Text Request Talks
4 Tutoring Center Growth Tips with Mathnasium’s Libby Lossing
Business texting can help boost your tutoring center—but you need the right tactics in place.
We’ll show you four quick tips on how to use text messaging to grow your retention, referrals, reviews, and reputation.
This article takes insights from our Text Request Talks podcast with Libby Lossing and further distills them into advice specific to texting. Lossing is a franchise owner of 14 Mathnasium locations, plus a winner of the franchise’s 2023 “Best Overall Marketing” and “Best Assessment Improvement'' awards.
The following tips expand on how to meet the same goals Lossing does with text messaging.
Watch the full interview on YouTube.
1. Mass text open positions to previous students.
Hiring good teachers is one of the most important things you can do in this business. In Lossing's case, she hires a lot of previous students.
Why?
It's a good culture fit, the job candidates already know the program, and it's a great proof of concept for new students that the person who's now teaching them was once in their very shoes.
But you may not have open positions all the time, so you need a way to get information to past students about new opportunities. Here’s where text messaging can come in.
Send mass texts to previous students letting them know you’re hiring. Mass texts work like BCC email, so any responses become one-on-one conversations that potential hires can then use to learn more about the role.
This also helps your tutoring center’s retention, since you know you’re potentially hiring someone who already values and appreciates your business.
2. Share SMS promotions about your referral system.
A referral program can become its own revenue stream, once enough existing customers start bringing leads to you. That’s why one of Lossing’s biggest goals has been to consistently advertise their referral program to her customers, including how it can be lucrative for them.
Lossing knows that her customers will only participate if the rewards are actually big enough for them. So she offers gift cards and makes it a point to advertise them as part of her referral program.
You can advertise your own referral program by texting links to your referral portal, or images of the rewards themselves. Customers could even text your tutoring center a keyword, like REFERRAL, to learn about your referral program and the rewards you offer.
Lossing tends to see her referral-based customers convert twice as much as her regular customers. Fostering your own referral program could lead to the same results.
3. Grow your online reviews by texting review links.
Being intentional about asking for online reviews is the next step in driving more foot-traffic to your tutoring center.
Lossing knows that the more positive reviews her franchise locations have, the higher they’ll rank in potential customers’ organic Google searches—plus the more likely they are to beat out competitors with little or no reviews.
Her goal is to ensure that asking for online reviews remains an ongoing part of her tutoring center’s existing workflow—and our Reviews feature helps her do just that by:
Connecting her different locations’ Google Business pages to Text Request
Inserting custom reviews links into her texts asking parents for feedback
Giving her one place to monitor and respond to oncoming reviews
Incorporating review requests into your tutors’ workflow is a must if you’re going to draw in new customers, and text messaging is one of the fastest ways to get your requests seen.
4. Delegate communication tasks using text templates.
New tasks always have a way of creeping into your to-do list. But even if you’re a jack-of-all-trades, you’re going to see the most success when you delegate these tasks accordingly.
In Lossing’s case, she prioritizes dividing and conquering the jobs she doesn’t necessarily have to do, so her team isn’t bogged down by one person juggling twenty different roles.
How can texting help your tutoring center do the same thing?
Text Request’s dashboard makes it easy to jump in and see how your teammates are communicating with parents, so you can give them pointers on how to improve. We even offer a templates feature, so your common communications stay consistent and quick.
That way your entire team is able to text—but with your ongoing supervision and support—so communications don’t get bogged down because only one person is doing everything. Efficiency like this contributes to your center’s overall reputation of being a reliable business that gets back to customers quickly.
How Else Can Text Messaging Help Your Center Grow?
The above are just a few quick tips—but we have an entire in-depth tutor text messaging playbook for those who want to build their SMS strategies from the ground up.
Our business texting software has boosted hundreds of tutoring centers’ growth, and we’re ready to help yours next!
