“We’ll Get Back to You” Is the Most Expensive Sentence on Your Website
Never let a martial arts school website, landing page or lead form end with “Thanks, we’ll get back to you.” Every step should hand the prospect the next action: schedule the first lesson, then call us. Make it easy for her to call you. Get a real person from your staff on the phone with her within 30 seconds of any form submission. A form that ends on “we’ll be in touch” leaves the next move up to you, and that’s where leads die.
The dumbest page on the internet
If anyone, whether your web company, a Facebook agency or your own staff, builds a landing page or opt-in form that ends on “Thank you, we’ll get back to you shortly” or “we’ll respond within 24 hours,” tell them it’s unacceptable. If it happens again, replace them.
That sounds harsh, but it isn’t a small thing. It’s the most expensive sentence on your website. A parent who just raised her hand is at the peak of her interest, and that page tells her to stop and wait. Every minute you make her wait, she cools off, gets distracted, or fills out another school’s form.
It happens with good agencies too. I’ve seen agencies we’ve used and liked build exactly this page. Check yours tonight.
Your website is an info call without the human
When Mrs. Jones calls and asks how much lessons are, a trained staff member doesn’t read the price list. She asks whether the lessons are for Mrs. Jones or a child, the child’s name and age, whether he’s done anything like this before, and how she heard about the school. Then she makes the offer, two free weeks of lessons and a free uniform, with no cost or obligation, and gives two appointment times to choose from.
Your website has to do the same job. Enough information to make her interested, then the next step. Anything that doesn’t move her smoothly down that path is a distraction. You want a greased chute.
The greased chute, step by step
| Step | What the prospect sees | The only goal |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Homepage | Three or so big buttons: kids and family classes, adult classes, fitness | Choose a program |
| 2. Program page | Benefits for that program only, plus the offer in plain language | Go to the form |
| 3. Form | Name, email, phone, ideally mailing address | Capture the lead |
| 4. Next page | “Pick a time for your child’s first free lesson” | Book the appointment |
| 5. Confirmation page | “You’re booked. Call us now with any questions,” with a tap-to-call number | Get her to call you |
If you sell a paid introductory program, the order is the same: pay for the intro, schedule the time, then call us. At no point does the next action belong to you instead of her.
Sort visitors on the homepage
If you teach kids and families, adults and fitness, don’t make a mother wade through all three. Ask which one she wants. Once she chooses, show her only what applies to that program. A walk-in who says “I’d like to find out about lessons” doesn’t get the black-belt weapons schedule, last month’s tournament photos and your certificates. Neither should a website visitor.
Speak her language, not yours
“Schedule a free intro class” sounds clear to you. To Mrs. Jones with her seven-year-old, it raises a question: what’s an intro class? Never use your internal vocabulary with a prospect. Say what she gets: two free weeks, a free uniform, a chance to meet the instructors, see the school and watch her son try it, with no cost or obligation.
Don’t bury her in legal fine print before the first lesson
On the same coaching call, a school owner’s site popped up a “free trial” box packed with policy and legal text before the visitor had even booked. That’s the reverse of what you want. The site first fails to give enough reason to come in, and then smothers the parent in terms. Save waivers and agreements for the school, where your staff can walk her through them.
Send ad traffic to a landing page
For Facebook, Instagram and Google ads, use a dedicated landing page rather than your main website. It’s much easier to keep one ad, one page, one offer and one next step in a straight line.
Why a phone call beats a form
Two principles sit behind the chute.
- Get a live person from your staff talking to the prospect as early as possible. At every step, right up to the moment she hands over a credit card, the odds she shows up drop sharply if she never talks to a real person from your school. The earlier she builds rapport with you, the better your conversion.
- A call she makes beats a call you make. If she calls you, the conversation is far stronger than if your staff has to chase her down. That’s why every confirmation page should ask her to call.
Plenty of agencies now promise to take a lead all the way to your front door on their own, often with AI scheduling and messaging. A few do it well. Most don’t. Whatever you use, you’ll convert more when a person from your school builds the relationship early.
How fast should a martial arts school respond to a web lead?
Within 30 seconds. You’ll often hear “within five minutes.” I think that’s too generous. When a form comes in, an outbound call should start within 30 seconds, backed by an automatic text and voicemail if she doesn’t pick up.
The research has been clear for years. In a 2011 Harvard Business Review study of online sales leads, firms that contacted a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited even one hour longer. The average response time was 42 hours, and 23 percent of companies never responded at all. Earlier research by James Oldroyd with InsideSales.com and MIT found that the odds of reaching a lead fell 100-fold when the first call came at 30 minutes instead of 5.
A school that calls in 30 seconds is competing with schools that call tomorrow, if they call at all.
The seven jobs your website has to do
Think of your website as a program director working the night shift. It has more first conversations with families than anyone on your staff, and in most schools it has never been trained. Hold it to the same seven moves you’d expect from a live program director, in this order.
- Say who the school is for, and who it isn’t. A family’s first question is “are these my people?”, not “how much?” Describe the family you want so precisely they recognize themselves. Saying you’re not a drop-in gym or the cheapest option costs you the wrong appointments, not students.
- Give something before you ask for contact details. A real parents’ guide, a short video on how your curriculum builds focus, or a belt-progression map. It should be worth having even if the family never enrolls.
- Publish your standards. Instructor certification, progress reviews every 90 days, capped beginner classes, how many black belts you’ve promoted. Standards hand a parent a ruler, and amateur schools can’t follow you there.
- Make the proof checkable. A large volume of public reviews, parents who’ve agreed to take calls from prospective families, an open invitation to watch any class, and short parent videos with transcripts. A hundred and fifty reviews at 4.7 persuade more than eleven at 5.0.
- Show the path, not a price grid. Lay out the first 30 days, the first belt, your trial enrollment and the black belt journey. A number without the value built around it only invites comparison. Win that in the enrollment conversation.
- Offer exactly one next step. Seven ways to contact you is the same as none. For nearly every school, that step is booking a specific first lesson at a specific time, not “request information.”
- Keep delivering until she walks in. See the gap between booking and the first lesson below.
Hire someone to build the site, but never to decide what it says. A developer doesn’t know that money is the last question a family asks or that the next step should be a booked lesson. You own the message and the offer; the vendor owns the pixels.
Fix the chute before you buy more traffic
When enrollments are soft, most owners buy more ads. If the site leaks, more traffic just means more people experiencing the same failure. Fix the page first.
Master one ad channel before you add a second
If you have $500 a month for paid leads, don’t split it across Facebook, Google, Instagram and a directory. Put it all behind one platform until you know four numbers cold: cost per lead, cost per appointment, show rate and cost per enrollment. Only then add a second channel.
Mastering a channel also means running split tests continuously. On a visual platform, the image carries most of an ad’s pulling power. I once ran two identical ads that differed only in the model’s hair color, and one clearly outperformed the other. Let the test answer the question instead of anyone’s opinion. You can also check whether competitors test: Facebook’s Ad Library shows every ad a page is running.
One persona, one story, one offer
Every converting funnel has a hook that stops the scroll, a story the prospect sees herself in, and a low-friction offer. It breaks when one ad and one page try to speak to adult MMA fighters, seven-year-old girls and women who want to lose weight at once. Build a separate hook, story and offer for each family you want, and keep the image, copy and offer consistent all the way to the booking page. One school owner I coached was chasing moms of young kids with a homepage photo of one child kicking another in the groin. Nothing on that page matched the parent she wanted.
Speed and mobile
For most schools, 90 percent or more of paid traffic arrives on a phone. Build for the phone first and test your own site the way a parent would: on your phone, on an average connection, tapping from the ad to a booked lesson. A big-name host means nothing if you’re on its cheapest server tier. A page that never loads never shows up in your numbers; the lead just disappears.
The gap between booking and the first lesson
The website’s job doesn’t end when she books. Two to five days of silence is where no-shows are made. Fill the gap:
- An immediate text confirmation with a real staff member’s name.
- A call from that person within minutes.
- A short welcome video from the instructor she’ll meet.
- A text the day before with the time, address, what to wear and where to park.
- A printed welcome letter or guide in the mail if there’s time. Almost nobody does it, which is why it gets noticed.
Automation cuts both ways. A chat bot that asks the right first question and hands off quickly to a person can lift conversions. One installed out of the box and never tested can intercept visitors who would have called and quietly lower your response rate. Email open rates have fallen sharply, while texts get read almost immediately, so use email as a backup, not your main follow-up. Test each tool the way you test your ads.
What fixing your website is worth
Say your site gets 400 relevant visitors a month and 1.5 percent book an appointment. That’s six appointments. At a 60 percent show rate and a 65 percent enrollment rate, you add about two students a month. At $375 a month on a 12-month program, that’s roughly $9,000 in first-year tuition.
Get that booking rate to 4 percent and the same traffic produces 16 appointments and about six new students a month, roughly $27,000 in first-year tuition for each month’s enrollments. No extra ad spend.
Now compare cost with value. A new student typically costs $150 to $300 in advertising and staff time. At $375 a month, one enrollment is worth $4,500 in the first year alone. Keep monthly dropout under 2 percent and the average student stays about four years, so that same $300 can be attached to $15,000 to $18,000 of tuition. That’s why a $3 reminder text that prevents a no-show is the best return in your business. Run your own numbers with the tuition and lifetime value calculator.
Where the leaks turned out to be
One member ran a Taekwondo school in a small, low-income Midwest market and came into coaching grossing about $30,000 a month. With one mastered channel, a consistent funnel and fast follow-up feeding a real sales process, he grew to $75,000 to $80,000 a month and collected over $200,000 in a single December. His market didn’t change; his funnel did.
Another owner had run his school for fifty years and taught well, but nobody had looked at his marketing and sales pipeline with fresh eyes in years. Fixing the leaks added well over $200,000 in net profit without changing his teaching, location or market.
And one school getting 90 leads a month still ran a waiting list, because nobody knew how fast to call back, how to book an appointment or how to run a real intro. Every marketing step worked. The handoff didn’t.
Paid or organic traffic?
Both, eventually. Paid ads work fast and stop the day you stop paying. Search rankings and an engaged social following take longer to build but keep producing without a daily spend. Start with paid if you need enrollments now, and build organic alongside it so a month without ads doesn’t take you to zero.
The 10-minute website audit
- Submit your own website form from your phone. What page appears next? If it says “we’ll get back to you,” fix it tonight.
- Time how long it takes for your staff to call you back.
- Count the clicks from your homepage to a booked lesson. More than three is too many.
- Read your offer out loud. Would a parent who has never taken a class know what every word means?
- Check your ad landing pages for any form that doesn’t lead to a booking page and a call-us page.
- Look for legal text or policies that appear before the first lesson is booked.
- Count the next steps a visitor could take. If there’s more than one, cut it to a booked lesson.
- Run the walk-through test: have a staff member narrate the site to an imaginary parent, top to bottom, on a phone. Wherever they stumble or say “ignore that,” a job is missing.
Watch the coaching sessions
These two recorded sessions go deeper on the same system.
For what happens after the call, see the complete intro-to-enrollment pipeline. For building the traffic that feeds these pages, start with Six Simple Steps to Add 100 Students and the martial arts school marketing hub.
The Most Valuable Hour You Will Spend This Year
Find out exactly why your school stopped growing. Book a free one-hour diagnosis on Zoom with our coaching team. We’ll look at your numbers, your marketing and your enrollment process, and show you what to fix first.
Frequently asked questions
What should happen after someone fills out a martial arts school’s website form?
The very next page should let them schedule their first lesson, and the page after that should ask them to call the school. Never end on “we’ll get back to you.”
How quickly should a martial arts school call a new lead?
Within 30 seconds, with an automatic text and voicemail as backup. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that firms contacting leads within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify them.
What information should a martial arts lead form collect?
Name, email address and phone number at minimum, and ideally a mailing address so you can follow up by mail as well as by phone, text and email.
Should martial arts school ads go to the homepage or a landing page?
To a dedicated landing page with one offer and one next step. The main website should sort visitors by program, such as kids, adults and fitness, and show each group only what applies to them.
Should I put waivers and policies on my trial class booking form?
No. Legal text before the first lesson is booked puts parents off. Handle waivers and agreements in person at the school.
Should I put my tuition prices on my martial arts school website?
No. Money is the last question in a family’s decision, and a price without the value around it invites comparison shopping. Publish the student journey and your standards, and discuss tuition in the enrollment conference.
How many pages does a martial arts school website need?
Fewer than most owners think: a home page that sorts visitors and offers one next step, a page showing the student journey, a standards and proof page, a schedule, and a booking page. Five pages in the right order beat thirty pages of style history and instructor bios.
How many marketing channels should a martial arts school run at once?
Start with one. Master it until you know your cost per lead, cost per appointment, show rate and cost per enrollment, then add a second. Splitting a small budget across several platforms usually performs worse than the same money in one well-tested channel.
How much should a martial arts school spend on online marketing?
Enough to fully fund one channel, then scale on return. A new student typically costs $150 to $300 to acquire, and at $375 a month is worth $4,500 in the first year alone, so the question is usually why you’d spend less, not whether you can afford more.
Should I hire an agency to run my school’s website?
Hire help to build the site and drive traffic, but keep control of what the site says and the one action it asks visitors to take. No vendor knows your enrollment process and offer as well as you do.
About the Author
Grand Master Stephen Oliver, MBA, is a 10th Degree Black Belt and the Founder and CEO of Mile High Karate and Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, one of the martial arts industry’s leading coaching and consulting organizations for professional martial arts school owners, BJJ academies, and MMA gyms. A martial arts school owner since 1975 and business coach since 1985, Oliver has spent more than five decades building, operating, and advising successful martial arts schools. He also serves as CEO and Chairman of NAPMA (the National Association of Professional Martial Artists) and Publisher of Martial Arts Professional magazine. A Georgetown University cum laude graduate, he earned his Executive MBA through the Executive Program at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. He was promoted to 10th Degree Black Belt in April 2026 and inducted into the Official Taekwondo Hall of Fame in August 2026. Learn more at MartialArtsWealth.com and StephenCOliver.com.
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