9 Ways to Increase Player Retention in your Coaching Programme
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to episode number 13 of the Tennis Business Academy Podcast.
And today the topic I’d like to cover is player retention.
Which I’m sure you’ll agree is one of the most important aspects of running a tennis coaching programme.
I’ve never met a coach that didn’t think that. We all instinctively know this, even if some of us haven’t spent that much time thinking about this topic in detail.
I often like to say that if you’re in charge of a tennis coaching programme you’re in the player retention business.
And the reason why we’re in the retention business is simple.
Tennis clubs and coaching programmes are local businesses.
Meaning that they have a finite amount of potential customers, unlike, say, an online business or a large global corporation, both of whom can sell their products or services to a global audience.
A tennis club or coaching programme can’t do that.
They’re selling access to tennis coaches and tennis courts.
Which means that only the people that can physically make their way to the venue each week can ever be considered as potential customers.
So, even if your venue is based in a large urban area, it still has a small potential customer base, relatively speaking.
And if we have a small audience, then we need to make sure that the players that do come through the door stay for a long time.
Because we know that we can’t keep replacing them with new players every time forever, as there aren’t that many to replace them with.
The way to make a coaching programme work is by giving players a great experience, so that they’re happy and engaged and keep coming back for more.
If you can achieve that, then you’re more than halfway to having a successful coaching business.
So, the real question then becomes: how do you retain customers?
Well, that’s exactly what I’m going to cover in the rest of this episode.
More specifically, I want to give you 9 different ideas that I think will help you retain customers.
But before we get to those I think that it’s important to acknowledge that delivering what I call the minimum relevant service isn’t really enough to create loyalty and retain customers for the long term.
For a coaching programme the minimum relevant service is providing coaching lessons.
That is the absolute minimum that a customer would expect you to deliver.
But just giving people lessons isn’t going to get people jumping up and down with joy, and pulling out their wallet to sign-up to your programme for life, right?
If you want your players to have true, long standing loyalty you need to deliver something special.
You need to find ways to go above and beyond and provide a player journey that is difficult, if not impossible to replicate anywhere else.
You need to find ways, big or small, to provide more value than anyone else.
You need to make customers feel valued and special and like they belong to a programme, club and community that is exceptional in some way.
If you’re able to achieve these things you will start getting people who will 100% buy into what you’re doing and will want to stay for life.
And now, without further ado, here are 9 ideas to help you do just that:
1) Deliver quality sessions
I thought I’d start with the obvious one!
But the thing to think about here is how do you define what is or isn’t a quality session?
How do you define quality in your coaching programme? How do you know if the sessions you’re delivering are keeping players happy and engaged?
From my experience, this isn’t always clear.
So my advice is that you should develop a way to try and measure quality as objectively as you can.
One obvious way to do this is to measure session attendance. Are people showing up to sessions as much or more than they used to?
If you see a drop in attendance that could mean that your lessons aren’t being effective.
On the other hand a very high attendance rate means that people are loving and enjoying the sessions, which is what we want.
Another metric that you could keep an eye on are the learning outcomes. Are people actually learning what they should be learning?
If they are then your sessions are being effective and players will be more likely to stick around.
Which brings me straight to idea number 2:
2) Create a player progression system
One thing is making sure that players learn and progress their game.
This is obviously crucial for player retention. If someone pays for tennis lessons they expect to learn something.
But if they’re progressing but don’t feel like they’re progressing then that’s no good either.
When it comes to retention, giving players a strong sense of progress and journey is just as important as actually helping them learn the game of tennis.
Video games are great at giving people this feeling of progress, which is a big part of the reason people love playing them.
No matter if you’re playing a simple candy crush type game on your phone or a really complex, state of the art game, you’re always being given a sense of progress as you play it.
Some games show you positive messages on the screen, others give you a score that keeps going up and up, others literally tick tasks off when you complete them, and with others you collect items that unlock new tasks and levels of difficulty.
Regardless of which method they use, they constantly give the player a distinct sense of progress, a clear sense that the more they play the more they’re moving forward.
They give players a sense of achievement. Which is why people want to keep playing.
If we want retention on our coaching programmes we should strive to offer that same sense of continuous progress and achievement.
Not only do we need to help progress happen, we also need to make the player feel like it’s happening every step of the way.
So, consider the learning experience for the player and think about how you can give them the feeling that they’re progressing and going up “levels”.
3) Create an online video library
Or in other words, leverage technology and expand the learning experience to the online domain.
This is not me suggesting that the video library will replace your in-person sessions.
I’m just suggesting that an online video library will enhance the players experience and be a value add to your programme.
The videos can cover all sorts of things like drills players could use to practise certain skills, technical and tactical tips, exercises and games parents can do with kids at home or at the club and really anything else that you think will add value to the player's tennis journey.
The idea here is that the more value you add to your offering, the more likely players will be to stick around.
4) Listen to your customers and do what they’re telling you
On episode 9 I talked about customer surveys, so I won’t spend too much time on this point.
The basic idea is that customers, including me and you, like it when the companies they give money to listen to them.
So, make sure to run regular customer surveys and to engage with players as much as possible so that they can tell you in their own words what they enjoy the most and what they think could be improved.
Once you have that information just do more what they enjoy and improve what needs to be improved.
Simple!
And if you want to learn how to run a proper customer survey, I suggest you listen to episode 9 of the podcast.
5) Find small ways to make customers feel valued
These are the things that you didn’t have to do, but chose to do.
Let me illustrate this with a quick story about my dad.
A few years ago my dad received a birthday email from a clothing company.
The email had a happy birthday message and a discount voucher that could be used in the following weeks.
He was THRILLED!
Yes, the message was automated, and yes what the company really wanted was for my dad to go back to their shop and spend more money.
So, what?
It was still a nice little surprise on his birthday. And he appreciated it.
So much so that he did go back to the shop and spent more money with them. Over and over!
It’s often the little things that people notice the most.
The things that you didn’t have to do, but chose to do.
Stuff like the automated happy birthday message with the discount voucher.
The delivery of a surprise ‘welcome gift-bag’ when someone joins.
The phone call to a parent when their child missed a lesson because they were ill.
The personal letter thanking a customer for being a part of the programme for 12 months.
I think you get the idea.
The main reason why we all appreciate these small gestures is because almost no one bothers with them.
If you find a way to incorporate a few ‘extra’ personal touches into the running of your programme players will definitely notice and appreciate it, making it more likely that they’ll stick around.
6) Deliver a comprehensive tennis experience
Think beyond delivering just the one thing - coaching lessons - and think of delivering a full tennis experience.
The coaching sessions are important, of course, but they’re only part of the picture.
People also play tennis because they want to meet new people, to play with friends and to test themselves in official and unofficial competitions and matchplay.
So, you should consider organising, or at the very least encouraging, other activities and events like social mix-ins for juniors and adults, tennis clinics, tennis holidays, holiday camps, tournaments, social events unrelated to tennis, awards ceremonies and whatever else you think people will want to participate in.
Expand the scope of what you offer, and guess what, more people will be more likely to stick around for longer.
7) Do your best to get players playing more than 1x a week
Once a week players probably aren’t that committed to the sport and by extension they aren’t that committed to your coaching programme.
Getting them to play more often will mean that they’ll improve quicker, and the better they get, the more likely it is that they will commit to tennis and to you as the person that helped them get better in the first place.
So, you should have a system in place to encourage players to play more than once a week, if you want to improve customer retention.
8) Develop an early warning system
The idea of the early warning system is that it will help you spot early on when people might be thinking about leaving.
If you can spot it early, chances are that you’ll be able to do something about it and at least have a shot at re-engaging the player that is maybe thinking of leaving.
The biggest red flag you should keep in mind is attendance. If people stop showing up you’re pretty much guaranteed that they will soon leave.
In my own coaching business, I’ve set up a system that automatically sends me an email if a player goes 15 days without attending a session.
This prompts me to reach out to them to ask if there’s something wrong, or if there’s something they need from us in order to get back to the sessions.
Often the simple act of reaching out is enough to remind people that they do enjoy the sessions and to get them back on-court.
Declining attendance is the biggest red flag you should keep an eye on, but there could be others, like where a coach’s instinct is telling them that a player isn’t engaged and enjoying the sessions even though they’re showing up, or even the fact that the player isn’t progressing at the desired pace.
We know that a player that doesn’t progress could become disillusioned and decide to leave.
But the main idea here is that you pick one or two things to keep an eye on, that will allow you to spot early on which players might be at risk of leaving the programme, so that you can do your best to re-engage them before they actually make the decision to leave.
9) Reward loyal customers
This could be through a referral scheme where you give something back to the players who refer other players to your programme.
Or it could be giving them a prize when they hit certain longevity milestones.
Like for example giving them a pack of grips when they stay in your programme for 6 months, and a t-shirt when they get to 12 months and so on.
Or it could be any other way that you can think of to reward the people who have been your customers for a while.
The main idea here is simply to make them happy that they’ve decided to stay.
This will reinforce the idea that they’ve made the right choice by staying and will therefore make them want to stay even more.
——
Alright, these are 9 ideas that I think will help you keep players happy and retain them for longer in your coaching programme.
Let’s just quickly recap them before we go:
Define objective measures for quality and make sure to deliver quality sessions
Create a player progress system that gives players a sense of achievement and progression
Create an online video library to add value to your offering
Listen to your customers and do more of what they enjoy and improve what they tell you needs to be improved
Find small ways to make your customers feel valued and appreciated
Go beyond just delivering coaching lessons and find ways to deliver a comprehensive tennis experience
Create a system to encourage players to play more than 1x a week
Develop an early warning system that allows you to spot early when a player might be thinking of leaving
Find ways to reward loyal customers as this will reinforce the idea that they made the right choice by staying
I hope these 9 ideas were useful to you and I hope that you’ll consider implementing some of them into your coaching programme.
That’s it for today’s episode. As always I’ll be back next week with another instalment of the Tennis Business Academy Podcast.
Until then and thanks for tuning in.