Turn Summer Leads Into a Back-to-School Flood: The Retargeting and Reactivation Playbook

One of the biggest reasons summer is so valuable is not the enrollments you get in July — it is the thousand leads you can generate that you then go after for back-to-school. Every hand that goes up at a fair, a movie theater, a summer camp, or a Facebook ad is a lead you can pull back in when school starts. But only if you keep the list and actually work it. Here is the whole playbook.

Summer’s real payoff is a list of 1,000 leads

Every year I tell members the same thing: the point of all the summer live events is not just the intros you enroll right now. It is that you can generate a thousand leads over the summer that you then triangulate on for back-to-school. When the schools go back in — here that is the middle of August — I can hit that entire list with direct mail, retargeting, email, text messaging, and live outbound calls, and get a flood of intros right as school starts. So keep every lead: the ones who enrolled, the ones who showed but did not enroll, the ones who made an appointment and did not show, and even the ones who never made an appointment at all.

Keep the list somewhere you can actually use it

Keep that list of leads in a CRM of some sort — even an Excel spreadsheet is better than nothing. The whole value is being able to go back and advertise to those people again. The lazy default is to dump their email into a newsletter list and send one email a week and call it a day. Do not be lazy about this list. It is the single most valuable asset your summer produces.

Feed the list into Meta and Google as a custom audience

Here is the move most owners never make. Take that list and use it to build a custom audience. Feed it into Meta — whether you run your own Facebook ads, use a good service, or use one of the new AI tools — and Meta will go find those exact people and show them your ads on Facebook and Instagram. Do the same thing on Google; Google calls it a retargeting list. Upload it, and now you can target that specific list of summer leads on Google Ads and on Facebook and Instagram ads. A lot of the other platforms can do this as well.

Drip on the list across every channel

With the list in hand, you triangulate. Show them ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Drip on them by email — and for a lead list, I would rather send daily, even twice a day, than once a week. Higher frequency wins; even if they are not opening every one, they see that you are there and communicating. Drip on them by text at a lower frequency than email. Drop ringless voicemail, which goes straight to their voicemail without ever ringing the phone. And keep mailing them, because direct mail has none of the spam-folder, unknown-number problems the digital channels do.

Why so much? Because seeing you over and over is the entire point. I hear members say, “Why do all these events, I keep seeing the same people?” That is exactly what you want. It is like they saw your TV commercial 92 times. I want them to have seen me on Facebook, seen me on Google, seen the school sign when they drove by, seen the bandit signs and the A-frames, gotten the emails — and then see me at the booth and think, “oh my god, I have been seeing you everywhere.” That is the moment they finally take the action they had been putting off.

Then put people on the phones at the peak

The drip keeps them warm; the phones convert them. Two weeks before school goes back in session, I put somebody on the phone calling the whole list with a back-to-school offer: “We thought it might be a great time for Joey to get started in a new activity, and we’re offering two free weeks here as school is starting.” It works like a charm. The same play works for New Year’s — you take all the leads you developed in the fall, maybe the whole year, and go at them heavy in January, because that is when a lot of people are thinking about starting a new activity. Peak seasons are when you cash in the list you built during the off-peak.

Do not forget reactivations

One more goldmine hides in all of this. When Krista Wells works her local farmers market on Mercer Island — she is doing about $1.2 million a year, and live events are her biggest feeder — she gets reactivations too. Students who had been gone six, nine, twelve months stop by the booth, talk to her, and come back. So the list is not just cold prospects. It is former members and old prospects who have now seen you everywhere and are finally ready to act. For more on that, see the reactivation goldmine sitting in your database.

Your summer is not measured by July’s enrollments. It is measured by the size and quality of the list you build — and by how relentlessly you work it into a back-to-school flood. Collect every lead at your live-event booths, keep it in a CRM, feed it into Meta and Google, drip on it across every channel, and put people on the phones two weeks before school starts. Do that, and August, September, and October become the best months you have ever had.

About the Author

Stephen Oliver, MBA, 10th Degree Black Belt, founder of Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, is one of the leading coaches in the martial arts industry for developing Million Dollar Martial Arts Schools and helping martial arts schools, BJJ academies, MMA gyms, and combat-sports businesses grow through stronger marketing, enrollment, retention, pricing, and leadership systems.

Free Resources to Grow Your School

Ready to add your next 100 students? Here is how I can help you, starting today:

• Get a FREE copy of Six Simple Steps to Add 100 Students to Your School at FillYourSchool.com.
• Get a FREE copy of Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.
• Want a personal game plan? Call our office at 1-720-256-0208 and ask for Bob Dunne to set up a FREE school evaluation with Stephen Oliver.