A director’s job is never easy, especially when planning for a new season. Are we offering the right classes? How do our registration numbers look? Do we have the right instructors?
All are awesome questions to be asking yourself. Today we’re going zero in on one area of focus: retaining students to maximize enrollment.
Sure, all the previously mentioned questions are important, and then some, but that’s a different article for a different day.
What does it mean to retain a customer?
Customer retention can be defined as the process of engaging existing customers to continue to utilize the services of your business.
How does that apply to your youth activity center? Simply put, it means your ability to get students to re-enroll from one session to the next to keep tuition revenue flowing.
Here are some examples of what customer retention looks like for youth activity centers:
Ms. Suzie’s Little Flipper is ready to advance to a Golly Guppy level class after exceeding the required skill milestones. When presented with the day and time for her new class offering, Mr. Suzie signs up on the spot. Boom! Retention.
Mr. Smith signed his son up for summer camp at your gymnastics program. After a few quick marketing emails following the end of camp, he’s ready to enroll for a full year at your program beginning in the fall. Boom! Retention.
Mrs. Morgan needs to purchase new tumbling shoes for her kid. Instead of heading to Amazon, she reaches out to the store manager at your cheer gym to purchase a pair you have in inventory. Boom! Retention.
What customer retention tells you is that your program’s offering and quality of service pleases your existing families and students. It’s a metric that shouldn’t be looked over, as it has the potential to be the lifeblood of your business.
Why is it important to retain customers?
Keeping your swim, gym, or cheer students happy should always be a top-of-mind goal. Why? Because keeping customers is generally more cost-effective than finding first-time students.
(Not to say you shouldn’t try to attract new students to your program. That’s just a different topic altogether!)
So why is it important to retain customers? Loyal clients cost less.
It’s no surprise that advertising costs your program money and it’s not always cheap. By appealing to existing families, you’re able to pocket the advertising dollars you’d spend if you have to attract an entirely new student base from season to season.
Repeat customers don’t just cost less. They are more likely to refer their friends to your program, as well as talk about how much their kid loves the classes at your facility to those in their sphere of influence.
When the customers you retain start bringing in new students: That kind of buzz is priceless!
How does Jackrabbit make it easy to retain customers?
Swim, gymnastics, cheer and music programs that run their business using a cloud-based class management solution know the benefits software provides when it comes time to re-enrolling students in an upcoming season or session.
New for Jackrabbit Class clients: We’ve got an entire section of our Help Center dedicated to helping you transition from one season to the next → Discover how to Keep Your Business Hopping with Jackrabbit
Jackrabbit Class makes it convenient to retain customers by offering functionality that’s easy to use- from both an administration and customer standpoint. Here are our four favorite ways Jackrabbit makes it easy to retain customers.
Built-in reports to identify who hasn’t re-enrolled
Jackrabbit’s suite of reports helps you visualize what opportunities you have to maximize class size and realize revenue potential.
Using reports, such as the Enrollment Detail Report, you’re able to identify which students were enrolled in classes at your program last season who haven’t re-enrolled. What’s better than software that allows you to quickly identify who is not registered for your upcoming season?
Now that you’ve identified who’s missing, you can drop those families a postcard in the mail, shoot them an email or pick up the phone for a quick chat to let them know that you’d love to help them enroll in their next class at your swim school, gym or music program.
Online registration lets customers re-enroll at their convenience
By offering customers the ability to register for classes online, you’re giving families a safe and convenient way to interact with your program.
The easier you make the enrollment process for existing customers, the more likely they’ll return, amiright? The Jackrabbit Parent Portal allows you to do just that- let parents secure a space for their child in an upcoming class.
Coming Soon: Jackrabbit clients will have the option to exclude classes from auto-posting registration fees during online registration! Get to know this enhancement and discover other new releases in this month’s edition of Virtual Release Notes on April 15!
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Priority enrollment shows appreciation for returning customers
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could give your customers all the warm/fuzzy feelings by allowing them to have first pick at classes for the next season? Aww… you shouldn’t have.
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Oops, we did it again!
Offering priority enrollment through Jackrabbit shows your appreciation and should be a staple in your customer satisfaction playbook.
Email functionality helps you reach customers quickly
Remember the enrollment reporting capabilities we mentioned earlier? Jackrabbit allows you to send an email to students who appear as not enrolled for an upcoming session, based on the report parameters set by the user.
There are numerous benefits of using cloud-based class management software, especially when it comes to re-enrolling students and retaining customers.
Are you ready to start realizing those benefits at your program? Start your 30-day free trial of Jackrabbit Class today so you can be set-up to retain as many families as possible by next season!
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