A prospective student described his hunt for a taekwondo school, a dojang, in a post titled "Why can't Dojangs answer calls or emails from potential students (rhetorical question/rant)". The first place he reached out to responded within three hours, and it mainly focused on sport sparring, which was not his primary focus. So he moved on to the next one.
"For the next Dojang, I sent an email and used the contact form. After a week with no response (not even your email was received), I tried calling them."
When he got through, nobody knew who he was. He was told to just show up in a uniform and a belt. He asked for the specifics to be emailed, gave his address again, and never received an email.
Another person contacting schools, in the comments underneath, put their own search like this.
"Out of nine places only two answered my emails."
Now the view from behind the desk. A different thread, somewhere else, where a school owner was replying to somebody wondering whether to keep chasing a gym that had gone quiet on them.
"I own a small school. I routinely get serial question askers. You spend lots of time and energy on them and it never pans out."
He is describing his own experience, and he is not inventing it. But hold the two side by side and look at what the man shopping for a dojang actually did. He sent an email. He filled in the contact form as well. He waited a week. He rang. He asked for the details a second time. From inside the school, that behaviour looks like a time-waster. From outside, it is somebody working quite hard to give you money.
From your own front desk you get one enquiry, on its own, in a quiet moment, and it feels like a conversation that has started. The family has a list, and you are on it for about as long as it takes somebody else to answer.
How fast should you reply to a new enquiry?
Inside fifteen minutes. Faster if you can.
Somebody who has just filled in a form is still holding the phone they filled it in on, and the thing they just did is still the thing on their mind. Reach them then and you are finishing something they started. Reach them later and your text has to compete with dinner, homework and a bath. Reach them tomorrow and they have to work out who you are first.
A late reply also has to survive being read and set aside for later, and nobody gets round to a decision they don't have to make.
And the owner's instinct, that these were never serious enquiries, has the causation the wrong way round. Handle an enquiry slowly, or answer it in three words, and you have built the bad lead yourself.
What does the research on reply speed actually say?
Somebody selling you something has probably quoted a figure at you on this, so it is worth knowing where it comes from and what it does and does not say.
The study is "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, which ran in the magazine Harvard Business Review in March 2011. The authors audited 2,241 US companies by sending each one a test enquiry through its website and timing the reply.
Of those 2,241 companies, 37% answered inside an hour, 16% answered within one to 24 hours, and 24% took more than 24 hours. The other 23% never answered at all. Among the companies that did answer within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours.
The authors also report a separate study, which involved 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 business-to-consumer and 13 business-to-business companies in the US. Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer. Qualifying, in that study, meant having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker.
Three limits on all of that, which you should hear from us rather than find out later.
It is from 2011, and the industries the authors name are financial services, automobiles, education, software, health care and professional services. Not one of those is a martial arts school. Qualifying meant a conversation, which is a long way short of a signature. And one of the three authors ran the company behind a sales tool that reminds reps when to follow up, through which channels and how often. That does not make the audit wrong and the figures are the figures, but take the direction of it seriously and treat the exact multiple as marketing.
The direction is the part you can use. Hours beat days, and minutes beat hours. And the 23% who never answered at all were giving the enquiry away for nothing.
Worth noticing too that the enquiries in that audit were web-generated test leads. A parent who has picked a class time out of your own timetable has gone further than that. So don't read that audit as your ceiling. If your own replies are not getting answered, look at the handling before you look at the leads.
Should I call or text a new lead?
Text first.
That was not always our advice, and it changed because of what we kept seeing across the schools we run ads for. A text gets answered in a kitchen with two children in it, during a work break, in the minutes before pickup. A phone call needs somebody to be free, willing and alone.
Calls still earn their place. If they pick up, you will build more rapport on a call than over text, so ring if that is your preference. The mistake is ringing, getting no answer, and counting that as the follow-up done. If they don't pick up, text straight after.
Two details matter more than they sound.
Send it from the number your booking confirmations come from. If your system has already texted them a confirmation and then a stranger's mobile appears, they have no reason to connect the two, and some of them will assume their details got passed around.
Keep the whole thread in one place. If half the conversation is on your personal phone and half is in the booking system, whoever picks it up next contradicts whatever you said. That reads as a school that doesn't talk to itself.
What do I say in the first message to a new enquiry?
Short. Not a paragraph. Ends in a question.
The question is the working part. A statement is a notification, and a notification is finished the moment it is read. A question is an open thread, and a thread stays open. A missed call does not. So ask something you could answer yourself if you had to. The child's name is the easiest one in this business, and asking it is not a trick, it is how a conversation starts between two people.
The first three messages, word for word
The first one, from the number your confirmations come from:
"Hi [first name], it's [your name] from [your school]. I've just seen your enquiry come through. What's your little one called?"
If there is no reply:
"Hi [first name], did you get my text yesterday?"
And if that gets nothing either, their name and a question mark on its own:
"[First name]?"
That last one looks too simple to work. It reads like a person, and it asks for almost nothing.
What you should not send is the timetable as a wall of text, or the price list, or a pile of questions at once. Above all, nothing that could have been sent to a whole list of people. A parent spots that straight away, and answering it feels like filling in another form.
Should I use automated follow-up messages for new leads?
Automate the mechanical half, and keep a person in the conversation.
One of the companies selling management software to martial arts schools publishes a page on automated follow-up emails for martial arts leads. Part of it is a list of the moments a staff member should take the conversation off automation: when the lead replies, when a parent raises a safety concern, when someone mentions an injury or medical condition, when the lead asks about contract or cancellation terms, when the person needs help choosing a class, and when a trial has been attended. The same page says software does not replace a thoughtful reply, and that changing the lead's first name does not make an email personal.
So the line is not really in dispute. The failure we see is the automated half getting installed while the human half never gets given to anybody, and then the school decides the leads were bad.
So automate the repetitive work. The reminders before a trial class, the chasing of somebody who enquired and never booked, the alert that tells you an enquiry has landed. None of it needs to change from one family to the next.
Then keep a person on the conversation with a family who has booked. An automation is easy to ignore, and a block of copied text reads like an automation even when a real person sent it. That is the trap worth knowing about. The owner thinks he had a conversation, and the parent thinks she was just a name on a list.
One test before you send anything: would a real person write this sentence to one real person? If not, you have sent a notification, not a reply.
What if the enquiry comes in while I'm teaching?
Then it is either somebody else or an automatic holding text that says when a human will reply. Either way you decide which one before it happens, not afterwards.
This is the honest limit on everything above, and it is not a small one. You teach in the evening, which is also when a parent finishing work gets round to looking for a class. That is the whole difficulty, and we have written up how schools cover that hour separately.
The one thing to add here is whose name goes on the message. A text from the instructor carries weight that a text from an office never will. Where you can, let the reply come from the name above the door, even when somebody else is doing the typing.
How long should I keep following up?
Longer than feels comfortable, and the first follow-up goes inside 24 hours.
No reply does not mean no. They were at work, or at a match, or they read it in a queue, meant to answer and forgot, which is what happens to the messages you send yourself. And they put their details in a form, so getting back to them is the favour they asked for.
So follow up again, and again after that. Remember that the man at the top of this page sent an email, filled in the contact form, waited a week and then rang. Your willingness to send one more message should at least match that.
One boundary. This page is about a brand-new enquiry, the one that landed this afternoon. If what you have is an old list of enquiries that never booked anything, that is a different job, and we have written about working the leads you already paid for separately.
Where we sit in this
We find the families, get them booked and remind them to come. You welcome them, run a great first class, and enrol them.
We have written up the gap between a booking and a body on the mat separately.
No retainer, no contract, and we're paid when a student walks in.
The one thing to do Monday
Write two names down.
The first is the person who answers a new enquiry between four and eight in the evening on teaching nights, inside fifteen minutes, by text, from the number your confirmations come from. The second is who does it on that person's night off.
Then send tonight's first reply yourself, with a question at the end of it, and see what comes back.
When you want the other half of it handled, bring your timetable and the number of spaces you can genuinely fill this month. If we don't think we can fill them, we'll say so on the call.
Questions owners ask
How fast should I reply to a martial arts enquiry?
Inside fifteen minutes, and faster if you can manage it. Somebody who has just filled in a form is still holding the phone they filled it in on, and they are usually contacting more than one school. An hour later the same message has to interrupt dinner, homework or bedtime. Leaving it until after class is the version that costs you most.
Should I call or text a new lead?
Text first. A text gets answered in a kitchen with two kids in it, during a work break, in the minutes before pickup. A call needs somebody to be free, willing and alone. Ring as well if you prefer, because a call builds more rapport when they answer, but never ring and leave it there. If they don't pick up, text straight after from the same number.
What do I say in the first message to a new enquiry?
One or two lines, your name and the school, and a question at the end. Ask the child's name or their age, even when the form already told you. The question is doing the work, because it turns a notification into a thread you can come back to. Long blocks of copied text get read as automation and ignored.
Should I use automated follow-up messages for new leads?
Automate the reminders and the chasing of people who never booked. Don't automate the conversation with somebody who did. People ignore automations, and a copy-and-paste block reads like one even when a human sent it. The software vendors' own guides say the same thing, in smaller print than the rest.
What if the enquiry comes in while I'm teaching?
Decide in advance who covers it, because after-work hours and class hours are the same hours. That can be an automatic holding text saying when a human will reply, or a named person at the desk for two hours. What it cannot be is you, after class, when you remember.