Retention rates and “bad” milongas

High and low level milongas.

In the previous post, I wrote about a friend comparing the vibe from two different milongas. I pointed out the behaviours of organisers that can create a “colder” vibe. Usually, such milongas attract and cater more to advanced dancers, and that is why the organisers have a judgemental mentality that discourages or puts off the more beginner dancers.

I have to be honest. I do enjoy such milongas. But it took me time to be able to do so. I addressed the issue without expecting those organisers to change. Even if they do… It will be awkward and strange for their guests if it happens so suddenly. If, for example, I visit the milonga where I was treated as a second-class guest and suddenly I see the organisers being all too friendly, etc., it will definitely seem strange. I will immediately ask myself… “What do they want from me? How come all this friendliness now?”. I wrote what I wrote just as an explanation for why some things are the way they are, and I wrote them to point out how being judgemental as an organiser can hurt your milonga. But the biggest danger is not that. The biggest danger is that this judgment can lead to a competition which in the end will hurt those high-level milongas more. Why? How? Follow my thoughts.

Click-through, conversion and retention rates

I am not an advertising expert, but having a Blog, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel makes me a user of advertising tools. Even if I don’t organise campaigns, I have dug a little bit to see how these things work. The basic principle behind advertising is that there is a funnel of where people get in from the time they see your ad.

So if I organise a campaign, let’s say that 100.000 users will see my ad. Do you know how many of them will click and get interested in the service or product I provide? If my advertising is good, I will maybe get about 500 to 2000 clicks (click-through rate). From then on, typically 5 to 100 (conversion rate) people will try once my product or service and finally maybe 1 to 40 (retention rate) will become loyal customers.

The situation is pretty similar in Tango. Out of the 100.000 people hearing something randomly about Tango, maybe 500 to 2000 will decide to take a class and about 1 to 40 will become hard-core loyal dancers. I won’t focus here on the first parts of the click-through and conversion rate but mostly on the retention rate. How do you convert those 500 to 2000 first timers to as many as possible hard core dancers?

Loyalty cards and benefits

Have you noticed how every kind of supermarket and large commercial chain has its own version of loyalty card? A card where you gather some kind of points, and at some point you use them for some discount or payback scheme? Have you ever wondered why they do that? One of the main reasons is to make you feel appreciated. The more you shop from them, the more you get benefits, so you feel that they see your purchases, recognise your loyalty and pay you back some small token of gratitude. They kind of build a relationship with you. In my frequent flyer program they also give me 500 miles as a gift every year on my birthday! First time I saw this, I certainly felt appreciated. I felt a little special.

Do you see where I am going with it? Do you think I will suggest having loyalty cards for milongas? You are wrong! You don’t need them. In a typical milonga there are usually dancers of multiple levels. As a beginner or newcomer, the more you visit the milonga, the more people will recognise you. The more people will start “seeing” you and dancing with you. It will take time, but eventually you are building some kind of relationship. This is probably one of the reasons why, as I wrote in the previous post, some guests are treated more warmly than others by the organisers. It’s like those benefits they get from being loyal to the specific milonga.

Eventually, this leads to having better dance experiences with more advanced dancers. These experiences are key to motivate you even further to progress and so on and so forth. Moreover, as you meet more people, you make more friends and you end up having stronger connections with the community. When I first started joining the milongas in Frankfurt, I knew that if I missed the next week… nobody would notice. Now when I leave for a couple of weeks and get back, people notice. They ask, we chat and this inevitably leads to those connections that make it harder for me to quit Tango or a particular milonga altogether. I am hooked!

As an organiser, you want your newcomers to build those connections as quickly as possible. You want to facilitate and even encourage it.

The milongas dependency

As I wrote in the previous post, my friend was comparing between two milongas with a different vibe. Obviously, the one that feels like home is the one that he will prefer to go more often. The other one might indeed attract a higher level of dancers but it feels more intimidating. It is an experience which doesn’t facilitate this connection building… or to put it better, it doesn’t make it easier for him. As a beginner, you need this experience to be as friendly and pain-free as possible. You want to have fun. So if you join a milonga where it feels like home… why leave it for one that feels judgmental? “Because the judgmental one has a higher reward” I hear you say. And this is True.

But now imagine a community where the friendly homelike milonga doesn’t exist. A community where all milongas attract high-level dancers with a judgement mentality. It will be much more difficult to crack through that. And since you didn’t sign up for a social rejection experiment, the army, or any other psychologically painful experience, you may very well end up quitting without second thoughts. After all, you joined a hobby to get some moments of joy in your life. You didn’t sign up for more moments of misery! Right?

So it is easy to imagine how in the end this community will starve for new dancers. If the dancers coming in don’t find a way to connect and form relationships, then there is no loyalty card. There is no reward. There is no value building. So it is very easy for newcomers to just leave after a few months or so. Some who are more resilient will make it through. But this rate will be significantly lower than in a community where the high-level milonga coexists harmoniously with a lower-level, more newcomer-friendly one.

Judgmental organisers and competition

If you want to become a milonga organiser, you obviously would want to have the best dancers in your community coming in. Everyone loves the high-level milongas. Obviously, they offer much better reward for your money. The problem, however, starts when the organisers of such high-level milongas downplay, judge negatively and even try to sabotage the other lower level milongas. The one where newcomers feel like home. What they miss is that the existence of their own high-level milongas is highly dependent on the success of the lower-level ones. If you keep trying to compete and hurt those other milongas by gossiping about them, judging them, not visiting them at all, then you don’t realise that in the end, the one who is going to feel the heat of this competition first is you.

The distribution of dancers in any community is like a pyramid. The higher level you go, the fewer dancers you find. If the people in your community don’t have a steady arrival of new dancers and a good retention rate, the top of the pyramid will take the hit first. Losing 10% of 10 dancers takes you down to 9… But losing it from the 100 dancers in the bottom layer takes you down to 90! Obviously, the milonga with 90 dancers will survive longer than the one with the 9.

Lower-level, newcomer-friendly milongas are as important if not more than the high-level ones. Downplaying their importance, being dismissive or even sabotaging them just because they offer a lower reward for the dancers is a one-way ticket to community starvation. The communities that pay respect and recognise their importance are the ones that flourish and can support really good high-level milongas too!

Tonight’s Goodnight Tango

Many Tango enthusiasts have a love-hate relationship with D’Arienzo. They consider it low value music without the nuances and the sophistication of Troilo or Pugliese. But do you know what Troilo had said in one of his interviews? “If it wasn’t for D’Arienzo we (other Tango orchestras) would be out of work!” D’Arienzo is like those newcomer-friendly milongas. Without them, the Troilo-like milongas would be out of work! Therefore tonight’s Goodnight Tango urges us to think. Think before we take the next. Think before we easily judge the importance of a milonga, judging it by the level of its dancers.

So what do you think? Are lower-level milongas more important than we sometimes think? Do you support them? Do you sabotage them? How do you feel about them? Let me know in the comments…

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