Cash flow is the life blood of any business and will be one of the important keys to the success of your studio. Without it you will have lots of sleepless nights and unwanted stress. Over the years we have tried some different events and promotions to give us a quick cash injection. The key here is to try to sell mostly to your existing customers. This way you already know that they have an interest in what you are selling and you won't waste any time, energy and money trying to sell to someone who may or may not be interested in doing business with you.
When you need people to respond quickly you are going to need to offer some kind of incentive to act now. Be careful not to give away too much or you will be kicking yourself later on. If you have all of your clients e-mail addresses, you can do these promotions for next to nothing and if you do not have their email addresses we have found that the best way to get them is to have them enter that information on their registration form.
1) Buy three private lessons get one free.This is really effective around the holidays because you can promote it as a gift packaged special. You can also offer this near your year end show to help students get caught up on choreography or help with certain technical points they need to work on. It is preferable that you teach the private lessons yourself so that it is not necessary to pay another teacher. Make the offer time sensitive. Give them one week or select a special day and your phone should be ringing. You could also put a limit on the offer by only making it available to the first ten people who call so that you create a sense of urgency.
2) Dance card special. If you have adult classes or offer some kind of dance card to take classes you can do a " buy 10 get 2 Free day ". If you don't have adult classes you may want to try a new program and kick it off with this promotion.
3) Special workshop Offer a special workshop given by you. This class needs to be different than anything else you offer in your studios regular curriculum. If you can sing you could do a song and dance workshop. How about a special class on working with different props? You could do a sports agility clinic. The sky's the limit here. Work with a special gift you have and go for it.
4) Referral week...Here is a great incentive to have your clients refer new people to you. You send your clients a coupons with their name on it with a cash value printed on it, $50.00 as an example, the amount is really up to you. They give it to a friend and tell them that if they bring it to the studio and register that same week they can get the discount that is printed on the coupon. Why would your clients go through the trouble of doing this? Because you are going to give them the same discount. For everyone they get to register they will get the same credit to their account. If they get four people to sign up they will get the discount times four. This may seem like a lot but it is low cost advertising and you know that you do not pay anything unless you get new students.
We have found that these type of promotions work really well because everyone benefits. We suggest that you give this promotion a limited time offer of perhaps two weeks. When thinking of ways to get a quick infusion of cash try to make it very time sensitive and be careful not to give the store away. Retail stores have sales when they want to improve their cash flow. Why not use the same kind of tactics for dance classes? We like to try to make it some special event so we don't have to discount our full season prices. The referral program is the only one we do this with, because we know we are getting new students in return who will hopefully stay for years to come, so it is well worth it.
