Here’s how using an irresistible martial arts offer can almost completely squash your no-show rate for martial arts trial appointments.
IN THIS EPISODE:
- Adding a human touch to automated messages with martial arts prospects
- How to write a successful follow-up email sequence
- Comparing free and paid martial arts trials
- Using high-converting landing pages when you’re time-poor
- Using The Messenger Signup Method to sign up prospects
- And more
*Need help growing your martial arts school? Start Here.
TRANSCRIPTION
Hey, it's George Fourie. Welcome to another Martial Arts Media™ Business podcast. Today, I'm going to be talking about how to reduce no-shows. Prospect inquires, books a trial appointment with you, but then ghost you; they don't show up. And sometimes, it's really hard to re-engage and get the conversation back going and get them to reschedule.
So, I'm going to be talking about a couple of ways that you can reduce no-shows, almost eliminate them completely. Some are going to be simpler, and some are going to be a little bit more complex. There's going to be a few options for you to consider. I'm going to cover those. Make sure to head over to martialartsmedia.com/148. That is where we've got the show notes, downloads, and everything for this episode. Head over there, and hey, let's jump in.
Okay, some context first. I was talking at a martial arts business event in Texas late last year, that’s 2023 and was chatting to a lot of martial arts business owners that were experiencing a lot of no-shows. A bunch of these guys was using different types of marketing agencies and just various problems that were coming up, mainly no-shows.
Out of the 10 leads that they were getting, only three were actually showing up—three to four. I’m kind of shocked, to be honest. That's like a really, really high no-show, right? So, there are a few things that you can do to mitigate this now. There are a couple of dangers and a couple of things to consider here, right?
If you are trying to automate things as much as possible and be as hands-off as possible, that might be the price that you're going to pay, right? Is that you're going to have some no-shows, and there's going to be little investment of time and following up and doing things, but you're going to get fewer leads. You're going to be paying a lot more for leads to show up. That's just going to be the nature of the beast for you.
But, if you're keen to be a bit more invested and thinking, “Well, I want to get my dollars’ worth.” Like, “I want to really reduce the cost per acquisition of getting these students in, really want to bring that cost down, control it.” There are a couple of things that you can do, so let's explore them.
Number one is, first up, just looking at the automation that happens, your automated follow-up sequences. What happens once a new trial, a parent or an adult books a trial to come and take their first class with you? What happens from that point?
Are they getting automated email messages instantly and then timed all the way to their appointment? Are they getting text messages or follow-ups? What else? Is there some personalization? Maybe it's a real quick, like a video message—something that is a bit more personal. Because, let's face it, we're living in a world of AI automation, and everything is getting automated.
The more human elements are getting removed, the more kind of numb you get to the messaging, right? Because it's almost like you're not responsible for answering to a human. So, you feel off the hook if you don't stick to your word for the machine, right? The more personalization you're going to remove from that process, you're probably going to be experiencing some form of no-shows. So, that's the first thing to look at.
Look at what you can automate, but rather than automate, is there some personalization that you can do? It could be just grabbing the phone, doing a quick video message, and saying, “Hey, Johnny, I saw you're booked in for a class on X, Y, Z day. I’m really looking forward to meeting you. So is the team.” Whatever you want to do, right? Or show them around, etc.
If you don't want to be that specific, the way you can get out of that is to say, “Hey, George. I just wanted to say thanks so much for booking your class.” You can introduce yourself, but make it a bit more automated, but still have a personal feel to it. That's one thing you can do, right? Optimize your automation, but then insert some form of personalization that makes it a bit more personal if that’s what you want—human to human. All right. That's option number one.
Option number two is to change your trial. Change your trial format to a paid trial system. If you're running free trials, this is pretty much what's going to be happening, right? Is that booking for the first appointment? When somebody is paying for the trial, and it's a paid trial, then that does change the concept.
Now, I've spoken a lot about paid trials on this podcast, not going to go into that right now. I will leave some links in the show notes where you can access those. You know, just looking at the comparison of free and paid trials. But what the paid trial is going to do for you is if you are selling a paid trial and you actually focus on collecting the money upfront, now you've got a prospect that is first up a customer. They've given you money, and they're going to be way more committed, obviously, to show up.
Using a paid trial, but then actually getting them to commit and making the payment before coming, that's going to really increase your shop. It's probably going to solve the problem 100% completely. Now, pros and cons to this: you've got to sell the trial and collect the money. How do you do this?
Well, with our ads, what we mainly focus on is what we call The Messenger Signup Method, which is a system that we use to sign prospects up via text; flies under the radar, and you're going from taking prospects from curious to serious to signed up. That is a process we take. We sell the trial first, collect the money, and then get them to book the trial afterward, right?
They’re already financially invested before booking the trial appointment. That changes the frame completely, right? Because if someone's giving you a couple of dollars, it means that the trust element is out of the way. They feel comfortable enough to actually give you money, and it's going to definitely increase your show-up rates.
Number three, what if you don't want to be messaging people and you don't want to be spending any time on the follow-up? This can be done, but you must be aware of the fact that you're going to need to spend some money to collect data to be able to optimize this process. What are we doing here? In this process, we are running a paid trial with the numbers here are important.
We play with different numbers to make this a complete no-brainer offer and make it really easy for people to buy, and we send them directly to a landing page. So, they go directly to a landing page. The landing page does all the selling of the paid trial for you. It's got proof of testimonials. It’s got the irresistible offer worded in the right way so that it communicates value, and people can go to the page directly and buy the paid trial.
So, the benefit here is you've taken all human elements out of it. The prospects have actually got to buy it. The cons are if you don't know how to structure a page with all the correct elements that are going to make it convert, then you're going to be testing for a long time. We've done a lot of tests on this.
We stopped tracking that formula, that structure at about eight or 9000 trials. We stopped tracking it. Now, we've simplified it and we keep optimizing it a lot more. We've got a lot of data behind it. It is 100% doable. You've got to be in mind in the beginning, that you're probably going to pay a bit more to acquire a student because you've got to optimize the landing pages.
The risky part of this is, if you don't know what you're doing, don't do it. I won't be like–what's the right word? I won't boast or say I know everything because I think I know enough to know that I still don't know anything because the data decides. Even for us, we can put our best foot forward, and our best tests, and then we still have to optimize.
We still need to optimize every time there's a hundred clicks on every page. We still need to look, compare, and do optimization, but when you hit that sweet spot, it definitely is super helpful. Those are the strategies.
So, real quick, just for a recap: Improve your automation and add some human element to it. Number two, go for a paid trial and start supporting the sale via messenger by selling the paid trial. Number three is to get a well-designed landing page. You can ask us about how that works and which formulas, and concepts work, and go for it that way.
A couple of things to note: Things that we've got that will definitely help our irresistible martial arts offer formula, how to structure a paid trial in the right way with the right numbers, and we've got a few shortcuts on the right numbers that convert the best, and then using The Messenger Signup Method and our landing page structure for paid trials. That's it.
I hope that is helpful. Any questions should be a message where you listen to this episode and I'll catch you on the next one.
Have a good one. Cheers.
*Need help growing your martial arts school? Start Here.
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