Retaining students over the holiday period

One of the times of the year when you are most likely to lose students is over the Christmas and New Year holidays.

There are many reasons for this. Some students want to train for a year and then move on to another activity. While you will most likely see your most significant influx of new students after the holiday break, many just joined to train for a year before moving on. However, returning after a break can be tricky for many other students, so this article is aimed at this group of students.

A break in your routine can be good as it allows you to refocus and recharge. However, it also means that the training habit is broken, and some students will find it hard to re-engage with training.

Here are several ways to address this problem.

Have a shutdown period that is as short as possible.

A shorter shutdown allows students to return to training before the training habit breaks. You should shut down for at most two weeks. You can stretch this to 4 weeks, but in doing so, you have a greater chance of losing more students.  

Depending on whether you own or rent your premises, this can be difficult, especially if you are using a facility that dictates its closure periods. However, in this situation, you can always schedule outdoor training in a park or at the beach. This can also work in your favour as a change of training venue can excite and stimulate your students.

We appreciate that being a martial arts instructor can be challenging. Most of us are volunteers with jobs and careers outside of martial arts, and we need a break, too. So, it is about finding a balance between getting back to training as soon as possible and having time for our families and ourselves. However, try to avoid lengthy closures (four weeks or more) if possible.

Run some different classes.

To excite your students about returning to class after the holiday break, offer something different over the first few weeks of the New Year’s training. For example, if you are a Karate School, you could look at running a few weeks of Ground Fighting training. If you are a sports-orientated Martial Art, you could look at some traditional training styles.

Having a network of friends who do other martial arts helps if you don’t have the skills yourself, as you can bring in somebody who has to help. You could then do the same for their school.

If you don’t have this collegiality with someone, you could reach out to local schools and offer to bring them in to run a session for you in return for you to run a session for them.

A short change is as good as a break in this case.

Operate a limited timetable with an open mat.

If you have smaller classes in January (many people are away on holiday at this time anyway) but want to keep those who holiday later in the year interested, you can run a limited class schedule for the first few weeks of the New Year.

If you run two classes a week, you could reduce this to once a week or run both classes for a shorter time. If you run a children’s class with an adult class immediately after, you could combine both classes for a period of time.

You could run these classes as an open mat session where people can come along and do their own training. This would allow you to relax as you would not be instructing or running things directly but only there to supervise.