5 Ways to Increase Your Swim School Class Registrations

Even if you have a thriving swim school, it’s always helpful to have a full roster for each of your classes. After all, you never know when a family might need to press pause on swimming for a bit or when you could face seasonal challenges. The more registrations you have, the better your revenue during these dips in business.

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If you’ve struggled to add on more swimmers, we have some ideas for you. Here are five tried-and-true methods to help you get more swim class registrations.

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Content Marketing

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It can be overwhelming to hear “content marketing” when you’re part of a small business like a swim school, but it doesn’t have to be such a scary term. The easiest way to start using this marketing approach is by committing to writing one blog post per month, and then slowly aiming to increase the frequency of your posts. This will slowly help you to make your blog active, and gradually help you get more website visitors as a result.

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If you’re unsure what to write about, ask the very people you want to draw in: families of young kids. Ask your customers what questions they have about your school, what concerns they have and what they’d like to know more about. Based on what they tell you, you can pretty easily write blog posts that will be valuable resources to existing customers and improve the likelihood that new customers will find you online.

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Search Marketing

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This method basically comes down to making it easier for prospects to find you when they search through common search engines. For example, a mom might type “swim schools for toddlers” into Google and click on the first one that pops up. You want to be that first one at the top of that list, and the way to be that is by improving your Google ranking and your SEO copy.

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First you need to identify the keywords that your customers are searching with, and then work to incorporate those into your website copy, blog content, meta descriptions, page titles and paid ads. If any of this sounds foreign or complex, we can help you!

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Smarketing

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This approach is exactly what it sounds like, a fusion of sales and marketing. It means that these two teams need to be in frequent communication and have several touch points between them so one hand of your company can know what the other is doing. This won’t result in a boost in class registrations immediately, but over time it’ll get you there. For example, by sales letting marketing know common themes that come up when talking with interested prospects, marketing can create better messages that are more likely to convert into customers.

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If you don’t have alignment between your sales and marketing teams right now, the best way to start is by booking a recurring monthly meeting with both groups and inviting a dialogue about how each can support the other. This can open the door for more unified efforts, and ultimately more success for both departments - and your school.

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Social Media

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Most of the swim schools we’ve talked to have a love/hate relationships with social media. They love that it’s an easy and ‘free’ way to connect with prospects and customers, but they hate that it’s confusing to know which platform to be on and what kind of content to push out through each channel. We feel you on that.

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It can be tricky to navigate this world, and if you don’t have an agency yet guiding your way, we recommend starting small. Choose one platform that you’re already fairly active on, and invest in it with your time. Commit to posting once per business day and sharing more pictures and videos. We also recommend dipping your toe into social media advertising, like on Facebook or Instagram. By doing this, you can set your budget, define the audience you want to reach and craft a very targeted, likely-to-convert ad. Many swim schools and other businesses have had great success with this approach.

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Email Marketing

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Ah, and of course, the old standby - email. Inboxes are crowded these days, but savvy email marketing still works. If you want to stand out among all the emails vying for parents’ attention, there are a few keys to keep in mind: 1) Personalize your messages, 2) Offer them something of value (like a discount or a free class), and 3) Use sparingly (in other words, make sure you send no more than one email per week to the same person). Follow these three rules, and you’ll increase your odds of getting attention - and registrations.

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If you’re looking to get more swimmers in your swim classes, there are a variety of tactics you can try, but these are some of the best ones out there. If you’d like to learn more or have help crafting a strategy specifically for your swim school, please contact us anytime.