Increase your school holiday program bookings with these email templates

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A BETTER day-in-the-life of class-based businesses

Hosted by Clayton Moulynox, Sue Thomas

About this online session Running a class-based business shouldn’t mean drowning in admin, chasing payments, or juggling messy schedules. Yuk! ​ In this 15 min online session, we’ll walk through what a better day looks like — one where your systems do the heavy lifting, parents love the experience, and your team focuses on what really matters. You’ll see how leading swim schools, dance studios, and other class-based businesses are streamlining their operations, improving retention, and making their days feel effortless. ​ If your day still involves spreadsheets, sticky notes or workarounds, this one’s for you. ​ Got questions? Ask via chat in this online session, our team is there to respond. ​ What you’ll learn We’ll cover off some of the typical tasks you do every day:

Getting a snapshot of what’s going on when you start your day Checking classes for availability and fulfilling bookings for waitlisted students Communicating with students/parents if you need to cancel a class & giving options for credits or make-ups Managing a class in progress: Checking in students, managing achievements Accessing online realtime reports (across multiple facilities) Your customers (parents/students) self-servicing with the customer portal and mobile app

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The secret to getting more bookings

You could use a number of platforms to advertise your school holiday program, but many can be daunting (and expensive). The key is to motivate your customers to take action, and one of the most effective ways to do that is through email.

A clear email structure boosts your program bookings from the outset, reduces program-related questions at reception and inspires more customers to take action sooner.

Swim schools that have followed this email structure have seen bookings increase by up to 400.

The graph below clearly indicates success; the red shows bookings from an earlier school holiday program that lacked email structure, while the blue was a later program that had a clear email strategy in place.

These stats were obtained through the 'booking statistics by course' report in Udio.

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The school holiday program checklist

We've developed a quick checklist to help you plan and implement your own email strategy. Here are our top recommendations to boost your program bookings:

• Set a booking release date to drive demand and create a sense of urgency
• Create your program and classes in Udio
• Send a pre-release email to let customers know exactly when programs will be available to book
• Prepare three emails reminding customers to book in
• Send you emails at set intervals as per your schedule

Print your free checklist →

Let's look at the checklist stages in more detail:

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Set booking release date

Create your program then choose a date (and time if you wish) to release it - a good benchmark is to release availability 3–6 weeks before the first class starts; that way, you can send one email per week/fortnight.

Release your program availability on a specified day to:

• Drive demand so customers take action
• Encourage parents to sign up to your customer portal where they can book holiday programs online

Generate a pre-release buzz with an email like below:

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Create your email templates

This is something you can do in advance and have ready to send on your set dates.

If you’re opting for a three-week timeframe, prepare three emails and plan to send one per week. Here are some templates that you can adapt:

Email 1 - Send on launch day (three weeks before first class)

Email 2 - Send a reminder two weeks before first class

Email 3 - Send a final reminder one week before first class

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Best practices when creating your email strategy

The great thing about this email and checklist combo is that you can repurpose it for every school holiday program moving forward. Here are some top email tips to consider including:

• Use your brand colours for links/bold text to strengthen your brand identity (and inspire familiarity among customers)
• Emojis are optional but when used sparingly are visually appealing to the reader; you can add them to the subject line and body of the email in Udio
• Emphasise that spaces are limited to create demand and prompt customers to book now
• Include a couple of links to your booking page (including 1-2 at the start) so that people have plenty of options as they scroll through your email
• If you have any testimonials from previous holiday programs, include a couple - if you don’t, consider asking customers after they’ve completed the program for feedback so you can include quotes in your email next time
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Send emails as per checklist schedule

Spacing your emails out 1–2 weeks apart maintains build-up by sending regular reminders to customers without bombarding them.

It’s good practice to send when your customers are most active - one of our swim school clients found that school pick-up times are generally best for achieving higher email open rates.

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Get your holiday program off to the best start

As swim school software providers, we understand the importance of finding a simple solution that yields results while taking as little time as possible.

Since COVID, there has been an increased demand for local activities which means marketing your holiday program to your entire audience base is crucial to creating FOMO (fear of missing out).

You don’t need to have a paid email platform to implement this strategy; they generally provide email stats and have advanced features (like email scheduling) but the basics can be just as easily completed via a school management system like Udio, which has inbuilt email functionality that integrates with your customer database. Get started by downloading the checklist which you can bookmark and use again for future school holiday programs.