How to retain new students in the first three months

How to retain new students in the first three months

Since classes have started back, we have seen an amazing uptake, numbers in there 1000’s are joining martial arts schools across the country, and long may it continue! Being a month in, students will have attended up to 10 lessons (if they do 2 a week) so the aim is to keep them coming back for more, in fact if they keep coming to lessons for the first three months, its going to be more likely they’ll stay for longer!

There are many ways you can help strengthen their relationship with your club in the first three months and create the habit…

First of all, you should go back to when the new student first joined, have a look at the tags you assigned to them. Although it’s unlikely that the student will see these changes take affect in the first 12 weeks, it’s the journey to them that you need to encourage don’t let them forget why they joined and report back on their improvements.

Having a process that you and all your team follow for the first 12 weeks for all your new students is recommended. This could include:

1. Keep track of attendance – this will show red flags immediately if they miss one or two lessons. Get in touch as soon as you can – find out why they didn’t come to class, it may be because of something like no transport (and in that case, tell them that you’ll look forward to seeing them at the next lesson) or it might be because they are losing interest. Be supportive and discuss what you can do to help;
   
   
2. Continuous communication – we’ve created a Welcome Journey template that you can use – this is an automated sequence of emails that are sent to the student for the first 12 weeks
   
   
3. Look for successes and things done well and praise them – but remember to be sincere;
   
   
4. Set time to discuss progress and how they are enjoying the classes;
   
   
5. Give the students tangible rewards, for children, stickers and adults certificates work well;
   
   
6. Keep your eyes open for any signs that they are not integrating into the class such as: Little interaction with other students, Unwillingness to participate in any particular activity
   
   
7. Make sure everyone has lots of fun – lookout for: no smiles or laughter especially at the beginning and end of class;
   
   
8. Create a buddy system where students are paired up (volunteered) with a new student that could help with the new student being able to ask questions on a 121 basis without feeling self-conscious;
   
   
9. Remember to take action when you see that all is not well with a new student, you want them to succeed so a little encouragement might be all they need.

How we can help?

We have a full package solution to help martial arts school owners run their business. Here are just some of the solutions we have that can help you with the things I have spoken about in this article:

• Tags – assigning a tag to a student to enable automated emails, email list building, and personalisation of a student record
  
  
• Automations (email communications based on triggers and tags)
  
  
• myMA Attend – Attendance app to make taking attendance easy
  
  
• Attendance tracking and management
  
  
• Communications – email and text messaging (including HTML texts)
  
  
• Certificate templates