Business Booster Roundup
This week we held our Business Booster event at the Hilton Hotel East Midlands Airport to a room full of clients, old and new. It’s always a pleasure to see our clients; they are why we do things here, to help with the day to day running of their business so they can keep changing the lives of so many people.
Managing Director Gerard Turvey opened the event with a review of the Industry’s performance this year which highlighted, as ever, the seasonal peaks and dips we experience annually. Gerard questioned whether we should just accept this seasonality as gospel and how we can mould the summer dip to actually increase business. Some NEST Clients have in fact proved this to be possible and we have seen great business growth during this time.
The subject, planning, was later developed by Mark Jeffery our Business Development Manager. As the saying goes, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” If you do have a plan, a goal, something to aim for, write it down and also make sure it’s achievable (Our budget planning tool can help you with that).
“Planning will help you stay motivated and will make you more successful running your business.” Mark Jeffery
If you, like many want to find new ways to get more leads, we launched our January marketing materials at the event. As I mentioned earlier, January is one of the peak times in our calendars with men and women all over the world looking to set new goals, try something new or shed a couple of those Christmas pounds. Our artwork this year has used these insights and we’ve created material for all marketing channels to help you reach as many people as possible. We shouldn’t though focus all our efforts on adults in January, we saw a huge increase in kids classes this January, so we’ve also created some eye catching kids marketing materials too – using quotes from students of martial arts to let mum and dad see why kids themselves like doing martial arts. They’ll be on the myMA Marketing Toolkit from the 9th November, to help you get your campaigns ready for January.
With lots of new students coming into class, and time at a premium, we’ve recently launched our electronic Direct Debit feature; this lets you sign new students up to Direct Debit online; so no more need for paper forms. Our Customer Services Manager, Louisa Turchet gave a demo of the new myMA feature to show how easy it is to put into practice. One of the major benefits is that as it uses an online form, the details we collect from your students and payers will be a lot more accurate – helping with getting your communications to the right people.
This is something that will help when we launch the new myMA Automation feature later this month. Whilst most people would have heard the term ‘automation’ from the perspective of marketing it was important for me to cover what it is and how you can use it; to help reach your goals. There are many ways automation can help throughout the customer’s journey; be it at the point of lead capture all the way to winback. Automation just lets you send communications automatically based on an event (a trigger) – saving you doing it manually (and remembering) every time.
Here at NEST we’ve been working on a few automations to get you started, first is ‘lead nurturing’ that’s when you add a new prospect to myMA, it can trigger a series of emails to that person from introducing your school, team and also giving you the ability to show your brand off. Once your prospect turns into a student we’ve created a ‘Welcome Journey’, to literally welcome them to your school over the first 12 weeks. This will not only help from a customer service point of view, but we hope it will help with attrition of new students in the first 3 months, as we know that many students sadly leave in this critical time.We’ll be creating email templates for this automation for you to use too.
Lastly, the first automation in the ‘customer life cycle’ part of the journey we’ve created a ‘birthday’ trigger and email templates; letting you offer birthday parties and also give a student a happy birthday wish and treat. There’s so much still to come but I am super excited about this feature, just look out for more information on this coming soon.
To finish the day off we ran 7 round table sessions; subjects from SEO to running a franchise were covered and chaired by our IT, Customer Service and Marketing teams as well as guest chair people Matt Chapman from Masters Academy and also David Holland from Results Rules OK. We let our clients do the talking and discuss pros and cons of what they do on a day to day basis but also learn from each other; which I heard from many of them was invaluable. I think it’s a great way of learning about what might be new to you but has already been ‘tested’ by someone else – it’s so lovely to see this industry share and be happy to help others succeed too.
I had a fantastic day, as did all of us from NEST. We’ve got some great features coming out and I can’t wait to develop them further and to see you guys using them too. I look forward to hearing your feedback and hearing about the results if not before, at our next event, our Client Conference and Gala Awards Dinner 2017 on Saturday 13 May. Catch the footage from last year’s event here. I think it’s going to be a good one.
Thanks for everyone that came on Wednesday, if you have any questions from the day please give me a call or email me at marketing@nestmanagement.co.uk. If you didn’t make it and something from here has piqued your interest, we will be more than happy to talk you through it in more detail.
