, that’s kind of the philosophy behind it. And I just got it pulled up here too.
The subject is, “Was everything okay with your last float?”
And it just says,
“Hi (name), it’s been a few months since your last float, and I wanted to reach out to make sure that you had a good experience when you came in. If there is anything that we can do better, please do point it out to us. You can send an email along to feedback@floathq.com with any criticism or praise, if it’s appropriate, from your float. We’re always trying to improve, and it feels like our center has new changes and upgrades every day, in large part because of the great feedback we get from our customers. Hopefully I’ll see you in the shop soon. In the meantime, float on.”
Graham: It’s a nice email.
Ashkahn: Yeah, not too bad, huh?
So that’s all that we do for our emails. And again, I think that the other ones follow that route of, whatever you’re doing, you’re trying to reel them back in. And in my mind, it’s just this balance between, of course you want to send out emails and get people back into the shop, and you really don’t want to annoy them, so you don’t want to send too many emails.
Graham: It’s definitely important to think about someone’s full process going through, because it’s pretty easy to slip into getting real email-heavy, right? Because let’s say they make an appointment and you have, like, a confirmation email that gets sent to them. That’s an email. And then a lot of places have reminder emails, maybe 24 or 48 hours beforehand. If once they buy something, they’ll get an email receipt emailed to them.
And then, if you have another email right after their float asking how it was, and then an email three months later. All of a sudden, someone coming in to float with you one time gets, like, six emails from you as a result of it. And that’s never the goal. You’re taking everybody’s email, and you don’t want to kind of break that trust with them and end up kind of being spam-y with the powers that you have.
Ashkahn: Yeah, so at least for us, that’s kind of why we decided on only having one of these things, and it only goes out well after their float, so 90 days. So, although they kind of get front-loaded with these emails about their appointment, they won’t hear from us again until three months later, which feels like a very generous amount of time.
Graham: Yeah. We also don’t put people on our mailing list if they come float with us. We do have a separate mailing list that people can sign up for, but we’re not just sending anybody who floats with us a bunch of emails afterwards regardless. So, we try to be kind of considerate with people’s emails, because we know we’re asking them, everybody, to give us an email.
And for the most part, it’s really useful for us, being able to send them a reminder, being able to send them a receipt, being able to contact them if they left something behind in our float center. Those are the reasons we need their email and we want to to, again, maintain that trust so that we’re not bothering people or making them regret giving us their emails.
Ashkahn: Alright guys, have a good one out there, and as always, slam it and jam it.
Recent Podcast Episodes
Tips for filling an empty service schedule – DSP 90
There are fewer things more stress inducing for a float center than seeing their schedule for the week and having it just be completely empty (Maybe watching your pump start up and spray water over your entire float room, but it’s a close call). What do you do in that situation? And how do you prevent it from happening in the future?
Well, Graham and Ashkahn have tried everything, from doing shout outs and deals on social media, to literally walking down the street trying to convince people to come in and float while the tanks were empty. Some tactics are more effective than others, but what it really comes down, at least in Float On’s case, is being prepared to give out a ton of free floats.
The guys talk about the effectiveness of each strategy they’ve tried and how they’ve reached out to contacts to form mutually beneficial business relationships and really get the ball rolling with filling up their tanks.
pH testing devices for float tank solution – DSP 89
There are lots of things you can measure when testing the quality of your water, for sanitation and comfort. Many of which aren’t specifically designed for float tanks. This is kind of an open secret in the industry, but most things simply aren’t accurate because of the incredibly high salinity of float tank solution. And pH seems to be one of them. This can cause float center owners major headaches as it’s often one of the first things that health departments/regulators will want to measure when they come and inspect your place (if they do at all).
Graham and Ashkahn try to break down this mystery of float water and try to break down some theories as to why it might be that float tank water might not have accurate pH readings, regardless of how you measure it.
Handling humidity to reduce water drops on tank ceilings – DSP 88
One of the biggest Float Mysteries in the industry is how to properly deal with condensation in a float tank. Your float tank is basically a giant humidity generating machine so clearly there’s going to be some condensation, but how much and why it forms can vary for seemingly no reason, making managing it difficult. The last thing any float center owner wants is for it to affect the floats they’re running (little water droplets falling on floaters is no fun).
Graham and Ashkahn commiserate with the industry about the difficulties in dealing with this particular hot topic, while also delving into the science of it and common solutions that should help any float center owner that’s facing this problem.
The purpose of a flow meters and the flow rate for a float tank – DSP 87
When navigating demands from health departments, it can be an absolute minefield of regulation, oftentimes with holdovers from the pool and spa industries. Many of these can be superfluous to float centers, but if you’re just starting a center, it’s difficult to know which ones to ignore, and which ones to incorporate.
Flow meters fall into this weird gray area where they’re not as important for float centers as for pools (and in some cases aren’t really needed at all), but can still be required by health departments or regulators. And to not throw the baby out with the salty bathwater, there are definitely some very practical uses for flow meters on float tanks.
Graham and Ashkahn tackle all these confusing elements and even provide specific product recommendations for flow meters for float tanks. Give it a listen!
When to contact health department – DSP 86
Contacting your health department/inspector/regulator/enforcer/supreme overlord can be stressful, to say the least. And given their general lack of understanding of floating as an industry, it makes sense why float centers may put this off. However, they have the authority to shut down your business if they feel that it’s a public safety issue, and that’s a situation no one should put themselves in.
Talking to your health department early and often can save yourself some headaches, but you don’t want to go to them unprepared. There’s a lot of nuance to regulation and existing codes that you should probably be familiar with beforehand. Fortunately, it may be something other float centers in your area have had to deal with, if there are any.
Ashkahn and Graham have a few tips for what to do to prepare and how to address common concerns they may have in this episode.
Latest Blog Posts
No Results Found
The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.
