Understanding Your Retention Rate

I don't see this being talked about in the martial arts marketing space and I thought it would be a good idea to share some insight on it. Getting tons of leads, people through the door, and a high sign up rate is great and all; but how long are those new students staying for? A month? Two Months? A year?

Understanding how long someone trains at your academy can help you better understand your business i.e. if new students are only staying on average 2 months, then maybe there is something within your school that needs to be changed.

You can calculate the average enrollment period of your school easily:

Import your membership data into an Excel or Google spreadsheet to make this easier.

Simply subtract the date a student joined from the date they quit and you'll find the amount of time they were enrolled at your school (note students with no quit dates are still enrolled and are not apart of our calculation). In the example above we see that on average students are enrolled for 3 months in this example academy.

From this list we can also calculate the percentage of people this academy retains. First, divide the number of quits (4) by the total number of sign ups (7) which equals 0.57 or 57% (this is the percentage of quits). Then subtract your answer from 1 and we get 0.43 or 43% (this is our retention rate). This percentage indicates to us that we can expect to retain 43% of our students.

A 3 month average stay and 43% retention rate may sound really good or really bad, but we can't say which without looking at historical data.

So lets look at one of my client's, Freedom Jiu-Jitsu, retention rates over the years:

We calculated the retention rates for Freedom Jiu-Jitsu going back to 2019. On average Freedom Jiu-Jitsu retains 70% of new students signed up in a given year. 2020 ironically seems to be an outlier with a 79% retention rate.

Overall the consistency of the retention rate speaks volumes about the school. Creating a consistent environment for students allows them to assimilate better into the academy. All though a 70% average is great, we are always still trying to improve it.

Try this for yourself and let me know your results!

More Students Less Work is a Ground Standard product. When a school wants the full agency behind it, Ground Standard Agency is the next step.

Part of the topic Martial Arts School Metrics and Retention.