The Studio CEO: Business Coaching For Yoga & Pilates Teachers & Studio Owners

The Myth of the Right Intro Offer

• Jackie Murphy

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If you’ve ever said, “I just need to find the right intro offer,” this episode is for you. Today, we'll break down one of the most common myths in the yoga and Pilates industry: that there’s a perfect intro offer or price point that will magically fill your classes. Spoiler: there isn’t.

Instead, I'll show you what actually determines your success: whether your intro offer matches your main offer, how you’re converting through connection, and if you’ve tested with enough volume to know what’s really working.

You’ll walk away with a clear framework to stop guessing, stop copying competitors, and start building a system that converts real humans — not just numbers on a spreadsheet.

Key Takeaways

  1. There’s no “best” intro offer — success comes from strategy, not luck.
  2. Your intro offer should teach the same behavior as your main offer.
  3. Conversion happens through connection, not constant tinkering.

If you haven't yet, check out the free workshop using the link below, and learn about the 3 marketing mistakes I see yoga and Pilates teachers and studio owners making all too often (and how you can fix them!).

Work with Jackie Murphy


SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the studio CO. The only podcast that I am not teachers in the studio owners. You are ready. You are home. I think you'll industry. I have seen the first hand won't be built. Join me as we dive into insight and real-world advice that will help me throw your company. Build a diving team and create a business that serves you as much as you serve your students. It's time to embrace your inner CEO and make more money without working more. This is just the beginning. And today we're talking about intro offers. This is a question that I would say I get a lot, and I know it can be a big pain point for so many different business owners. So we're going to dive into really like how you can choose the quote unquote right intro offer. Before we dive in though, I want to let you know that we have a three marketing mistakes workshop that you can watch today. And these three marketing mistakes are specifically for yoga and Pilates business owners who you're probably doing some sort of marketing already. Like you have the awareness that marketing is important to grow your business, but you're not seeing your marketing really increase the number of new students coming into your business or increase your visibility. And so I dive into the three mistakes that are most common. And there's a bonus fourth mistake. However, as you go through, I find that most people are either making all three mistakes or at least one of them. So you can click the link in the show notes to get that workshop and watch that three marketing mistakes workshop right now so that you're not wasting your time when it comes to marketing. Because we're going to talk about intro offers, but if you don't know how to market well, it's not going to matter. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about the big problem with intro offers. I hear almost every single week, Jackie. I just need to find the right intro offer. What's the right intro offer for my studio? What's working right now, Jackie? What price should my intro offer be? Should my intro offer be two weeks or three classes or a challenge? And underneath all of those questions is this belief. It's this hope, really, that there is a perfect intro offer out there. One that can just unlock everything, one that's going to fill your classes and grow your membership and finally make marketing feel less hard. So you may have tried like two weeks for$29 and it didn't work. Or you tried three classes for 49 and that didn't work. Or you've tried a 21-day challenge and that didn't work. And so you're stuck in a constant cycle of tweaking, second guessing, and constantly looking around what other studios are doing and wondering what do they know that I don't know. Here's the truth, and I really need you to hear this. There is no one right intro offer. There is no best one offer that's working right now across the board. There is not one magic price that, if you choose this price for your intro offer, it will increase the number of new students that you're seeing. There's no structure in terms of how you're delivering your intro offer that works for everyone. And the sooner that you stop looking for it, the sooner you can focus on what actually matters, which is building a system around your intro offer that converts people who have said yes. But before we go there, let's just talk about all the different intro offer options that people are currently using right now. A little menu, a little list of what you could be doing. Number one, the two-week unlimited intro offer. This is probably the most talked about, most copied offer in the industry. I have multiple clients who are incredibly successful with this format right now. And I will say that this is more yoga studio Matt Pilates friendly with the unlimited flavor of it. There is also the one week unlimited, which is like a paid trial week, really common when it comes to online memberships. There is a three-class pack intro offer with hopefully a two to four week deadline to use those three classes. There's a five-class pack intro offer, an eight-class pack intro offer. People are doing first class free as their intro offer. And I want to be clear that that is lead generation. That is not a true paid intro offer. It also used to be really, really common, like 15 years ago. I feel like everywhere you could go take a first class free. And we got smart as an industry that that one is usually hard to convert people on, but there's a way that you can do it well. You could do a 30-day challenge as an intro offer. You could do a 21-day challenge, a seven-day shot challenge, a 14-day challenge. Um, there are intro offers that are BOGO, really bring a friend and get a free class, right? Bring a friend to the studio. There's a paid discounted intro class. So like your drop-in rate, but discounted. That's a common intro offer. A paid trial month, essentially, like your first month of membership is at a discounted rate, but it automatically puts you into membership. That one is an intro offer, but it's also membership sales at the same time. And then there are other ones that I'm not even listing, but you can see from that list, there's so many different types of intro offers that of course you would feel overwhelmed and confused about which one do I pick, which one is best for my business and my studio. And so what I love is there has been a study recently that showed the BFS asked hundreds of studio owners which is your most effective intro offer. And they asked city studios and suburban studios, and about half, 48% and 49%, said their most effective intro offer was other. It was not even on the list. Not a two weeks unlimited, not a challenge, not a three-class pack, just other. So that tells you the variety that over half the studios out there, both in the city and the suburbs, are using something different than what's on our normal list of intro offers. And when you look at the rest of the studios that they studied, oh, 30% are using that two-week trial, 14% are using the paid trial week, 5% are using the first class free, and everything else is in the single digits. Essentially, what's important about this is there's no clear winner, there's no dominant offer that everyone agrees works. The other thing that comes with this data and all of the different types of intro offers is that there's no clear price point. So 40% of city studios said that their intro offers are$51 to$100, where suburban studios it's around$21 to$50. And it genuinely depends. Are you a yoga studio? Are you a Pilates studio? Are you a reformer studio? Are you semi-private? Are you a big group studio? Are you an online business? Like your price point and the intro offer that you choose has to uniquely fit your business. And the real main point of this is there is no one right offer. There's not one right offer that's working best right now. There's not one price point that's working best right now. And that is good news because it means that you can succeed and generate more new students without having to copy the business down the street or what you see online or change your price point completely. It means that your intro offer, quote unquote working or not, is actually a lot more in your control than you would think. So if offer and price aren't the deciding factors, like how do you decide what intro offer to do? And what I want to suggest are three different things. Number one, I want you to make sure that your intro offer matches your main offer. And by match, I mean does it teach people the behavior you want them to adopt as paid clients? So this is a mistake that I see more than any other. It's something that you can just not think of. So it can be a little bit invisible until someone points it out. Let me give you an example. If your main offer, what I call your MVO inside of the Studio CEO program, is membership, meaning that your people are taking two to three times a week and they're paying monthly, but your intro offer is five class pack over eight weeks. I want you to think about that. You are not teaching people to show up two to three times a week. You're teaching them to come whenever they feel like it over the course of two months. And so their behavior doesn't match the behavior of your paid clients. So I want you to think about what you are selling in your intro offer and what you're selling as your main offer, and do they match? Does the intro offer behavior mirror the behavior of your paid clients? The same thing is true. Let's say that your main offer is class packs and that's what you sell the most in your studio. Then your intro offer can't be like a free week unlimited because it doesn't match the behavior. It should mirror it. So something that teaches in the rhythm that they're going to have when they're a paid client. So the same thing is true if you're starting to use a challenge as an intro offer. If you're gonna run a 30-day, a 21, a 14-day challenge, you're teaching structure, commitment, accountability, daily check-ins. You might even have a community group, but then your main offer one may not even be decided, and people are dropping in with no commitment, no community, you're essentially giving them something and then in the enter offer and then not being able to sell it on the back end. So the challenge is gonna convert really well if your main offer also has structure, if it's an ongoing program, if it's maybe a cohort model, if your studio has a really great community and accountability baked in. But if your main offer is just drop in and come whenever, the challenge is gonna be the wrong fit for the intro offer. This is gonna make conversion so much easier because you're not asking people to make a huge behavioral shift. You're essentially at the end of the intro offer just asking them to keep doing what they've already been doing, to keep doing what they've already loved doing so far. Okay, decision factor number two is that conversion comes through connection. So can you convert the people who take your intro offer? And here's the hard truth: most business owners, one, don't track their conversion rate, don't know their conversion rate, and their conversion rate is lower than what it should be. So they feel like people just aren't joining, new students are coming in, but they're going out the door and they're like wondering what to do. They must change the intro offer to fix this conversion problem. And I'll tell you that it's probably not the intro offer, it is probably the conversion process after they have purchased the intro offer. And I want to just offer you that we have found that if someone attends classes three to five times during their intro offer and you have a personal conversation with them, they're hearing about your offer multiple times, the conversion rate should be around 30%, if not higher. If it's not that, you may just have a conversion problem. And that doesn't happen passively. It's not gonna change if you change your intro offer. A conversion problem is only solved through connection, and connection requires conversation. So you really want to make sure that you are getting to know by name your new students, that you are getting curious about what's bringing them in, why they're there. You want to have plenty of opportunity to check in with them, and you really want to be inviting them to the main offer pretty quickly right after they buy. Now, there's a way to do that that isn't salesy, sleazy, or spammy. I want you to do it really based in connection. And I want you to think your intro offer is not a one-time transaction. Like your intro offer is the start of a relationship. And are you fostering that relationship as they move through their intro offer? They will convert because they feel seen, because they liked being a part of the community, because they feel like they are known at your business, that they're cared about, that you know what they need. And so really focus on the conversion process after the intro offer, not just the intro offer itself. And then number three, you have to stick with it. You have to test with volume. I would recommend that you get 100 people through your intro offer, 100 people purchasing before you make any sort of decision. Because let's say that you decide to try a two-week$29 trial and 15 people buy it, three people become members. That's a 20% conversion rate, which is pretty good. But because the sample size is so small, you may panic. Only three people join. This isn't working. I need to change the offer. And so you switch your intro offer. And you're not sure what intro offer is going to work. You're not able to give any one intro offer enough time or enough volume to actually know how to increase the conversion rate to get more people to say yes. So pick an intro offer that matches your main offer, have a clear conversion process after, and then stick with it until you get a hundred people through it. Track how many people buy it, how many people show up, how many people convert to membership. And then you'll have the data to know is the offer the problem? Is the price the problem? Is the conversion process the problem? Or is something else entirely the problem? The delivery. If you get a hundred people through your intro offer and only 10 convert, now you have a real signal. Hey, this is not working. Something is really off. But if you change your offer every two weeks with 10 to 15 people each time, you're not going to learn anything. You're just going to be guessing. And I want you to stop guessing, stop copying what you see another studio down the road doing and start testing with discipline. Now, this also applies to online business. I know I've said studio many times, but most online businesses have some sort of intro offer. Online memberships have them, um, one-on-one businesses have them. Your intro offer may just be a consultation, it may be a free thing, but the same thing is true. Does your intro offer match the behavior of your main offer? Do you have a conversion process that's clear, that's creating connection and building the relationship? And have you stuck with it until a hundred people go through it to then really look at the data? So here's what I want you to take away from this episode. There is no right intro offer. You can stop stalking the other businesses' website to see what they're doing. What you have just learned is that there are studios succeeding with a multitude of intro offers, completely different offers at different price points. And so it's not that there's one that you have to have in order to work. What matters most is did your intro offer match your main offer? Are you converting members through connection? Are you testing with enough volume? So here's your homework. Stop tinkering with your intro offer. Pick one, make sure the behavior matches, commit to getting 100 people through it in the next 30 to 60 days, ideally, and focus all of your energy on the conversations, the connection, and the clarity because that is what converts, not the offer, the relationship you build around it. All right, my friends, if you want to have some awareness of how to market your intro offer, what to do, what not to do, and how to get those 100 people through it, make sure you click the link in the show notes to get the three marketing mistakes workshop for yoga and Pilates business owners. And I will be teaching you what you need to know to start getting those 100 people into your intro offer. Talk to you in the next episode. Bye, y'all.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, it's a big time to join the group next week.