Prospect Sequence

Prospects are contacts in your booking software that have never attended and have no upcoming events scheduled. They may or may not have purchased a package, such as your Intro Offer or Drop In, but have yet to get themselves on your schedule.

The prospect sequence will be one of the most important automation sequences. It will be very difficult to convert someone to a long-term member if you don’t get them into the studio.

Make sure you take your time building out personalized content, use each communication medium, and create a drip campaign that spans multiple weeks following a prospect’s account creation date.

Sequence Goal

The goal of the Prospect Sequence is to nurture these new contacts until they attend their first class or private session.

It’s important to note that in the prospect sequence, we distinguish “never booked an event” (meaning, contact has never attempted to create a booking) from “has never attended, and has no upcoming events book.” In doing so, we’ll account for contacts that miss their first scheduled event, and we’ll remove contacts that have their first event scheduled. This will help ensure the goal of this sequence, having your new prospect attend for the first time, is accomplished even if they are absent for their scheduled event.

Important

If you prefer your clients stop triggering prospect automations when they purchase an intro offer, rather than our standard setup, add the following automation from our catalog to your account and activate it: Add Tag - Prospect: Opt-out

Where Prospect sequence fits in your client journey

Prospect Sequence - Prospect creates an account on booking software -> Triggers your prospect sequence of automations based on how many days after creating their account, and no events attended or scheduled for the future.
First Visit - Confirmation - Prospect books their first event -> No longer (currently eligible for Prospect automations), and will trigger automations for First Visit - Confirmation confirming the date/time of their first booking, and delivering important information to streamline first visit, such as what to bring, when to arrive, what to expect, and link to complete a liability waiver.
First Event Missed - Prospect misses their first event -> Will trigger your First Event Missed series of automations, then fall back into your Prospect Automations until they reschedule.
First Visit Follow Up - Prospect attends their first event -> No longer eligible to trigger Prospect automations, and will trigger your First Visit Follow Up automations.

Designing a good prospect sequence

Before getting into the nitty gritty of the segment setup, let’s walk through a few tips to ensure your prospect sequence provides maximum value to your studio and to your new client:

1. Mixed Communication Mediums:

Use a good mix of email, SMS, and To-Do automations to ensure you’re casting the widest net to move your prospect down the client journey.

Emails - Good for sending more elaborate information such as studio policies, where to find parking, how to contact your staff, and links to purchase an intro offer or complete a liability waiver. Think of the emails you send as a “self serve” option for your client, proving very clear call-to-actions (CTA) where the client can take the next step directly from your email.

SMS - Great for providing a two-way dialog with your client, providing additional support to help them take that next step of getting on your schedule. SMS automations in the prospect sequence also provide additional benefits such as engaging with clients that might not check their email, and providing a communication channel to your staff incase the client has questions before attending their first event.

To-Dos - Provide that personal touch point! Let your new clients get to know your studio and staff before they book their first class. Assigning To-Dos for staff to call new prospects often times will help overcome client hurdles such as anxiety, procrastination, and other objections. As an added bonus, your studio will shine for delivering personal customer support instead of treating new prospect as “another number,” as many studios unfortunately do.

2. Perseverance

Don’t just email a prospect the day they create their account and expect them to immediately show up. Life gets in the way, and for some clients it takes time and careful nurturing to have them show up. Continuing a slow prospect drip campaign takes very little time to setup, and ensures you’re leaving minimal, and maybe no “money on the table.” We recommend a 45 day sequence (45 days following client account creation date on your booking software).

Your cadence should be stronger within the first week and then trickle off over the next month. Consider an email on day 1 in tandem with a To-Do prompting your staff to call the prospect, a follow up text the next day, then slowly cycle through emails, SMS and To-Dos over the following weeks.

3. Provide a way to remove a member from this sequence

A new prospect might respond to your communications to let you know they’re interested, but not ready to get started immediately. In this scenario we don’t want to opt the member out of email or SMS, we simply want to ensure they don’t continue to trigger prospect automations.

This is where we’ll leverage tags, or as we’ll refer to them in the client journey, Stop Tags. If you are not familiar with Tags or how they can be used to remove clients from specific types of automations, take a quick look at this doc: Stop Tags

Prospect Audience Setup

In plain english, the audience we’ll be targeting:

Created an account on your booking software X days ago, and has not been remove from this sequence by way of “stop tag”
Has never attended an event, and
Has no upcoming events booked

Filters used in prospect automations:

Client Account Creation Date - How many days after creating an account will your automation trigger? This will be the “effective trigger point” for all prospect automations, and will be the ONLY filter that changes for any prospect automation.
Client Tag - This filter will allow us to remove an individual from your prospect automations without opt-ing them out from email or SMS. If you prefer your prospect sequence ends if someone purchases a specific package or a contract (instead of the basic setup of stopping after first visit or upcoming booking), you can setup automations to apply your prospect “stop tag” automatically after specific actions.
Booking Count - We’ll use this to ensure the client has zero attended events, and zero upcoming events scheduled.
Booking Status - In tandem with Booking Count, we’ll make sure the status of the zero bookings are attended and upcoming

Prospect Automation Rules

Your prospect automations will all have a very similar audience, with only one filter changing for each automation: Client Account Creation Date

The audiences will contain 3 rules as follows:

Rule 1 (contains 3 filters):

Client profile status = Active
Client Tag = does NOT have [select your prospect stop tag]
Client Account Creation Date = [select when this automation will trigger] - This will be the only filter that changes between automations in your prospect sequence.

Rule 1 described: Target clients that created their account today or X days ago, and have not been removed from this sequence from an stop tag.

Rule 2 (contains 2 filters):

Booking count = 0
Booking status = attended

Rule 2 described: Remove anyone that has already attended an event.

Rule 3 (contains 2 filters):

Booking count = 0
Booking status = upcoming

Rule 3 described: Remove anyone that has an upcoming event scheduled.

Example Prospect Audience Screen Shot

Automation Catalog

Need help building your prospect automations, or want to add a few more touch points? We have plenty of templates in our automation catalog to get you started:

Click on Automations -> Catalog
Locate the category Prospect
Select the automations you’d like to add to your account.

Watch Prospect Sequence buildout

Watch a prospect automation sequence built from scratch.

Dashboard Segments

Adding a few prospect segments to your dashboard is a great way to visualize prospects that were created today, in the last week, in the last month etc.