We all know first impressions matter most. Your first month with a customer is your best opportunity to make them fall in love with you and if you can manage that they will stick around for years.

As coaches our main goal needs to be keeping retention as high as possible. Below I’m going to be breakdown my strategy to giving a customer a world-class experience (especially in their first month) so they stick around for years. Yes, years… We see coaches with the same core group of customers for 4+ years now.

In this article, we will breakdown some key points that I use to keep customers for the longterm.

Before, we get started let's cover the free 14-day trial your customer and what they receive:

We highly recommend spending a lot of time with them throughout their 14-day trial. Try to get the coaching session back asap, ask if they have any questions after you submit it, send them some follow up helpful articles/videos, etc.

Okay, now let's cover into how to think about getting your customer started.

As coaches that are working online we’re going to have two major challenges that we have to focus on overcoming:

I’ve found it very helpful to think through a user behavior cycle. All user behavior cycles have 3 core parts:

I’m going to show you how we think about behavior cycles below, but I want to call out one important point. You’ll notice we carefully chose the word “behavior” over “action”.

Why?

Because, we want to change their behavior over the long term. We don’t want them sending in a video to be a one time thing. We want their behavior to be:

Practice or Compete —> Send Video —> Improve —> Repeat

Okay, let’s take a look at the Blayze Behavior cycle chart we have built:

If this doesn’t make sense yet, don’t worry I’m going to explain it here and you can see a video walkthrough of it here.

The “trigger” part of this are the things that help guide the user to the behavior we want them to take (uploading a video). This is where we (Blayze) as a platform work together with you to help guide the user to the experience we want them to take.

You will notice as we look at the triggers we have “Email”, “Notifications”, “In-App”, and “Coach Communication”. Email, in-app, and push notifications refers to everything that the Blayze platform does to help guide your customers in the direction of sending you the first video.

We give them nudges, guides, educational material, reminders, task lists, and more to drive them to upload a video to you. All of this is helpful, but the most important part of the equation is their coach!

Under coach communication part of triggers I’ve listed out the two core segments:

Finally, we have the “reward” section. The reward is what drivers them to continue with a product or service and can come in many different formats.

Not only is their improvement an award, but from within the app we want to celebrate that as well. We’ll talk more about rewards a little later in this article.

Your intro assessment is your first opportunity to build a relationship and get them excited to have the opportunity to learn from you. Yes, you’re a world-class coach, they are lucky to have you as their coach. Oftentimes, they are fans of you, they want to be friends with you, remember that.

During our intro assessment we have 3 core goals:

The 2nd and 3rd points are the most critical parts of our intro call. When a customer is getting started they don’t know how to start, when and how often they should send in videos, what videos to send in, what to expect, etc.

We need to tackle all of those for them! We can’t expect a customer to know any of the steps so we are going to want to walk them step by step and not assume any piece of this is too obvious.

The first step is helping them set a plan. Every customer will be a little different here, so take the time to understand what they’re looking for and use your judgement to how you would recommend them to use you as a coach.

This means saying:

Tell them WHY you think that cadence or format makes sense. Finally, after setting a plan with them you want to leave them with 1 clear next action to take, upload their next video to you (again make sure it’s super clear what video they are uploading to you).

We want to do all of this while still having fun, laughing, and making them feel welcomed.

As you begin working with a customer the key trigger to drive more of our wanted behavior (sending in videos to you) will be staying engaged and top of mind with them through messaging.

This is especially true if you’re working with youth athletes. The number 1 reason an athlete will stop working with you has nothing to do with the quality of their coaching sessions — the main reason they will drop out is that they simply forget to send in videos, or they don’t know what to do next.

If they have to think about what to send in, or when to send it in, then we have lost them. The mental energy it takes them to do that is just too much. It’s a coaches job to simplify for the customer so they don’t have to think about anything.

Using chat messaging is a great way to stay top of mind, ensure they know exactly what actions to take and when, and continue building the relationship. So, what is the right cadence for messaging a customer?

We recommend on average trying to start conversation with them once every two weeks. There is a direct correlation between messages sent and number of sessions purchased by a customer.

Here are some suggestions you can use to send messages:

During your first month, we recommend being extremely active with them. Messaging them once or twice a week is recommended.

Make sure they know exactly what they need to do next at every moment, ask if they have questions, respond as quickly as you can, and get on the intro call with them as quickly as you can.

When they subscribe we send an automated message on your behalf to schedule an intro call with you. Don’t just rely on that, try to write them another welcome message that is more personal and warm as soon as you can after they subscribe.

When we think about the first month’s timeline, we split it up into 3 very important sections:

There are some important actions we want users taking each week and I’m going to break those down here.

(Please note the "intro call" has been replaced by "intro assessment")

There are three core things we want a customer to experience in their first week:

Our goal is to help them complete the three steps here.

The first step is easy, messaging with them to make them feel welcome and ensuring they submit their intro assessment asap.

We then want to make sure they get all setup on Blayze to make things as easy as possible for them. That means:

We want to keep the momentum up here in week two. After you submit your first coaching session you will have generated their first custom training plan as well. Check in to make sure they saw that and get that finished in the first week.

You’ll want to check in to see if they have any questions on the plan, the drill, recording the drill, etc. Check in throughout the week and celebrate once they have completed it via chat messaging with them!

Ideally, we help them continue to explore our education center and you can give them 1 or 2 additional articles to read/view.

It may be a stretch to have a customer sending in videos in back to back weeks but giving them more examples of how they can work with you is a great idea here. Their trial will be ending at the end of this week.

They key takeaway that I hope you get from this is that we’re in this together on retaining customers. Blayze is adding more and more to the platform everyday to help keep customers engaged with their customers, but you have the real power to keep your customers coming back.

Always think back to the triggers that drive someone to form the consistent behavior of sending you videos and the rewards they get for doing that.

Remember that a customer should never be confused or have to question what the next step is. They already have enough work to do with sending in that video - simplify things for them, remind them, and hold their hand every step of the way.

We have to remember that most customers stop using Blayze simply because they forgot about it, fall out of the habit, and then get lazy. We want to use those triggers to stay top of mind and keep them motivated to continue improving by sending in their videos.

If you find yourself finding success with one repetitive task (sending a similar message, or giving the same plan, etc.) let us know and we can find ways to automate that for you!

And if you didn’t watch the video walkthrough of that chart above here it is: