Introducing Retention Center

I’m thrilled to announce today the release of our newest feature: Retention Center. With the Retention Center activated, you can effortlessly email groups of your students, invoking this new capability from any page where we display student information.

The Retention Center has quite literally been woven into just about every aspect of our product, and will empower studios to communicate with their students in a more targeted, personal and relevant way than ever before.

The easiest way to communicate with your students

Like everything we do with Tula, we obsessed about how to keep this new feature easy to use while also maximizing the power and capabilities given to our customers. We didn’t just want to make it easy for people to send emails. We wanted to empower studio owners to easily communicate with their students in a personal, targeted, and relevant way.

Student Filter as home base for the Retention Center

The first thing you’ll notice is that our student filter page has become the sort of ‘home base’ for the retention center. We’ve made our filters easier to use than ever before and we’ve also added some new filter options so that you can target people more precisely and communicate in a way that’s most relevant to them. 

For example, you might want to email everyone who hasn’t been to your studio in 90 days, and offer them a special one off pass. Or you might want to email everyone who has joined your studio in the last 30 days. Or you might want to email everyone who’s last purchase was a 10 pack and they have more than 5 credits left. Or maybe you want to email everyone who’s last purchase was a membership pass but their last attendance was more than 30 days ago.

All of this is now possible on the new Student Filter page.

Communicate with your students in a way that's relevant to them.

Retention Center always available everywhere

The other thing you’ll notice is that the Retention Center is available everywhere else throughout Tula, as we already provide lists of students in pre-defined contexts.

If you’re viewing an event page, now you can choose to email people who have registered for the event. Or if you’re looking at a past event, you can email everyone that attended. Maybe you’re using the People by Passes report to see who purchased a pass to your upcoming retreat, or maybe you’re looking at your memberships page. 

What we realized was that within Tula, we already have pages throughout the system where your students are segmented. Instead of always making you go back to some retention center home page, we felt the superior approach would be to make it possible to invoke the retention center from just about anywhere. 

Templates

Of course, no Retention Tool would be complete without the ability to save your favorite emails so that you can easily use them again for later emails. By using templates, over time you’ll have quick and immediate access a set of emails you call upon frequently to quickly communicate with your students, while still encouraging you to think about the timing and context of the messages you’re sending.

Updated User Profile Pages

The final thing we put out with this release was a nice update to our user profile pages. We updated the layout so we could display email campaigns that someone was a part of, and in the process we updated the page to more clearly show the active special event passes that someone has along with whether they have an active membership.

Activating Retention Center

The retention center is available as part of the $99 Mala plan, and has an associated usage fee of $5 for every 1,000 emails you send. Alternatively you can opt to choose to send unlimited emails for an additional set monthly fee that’s determined by the number of students you have in your studio. Once you agree to the pricing you’ll be able to save your retention settings and you’ll be ready to send emails.

The way the usage fees work is that you’ll have a separate invoice and charge for your email usage, that will be billed on the same date of your subscription renewal. For example, if your renewal date is on April 15th for your Tula subscription, you’ll also receive an invoice/charge for any emails you sent from March 15 through April 14th. If you choose to have unlimited email added to your plan, then of course that will simply become part of your normal monthly subscription.

Retention Center Version 1.0

This release is Version 1 of our Retention Center, and we already have loads of ideas we’re prioritizing for future development, from automation to conversation tracking and more. We’re excited we have this new foundation on which we can continue to build more powerful communication functionality to help you retain your students. 

We’re thrilled with what we’ve come up with so far, and we hope you like it as much as we do!

Looking at age as a percentage of your available life lived

I'm not sure if I think about the shortness of life more than most people, or if it's simply natural to think often about how temporary our situation here is. But in any case, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about the shortness of life.

But for as much as I have gratitude for each day, I've learned also that always acting in a way that assumes "life is short" can lead to it's own set of woes as the result of an unwillingness to delay gratification.

What happens is we tend to have a number in our minds regarding when we think our time is going to expire. Maybe for you it's 50 because that's when your father had a heart attack. For someone else it might be 95 because that's how old their grandfather lived to. Maybe someone constantly thinks death is knocking at their door because tragedy has visited them. 

The primary problem with thinking about age in terms of years though is that we don't actually know our expiration date. So we're basically working on an equation with an assumed value that's almost certain to be incorrect.

So when we say we're 20 or 40 or 60 years old, it also comes along with the built in assumptions we have about our life expectancy. Instead, I think it's better to think of age as a percentage of our available life lived.

What percent old are you?

This question makes it instantly clear you really don't have any idea how old you are. I'm 39 years old, but wth the rate of technical advances combined with the opportunity for sudden death to befall someone, I could actually either be 99% old or I could be 33% old. 

The thing is, only the dying know how old they are. And sadly, sometimes a 20 year old is older than a 40 year old when we look at age as a percentage of our available life lived.

What I like about thinking about age in this way though is that for me it's a good way to have both extreme gratitude for the present, while it also motivates me to put in the time, effort and work to optimize the things that need optimization even if it means I'm going to be a little less happy or there might be a little more struggle in the immediate future.

After all, if I end up having 60% more life here I want to optimize for it!

For me, thinking of age as a percentage of life, is a good way to find balance when there can be opposing forces at play.

So....what percent old are you?

I know. I don't have any idea either. We're all X%.

The Studio Owner's Manifesto

I've often gone back to Seth Godin's wonderful Bootstrapper's Bible for inspiration. In that same spirit I put together this little manifesto for studio owners you might find useful, based on a slew of my observations over the years. 

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I am an Independent Studio Owner. 

What I have built is important and unique and valuable. 

I work for my customers and students. I open the studio doors every day to provide them with a valuable offering. I am important to my customers and I have gratitude that they include my business in their lives. Knowing I cannot please everyone, I always do what is best for the community at large.

I am an independent studio owner. I am not afraid of technology. 

I use modern technology to be the lever I wish it to be, so that I may pursue my intention with my business. I understand the power and influence of technology, and I keep a watchful eye to determine who is working to benefit me and my business as opposed to who is working to benefit themselves by exploiting my creation.

I am an independent studio owner. I am wide eyed aware that billion dollar companies are being built off the collective value of what my peers and I offer society. I am constantly told by discount sites and deals marketplaces that I need them, when we both know the truth is it is they who needs me. 

I am an independent studio owner. I understand the value of partnerships and of those who introduce my business to new customers. I am aware of the impact these relationships have on my business. I measure their impact with data and I compensate these companies appropriately. I do not work with people or companies that devalue me or my offering. 

I am an independent studio owner. I understand the value of quality Instructors and know they are a vital part of the community. I treat my people well and I pay them fairly. 

I am an independent studio owner. I am aware this studio would not exist in it's present form were it not for the vision on which I executed, and the risks that I took to make it happen.  In addition to valuing partners, customers, students and instructors, I also value myself. I pay myself fairly and in a way that recognizes the contributions I have made as the owner and creator of the business. 

I am an independent studio owner. I see clearly our society is embracing health, wellness and mindfulness in a way that it hasn’t before and I am excited to be a part of this movement. 

I am an independent studio owner.

Ten Key Metrics You Should Be Tracking if Your Studio Uses Classpass

I’ve written before about why Maile decided Tula Yoga Studio wouldn't join classpass, but also about how we built a small integration for our customers that use Classpass.

The more I learn about Classpass the more and more skeptical I become that their model is sustainable for independent studios, however I’m also aware studios still use them, and nobody knows better than you whether Classpass is good for your business. 

But whether you think Classpass is great for your studio, or whether you’re considering abandoning the Classpass network, they are a business partner and you should know the impact they are having on your business. If they’re good for your studio, awesome, now you have data to back it up. If they’re not good for your studio, excellent, you’ve identified an area where you can improve. 

Ten Key Metrics

With this in mind, here are 10 easy to gather, simple to understand, key metrics you should be tracking & questions you should be able to answer, for the time preceding and following the adoption of Classpass at your studio. (And sometimes even if you're not).

Total Monthly Revenue: Is it going up or down?

Monthly Member Count & Monthly Member Revenue: By far the biggest risk of joining Classpass in my view is losing members. Did anything happen with your monthly members? Did they go up or down or stay flat? Is that consistent with what you’ve experienced in years past?

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Total Revenue Received from ClassPass: How much money total did ClassPass pay you for a given month?

Total ClassPass Attendances: How many total people are coming in with classpass? 

Revenue Per ClassPass Attendance: How much revenue are you on average receiving for each Classpass attendance?

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Total Non ClassPass Revenue: How much are you bringing in without classpass? How does this compare to before you started using classpass?

Revenue per attendance of non-class pass students: What’s the average revenue you're receiving for your full price students?

Percentage of attendances by way of Classpass: What percent of your total attendances are coming in from classpass?

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Revenue per non classpass, non member attendances: How much less are you getting paid by classpass than you're getting paid for your other drop-ins?

Percentage of revenue received from Classpass: What percentage of overall revenue does Classpass account for?

How do things look?

Like I mentioned at the start of this post whether you tend to think Classpass is good for your business or you think Classpass might not be quite right for you, this simple spreadsheet should help you see with data how Classpass is affecting your business. Below is a view of a template with some generic data filled out in one row. Cells highlighed in yellow are formulas driven by numbers you enter in the other cells. Like I said: super simple. You can dowload an Excel version here, a Numbers version here, and a CSV file here.

View fullsize

It's amazing what a simple spreadsheet can do for you!

The thing I like about looking at data this way is you're laying out cleanly a way to see how Classpass has affected various aspects of your business, and then you can compare to whether that matches your intention. 

On Mindbody, Marketplaces, Fear, and Hypocrisy

I’ve been writing about Mindbody a lot lately, with my recent open letter to their customers, and my open letter to their CEO, regarding their new application that competes with Groupon called Mindbody Connect. 

And while I thought I was mostly done writing about how terribly they're treating their customers, I had completely forgotten about the fact that Mindbody worked with Yoga Journal to prevent companies like Tula Software, and other like us, from participating in the Yoga Journal Marketplaces.

The Yoga Journal Marketplaces, if you aren’t aware, are nationwide open to the public events contained within the Yoga Journal Conferences, and are a fantastic way to meet people in the yoga industry around the country. 

Tula Software was told directly by Aim Media sales representatives, the parent company of Yoga Journal, that we were not allowed to participate in their marketplaces because Mindbody had gotten upset when our mutual competitor Front Desk showed up at the January 2014 San Francisco Yoga Journal Conference, which I also attended as we were preparing (or so we thought) to sponsor an event in a different city.

So a short 2 years ago, the CEO that is saying this kind of thing on the Mindbody customer forums:

“A relatively small number of people are caught up in self perpetuating fear. And, if they don’t break out of that negative spiral, their businesses will suffer - not because of us. Because of them.”

— Rick Stollmeyer via mindbody customer forum

And mocking his customers on twitter by saying things like this:

The past two weeks remind me: the opposite of love isn't hate. It's fear. Fear paralyzes. Fear manifests the outcome you fear most.

— Rick Stollmeyer (@stollmeyer) January 6, 2016

Yes, that is the CEO of the company that was actively working with Yoga Journal, the industry's most respected publication with the industry's largest marketplaces, to prevent Tula Software and others like us from participating in the same marketplaces Mindbody was participating in. 

And now that same company is shoving their customers and their students into their marketplace and minimizing the impact that their decision to compete with Groupon has had on your business. 

They can try all they want to lecture you about competition and fear, and I’ll be here every step of the way to teach them about hypocrisy.