How Much Money is Your Yoga Studio Leaving on the Table? (Part II)

In Part I of How Much Money is Your Yoga Studio Leaving on the Table I discussed the indispensable tool and profitable technique of building an e-mail subscriber list. Here in Part II I’ll tell you about using live chat to increase the number of your website visitors to actually contact you giving you an opportunity to sell them on taking a class at your studio.

Yoga marketing is all about establishing a dialogue with prospective yoga students and customers. If a visitor to your website leaves your site without contacting you, then you’ve lost a sale and the potential to get a sale because no dialogue started.

This means it’s imperative you offer your website visitors as many opportunities as possible to start a dialogue with you once they arrive at your site. Displaying a phone number, having a contact form, and an email subscription form are all great. However, one incredibly powerful tool for getting customers is adding a “live chat” option to your sites.

What is Live Chat?

Okay, I don’t have live chat on this site – but it’s a blog – I’m not selling any products or services directly. But you are – and that’s why live chat is a such a great tool.

Live chat is a way that website visitors can have a typed conversation with you or an employee of yours in real time. It’s a button saying “Let’s Chat” or something similar you display prominently on your site(s). You can indicate whether you’re available or not available. If not available, your visitors can easily leave you a message (this is better than nothing). It also gives you a way to deliver great customer service to existing customers.

If a visitor clicks to chat, you’re notified and both of you have text boxes in which to type messages back and forth.

Like an e-mail subscriber service, a great live chat service is very inexpensive. I highly recommend Provide Support which costs $15 per month for an unlimited number of websites (they offer a free trial so you can see if it’s worth it). The best part is you don’t need to install any software. Provide Support’s entire system is web-based – you simply log in to your account and manage your entire console on the Internet (i.e. cloud computing).

Live Chat Offers Instant Gratification for Your Website Visitors

I don’t like calling businesses. I don’t like waiting for answers. Live chat solves both these problems for your customers who are just like me. Often I’d rather avoid waiting for an answer than asking it through a form or making a telephone call. However, when a website has live chat, I don’t mind waiting 20 seconds for a live answer.

Live Chat is More Efficient than a Telephone Call

When you’re on the phone, you can only deal with one customer at at time. On live chat you can easily assist 3 to 5 customers at a time. You can also keep copies of all transcripts and send a transcript to your customers).

What if You Don’t Have Time to Keep Live Chat Going 24/7?

No problem – you can simply set it to “leave a message”. When you’re available, then turn it on again. You can be available wherever you have an Internet connection. If you go to a conference or workshop, you can at least part of the time be available for prospective customer inquiries. If you have a receptionist – then you can train your receptionist to be the live chat operator. Your receptionist probably knows the answers to most questions anyway.

Live Chat Will Give You a Competitive Advantage

Most likely most of your competitors don’t use live chat. Get an advantage now using live chat. At the very least – if you have Web traffic to your website(s), give live chat a trial run and see whether you get inquiries and whether those inquiries result in paying customers.

Let’s Look at the Live Chat Numbers

In Part I I used a scenario of 50 website visitors per day. I’ll do so here as well. Suppose 5 of those 50 visitors per day start a live chat with you during which you’re able to immediately answer their questions. If 1 out of 35 live chat customers become a student of your studio (taking 1 class per week at $10 / class = $520 per year), then your live chat service will add 52 students to your studio in a year. You’ll earn $520 in revenue for the year on a live chat investment of only $180 ($15/month). That’s a $340 profit.*

Okay, I acknowledge you’ll never know whether a live chat customer would have become a yoga studio customer regardless whether you have live chat. There is no way to know for sure. However, give it a trial and see if you get a bump in new students. Besides, with live chat your existing customers can more easily contact you. As you know, retaining yoga students is absolutely fundamental to building your business. When you can easily and cheaply improve your customer service, then it’s well worth the time, effort, and nominal cost.

Click Here to Visit the Provide Support Official Website

Putting it all together

In my last two posts Putting Your Internet Yoga Marketing Campaign All Together (using microsites) and Part I of How Much Money is Your Yoga Studio Leaving on the Table as well as this post – I’ve given you the tools to build a solid Web presence and then turning website visitors into yoga students – all for the following low cost:

Website theme with StudioPress: $70 (unlimited number of websites and blogs);
Website hosting: $7 /month (unlimited websites);
AWeber e-mail subscriber service: $19/month; and
Provide Support Live Chat: $15/month (place it on an unlimited number of sites)

Total Cost: $70 up front; $41 monthly.

With the example of 50 visitors per day to your sites using an email subscriber and live chat I showed it’s not impossible to earn $272 + $340 = $612 in annual profit (for the first year*). Imagine if you get 100 or 200 daily visitors – all the more possible with more websites.

The point is: developing and executing an outstanding Internet yoga marketing campaign is not difficult and not expensive once you get informed. Both AWeber and Provide Support offer trial periods so it’s risk free. With StudioPress themes and Bluehost – you can leverage your investment because once you pay the initial cost for the theme and the $7 per month for hosting – you can build unlimited websites.

Once you put in these tools, continue building traffic. More traffic with these great conversion tools equals more yoga students for you!

*The number set out in this post and Part I are illustrative. Using any or all of the tools set out in this website does not guarantee results. Results may vary. Take advantage of the trial offers and see whether it works for you.

Part I of How Much Money is Your Yoga Studio Leaving on the Table