Episode 358: Why Free and Discounted Intro Offers Are Filling Your Studio With the Wrong People

Is Your Intro Offer Attracting the Wrong Clients?

Is your intro offer bringing you great long-term clients—or just people looking for a deal?

In this episode of the Female emPOWERed Podcast, Christa Gurka breaks down the most common intro offers used by Pilates studios, boutique fitness businesses, PT practices, and wellness businesses. She shares the pros and cons of free trials, deeply discounted offers, paid trials, and higher-value bundled offers—and what each can mean for conversion and retention.

Because the goal isn't simply to get more people through the door. It's to attract the right people who show up, convert, and stay.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why free offers can generate leads without generating great clients
• When free or deeply discounted offers can make sense
• Why a big jump from your intro price to your regular price can hurt conversions
• How “bridge pricing” can make moving into a membership or package easier
• Why Christa prefers bundled, value-driven intro offers
• How to add value without significantly increasing your costs
• Why you should track the entire journey from lead to long-term client
• How follow-up and your sales process affect conversion

More Leads Aren't Always Better

A free or extremely inexpensive offer removes friction, but it can also attract people who are primarily motivated by price. That becomes a problem when you try to move them into a $200, $300, or $400 regular offer.

Instead, Christa recommends considering an intro price that's closer to your regular pricing while increasing the perceived value through bundling.

For example, moving someone from 4 classes for $99 to a $129 monthly membership is a much easier transition than moving them from a $19 or $39 trial.

Most importantly, don't stop measuring at leads. Look at the entire funnel:

Lead → Booking → Show-Up → Conversion → Retention

The best intro offer isn't necessarily the one that generates the most leads. It's the one that consistently brings in the right clients for your business.

SEO Keywords

Pilates studio intro offer, fitness studio intro offer, Pilates studio marketing, boutique fitness marketing, PT practice marketing, client conversion, client retention, fitness studio pricing, Pilates pricing, Christa Gurka, Female emPOWERed Podcast

Transcript

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2:02

Hey there, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Female Empowered podcast. I'm your host, Christa Gurka, and we're talking today about intro offers, and I know that I've actually spoken about them a lot lately. I did an episode about why you don't necessarily need more clients, you need better ones, and we talked a little bit about intro offers there. but because excuse me, there is a new Pilates studio or fitness brand opening basically, like, on every corner in America these days every two minutes, there's a lot of people going into business for the first time, and what I really wanna do is help people get the best start they possibly can when they start their business, and give them a little... give you all another way of thinking through things that maybe you haven't thought about before. And so what I'm gonna talk about today is specifically all the different intro offers that we commonly see out in the market. I did receive a bunch of DMs after one of the last episodes I did, asking, "Well, this is my intro offer. What do you think about it?" And so I just wanted to compile a, you know, put a few of them together and talk to you about pros and cons of each and what actually happens down the line with these specific intro offers. All right? So what we're gonna do is we're gonna break down a variety, I think I have three of them, and go from there. All right? So excuse me. I'm gonna take a little sip of water. All right. Let's go ahead and get into it. So when I first started, Pilates on the Beach was my very first studio, and then Pilates in the Grove, and then multiple locations. So when I first started, I think free class was, like, the gold standard. That's what everyone did. Free class this, free class that. and so of course, I just followed what everyone else did, and did a first, a free trial. then when I got a little bit, a, just, just a little bit smarter, I was like, "Well, why don't we have people put a little skin in the game?" So we're like, "If you buy your first class, we'll give you your second class for free." So it was basically like a BOGO, buy one get one. All right? Over the years, we tested out a variety of different intro offers once I got even a little bit smarter about running business and looking at numbers, at, and, and KPIs and metrics, and the kind of people that we were attracting with all of these different intro offers. And then also really looked at- What happens down the funnel, all right? So what happens at the end? Are you converting these people? Are they showing up for that intro? Are they staying long? What are the people... What intro offer did they come in of, of... Let me slow down, Christa. Of your best clients, which intro offer did they come through? Did they come to your clinic or studio through a very specific offer and you're like, "These are the kind of people we want to continue to attract, so let's see which offer, attracted them to the studio." All right? So let's talk about the free class or a, a free week, which kind of sometimes happens in, like, yoga or maybe even things like F45 or Orange Theory or things of that nature. So in, in our sess- in our industry, you might see, like, a free class, or at a PT clinic you might see a free discovery session. Okay, so let's talk about free. Let's just talk about free, any type of free trial. So what happens is the free trial really does remove every ounce of friction for the client. They don't have to pay anything, right? They get it for free. They get to try it out. There's, there's really no risk to them for them to say yes, and that's why people initially think, "Oh, free," like, "Who's gonna balk at free? Nobody will say no to free, so this is the way to get all the people I want into the studio." That's really the entire appeal of a free intro offer. There's no risk to them, so your thought is more and more and more people are gonna say yes to trying you, and you're like, "Once people get in, I can sell them. They're great." What it also does, though, is it doesn't create enough friction for them to commit. So think about it. It's free. It's a rainy day. It's pouring outside, or if you're in an area where it's cold, they get up, it's, like, 12 degrees outside, and they're like, "Eh, there's nothing for me to lose. I'm not gonna go." Okay? And then there is something in A mindset, I would say, about free, right? There's a something in the mindset of people that it's like, if it's free, it's less valuable, all right? And I like to use the, the term or the phrase, like, the transformation is in the transaction. So if there's no transaction taking place, there's no money changing hands, these people have no skin in the game, so to speak. They don't lose anything by not showing up. They're like, "Okay, maybe I just lost the opportunity to do a free class, but I can always go and buy one," right? So while this offer may, I'm not even saying it definitely will, but while it may generate the highest volume of leads of most of the intro offers, it also generates the lowest quality leads. I just went through a, an exercise with one of the women in our Elevate to Exit program. She owns two studios. She's gonna hopefully open three and four in 2027. And she was doing a free intro offer, and she was running ads to that intro offer. And what we saw was when we went through the whole funnel, when we were able to see, okay, how much in ad spend did you have to pay to get all of these leads to sign up for a class, and then how many of those people s- that signed up showed up, and then how many of those people that showed up converted to a member, all right? And what we found when we went through this entire exercise was that it was costing her about $5,000 to get one lead because it looked like she had a ton of leads, right? It looked like there were a ton of leads that came in because there was, one, a lot of clicks on the ad So when you have a lot of clicks on the ad, people are like, "Oh, look, it's getting a lot of clicks," but that doesn't mean people actually converted. Okay? So then we wa- we took it one more step down the funnel. Okay, of all these clicks, how many people actually gave you their name and email? So let's just say if there was, like, 500 clicks on the ad, only 100 gave, gave her their email. Okay. Now, giving you their email doesn't mean that they bought either. So now of those 100 that gave her the email, they... she had probably 50 of them buy the n- the free class or sign, s- actually sign up and book the class on the schedule. All right? So it went from 500 to 50 that booked the class. Now, of those 50 that booked the class, she had 10 people that actually showed up, and of those 10 people that showed up, one converted Okay? So a- again, it's you have to look at this whole thing as an infrastructure, not just the top. You really have to look at who comes out at the bottom and becomes a client. And so wh- when we talk about leads, we wanna talk about qualified leads. Qualified leads, right? People that are your exact demographic and who will buy from you. So when you, when your offer is free, you just attract people that are attracted to free things. Okay? And so those people that are looking for free usually are not the people that are gonna turn and convert into a 200, 300, even $400 package. Okay? So more often than not, they turn into no-shows, right? The show up rate for free trials is significantly lower than the show up rates for paid trials. All right? So while these tr- free trials can work, I would say they're almost very specific at a certain stage of business. Now, there is something to be said for having a lot more energy in the room and having your instructors have more people to teach. So for example, if you're saying, "I just need people in the door. I just want it to create a buzz. I just want more people," like a full class or even 80% full does a lot more for the class energy and the instructor and the rest of the people than two people. So if your idea is like, "Listen, I'm willing to take a loss right now just 'cause I want the energy in the studio to be better," or, "I need more discovery calls 'cause I need my cl- clinician starting to work," that's okay. That's your strategy for a short period of time. But I would try not to rely on free intro offers or free discovery sessions moving forward. All right? So, hi Boo Boo. I, if you're watching me on Instagram, or on YouTube, my dog Duncan just jumped into my lap. Do you wanna come up? Because it's raining outside and he hates the rain. Come on up. Come on. Come on, but he's getting kinda too big to sit in my chair with me. So if you wanna see Duncan, go over to, YouTube and about the 10-minute mark you'll see him jump into my lap. So sorry for that little distraction. Poor guy, he hates the rain and the thunder. So okay. So that's my feeling as a free, free offer. We, I did it for a long time and it really did not, it did not work for me. And, and what I ha- what I ended up doing, my s- the studio was full, but it was just full of people that were not the right type of clients. Okay? So, now let's look at a paid offer. All right? So let's talk about- a low ticket intro offer. So the deep discount intro offer. So something in the, in the phrase of like 19 to $35 maybe for a studio, a class-based setting, or maybe like 49 to $79 if you're an appointment-based person. Okay? So this is what I like to call the low ticket or the deep discount offers, right? And so what I wanna sh- show you about these is I don't wanna just have a blanket statement of like, "Never, ever do this," but I want to show you what actually happens, okay? Next to free, these are generally the best way to fill a schedule. People actually honestly value sometimes more a low ticket offer because, again, like I said, there's sometimes a thought of if something's free, it's not really worth it. Like, how good could it be if it's free? So sometimes a low offer of like $9 or $19, and I think you do... I think F45 has one of these that's like $5 for five days or something like that. So they're just like, "Oh, it's low ticket." They're- they have a little skin in the game, but is $5 really skin in the game? You can't even buy a smoothie for $5 these days, right? But, so they might be great for like a new launch, a new location, a slow, slow, slow season. A week of like, "We're tr- testing out a new class, and you can try it out for $19." Or sometimes this is a great thing that we would do in a really slow season when we had maybe two people in a class and we were like, "Oh," we would do flash sales, like $19 to sign up for tomorrow's 12 o'clock. So at the last minute, we would try to get some people in, okay? That is the pro of this deep discount offer. The con is that, once again, you are attracting people that, who resonate with a $19 offer, or if you're an appointment base, like a 49 or $99 offer. But if your regular price is double or triple that, it will be really hard to convert them, okay? Not because they don't like your service, not because they don't like your studio, not because they don't want to come. Because they're literally the people that either can't afford it, or that's not who they are. They don't see themselves as people that are paying, you know, $250 a PT session or two, $300 a month for a, you know, Pilates membership. So oftentimes these people, what resonates with them is because they're shopping price. What's valuable to them is the price, not necessarily the fit or the service that they're getting. All right? So that's why, again, low ticket, deep discount offers could be p- good for a season or a reason. I like rhyming. but I wouldn't build your business off of deep discount offers, because they really just attract bargain hunters. Right? They're the people that are gonna wait and be like, "When are we getting like a $19 promo again?" Or, you know, "When is your next Black Friday sale?" Or, "What are you doing a Black Friday sale? Why aren't we doing any discounts again?" Okay? So while it can make sense for a short defined window, like weeks or a month, when you're have like a specific capacity problem to fill, I don't lo- I don't love it for a long-term intro offer 'cause once again, I just think you're attracting the wrong type of people that you want to fill your studio with, right? You want to fill your studios and your clinics with people that will not balk at a $200 price point That's just the nature of the industry we're in. You know, it's a higher price point service because the value you all pr- are providing are amazing. It is great, and the value is there. All right? So we all know this. I've said this over and over again in the podcast. The cost to acquire a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more than retaining one. So if you're getting... If you're paying money, whether it be ads or your time for organic outreach, and you're getting these people that are coming in, and they're not staying, you are constantly having to fill your funnel over and over and over again, okay? So if your entire strategy is a rock bottom intro offer, which is purely designed to maximize lead volume, you are spending your very expensive marketing dollars on the least loyal customers. And then you become frustrated because you have... the conversion is really low, and the retention is really low. And once again, it's harder and more expensive to keep attracting new clients in the door. So it's just something to consider. If you have a low ball deep discount offer, it's just something to consider. All right? The intro offers I like the best are intro offers or... And, and it's not just that I like them. I have... We have studied this, and we have seen that they work the best for long-term retention and conversions. All right? So we want to try to get intro offers. We like a bundled intro offer where you can really show that the value, you can stack the value on it, so you can show that while they're paying $79, the value might be... the value of it might be $200, okay? And you're getting them closer to what the actual price point is. So let's talk some examples. Okay? So think $99 for an intro offer that is for group classes. The next tier up, right? So four group classes, $99 is an intro offer. They have to... This is another big thing that I'm really... You ha- your intro offers have to be time-sensitive. So 14 days, 10 days, 14 days, 21 days max, 'cause you wanna teach these people to be coming in regularly. So let's say you start with a $99 intro offer, and then the next thing is maybe you do a four class a month membership that's 129. Okay? So a $29 difference, a $30 difference, is a much easier to sell than going from $39 to $129, right? Making it $100 difference or $90 difference, right? The person that wants to do $39 for a couple classes is a very different person that wants to do $139 for a couple classes, right? Or you can say, and then it's also getting people that really wanna try more than one class. 'Cause sometimes when you try just one class, you don't really get the benefit of it, right? Especially when you're talking about modalities like Pilates and yoga and things of that nature. So let's again say $99 gets you four classes, and then what you wanna say the value of that is whatever your drop-in rate is. So if your drop-in rate is $45 for a, a class, then y- that value is $180. Plus maybe your intro offer is a free pair of grip socks, plus your intro offer is a quick tutorial on the... which you do anyways. But you can bundle that up, and we even bundled a... We had, like, a, a how-to video that was already pre-recorded that was, like, the fundamentals of Pilates, and it talked about rolling and segmental mobility and bridging, and we just lumped that in, and we said that that was a $29 value. So our val- it was $99, but you get X, X, X, X, X, which really ended up being, like, a $229 value Right? So you're showing them, wow, you're getting like $129 off. So that's amazing. Okay? And they're getting valuable stuff that doesn't really cost us anything. So a pair of grip socks, you know, what? Wholesale costs you $5 or so. Okay? But the value of it is $20. The video you've already created, so right? That doesn't cost you anything, and your, the value of it is $29. The little tutorial you do anyways, but you could say the value of it is $29. All right? And so now you wanna take that same exact thing, and if you're an appointment-based business, a physical therapy practice, or maybe you only do private, you're a personal training gym, or a chiropractor, or a massage therapist, you can bundle it the same way. So you can say your f- trial, okay, trial, rather than... Or your initial evaluation or your trial assessment, and you can value it. So let's say that you normally charge $200 a session, right? And you're gonna say, "Okay, you get this for $99- And a personalized home exercise program, because maybe you already have vid- a video library. So that already alone is a $200 value, plus the home exercise individual program, which is another $100 value, so that's $300. And hopefully at $99, you're at least, as an owner, not losing money, 'cause hopefully you're not paying your instructors or therapists or clinicians or coaches $99, right? You're hopefully paying them anywhere from 40 to 50 to 60, maybe 70 at the highest. So even at $99, yes, it's not a great profit margin, but the hope is that your clinicians or your instructors are so good that you're going to, they're gonna convert them after that. So that's part of that process, right? Yes, we have a lower ticket offer, but the job of that clinician or instructor is really to convert that client into more visits, whether that be to buy a package or whether that b- be to buy a follow-up PT session. And so you ha- you want to make sure that you have the entire strategy built out for what happens on that trial offer date, whether it's their first class, whether it's their first one-on-one session, whether, whether it's their first PT session. All right? What happens with personal touch points as well as what happens with, automated touch points, automated texts, automated emails, okay? What are the things that you're doing to make sure that you're really driving that person more and more into converting into a long-term membership or packages, okay? When you have something that is priced closer to the real value and the real price of the offer, conversion from intro or trial offer to full membership really goes up dramatically What might go down is the lead volume. So you might have, instead of having 500 clicks on your ad, you might have 200 clicks on your ad, but they're way more qualified. And so let's say if you have, let's say you have 500 clicks on your ad, and we t- we said we only got one actual paying customer from that. So what is that? That is less... What is... So 55 would be 1%, so it's less than 1%. Okay? And now you have a h- a deeper, a higher priced intro offer, or trial offer I like to call them, right? Then maybe you have, maybe you go, you got less volume, so you got 200 people to click, but you had 20 people convert. That's a much higher conversion rate. So rather than a 1% conversion rate where you have to play the volume game, you have a 10% conversion rate, which you get to play the value game. Fewer people are gonna say yes to a $99 offer or $150 offer than to a $19 offer, but what you're doing is you are trading volume for quality and value What this requires of you as the owner is for you to actually know your numbers, for you to actually know the type of customer you're going after, the type of buyer, what they care about, what their goals are, what their transformation should be. You really need to know your package price, your capacity, your break-even price point. What is an easy to get... an easy threshold from which you can get a yes from the customers? And you also must have a strong strategic, repeatable, sustainable follow-up series. Okay? So while you might be getting fewer people in when you change that trial offer, you will see that your conversion from trial to member goes up significantly higher. Our industry shows that new, free or low intro offers convert at 20 to 25%, where paid, not deep, not low intro, like, like not deep discounted, but a higher paid over $70 convert closer to a 50 to 80% conversion rate from trial to long-term membership. All right? And also improves your retention rate, which means you have more people, more of the right people staying in your studio or clinic, and you're not having to spend huge marketing dollars to continue to drive poor quality leads through the door All right? So what about people that have no intro offer at all Right? This would be like maybe PT practices don't have an intro offer, right? If you're a chiropractor, maybe you don't have an intro offer. If you're a massage therapist, maybe you don't have an intro offer. You lead with maybe a paid evaluation or an assessment. The posit- the pros of this is it immediately sets you, sets the tone for you as a, an expert-level service rather than a discounted f- class. The con might be that it's a little harder to sell on your marketing side. You real- it's really hard to sell cold people from an ad to, like, a $250 offer. So what you can consider is how can you bundle things to make it seem, to make it, to increase the value. So let's say you do a, let's say you're a running, PT, you're in the running niche, right? So you're an orthopedic practice and you specialize in runners. You could say you're, in your initial evaluation, you also do a running, a gait assessment, and that is valued at, I don't know, $125. You do a postural assessment, which by the way, there's all sorts of programs out there now, software, that you can do this easily on an iPad, that that value is a $99 value. You run them through the SFMA assessment or a, functional movement screen. That is valued at X amount of dollars. You get a personalized, individualized home ex- digital copy of a home exercise program. That's valued at this. So you can package this into, it's, yes, it's $199 for your initial assessment, but the value is closer to $500, right? And so people just really want to see the value of what they're getting. A lot of times it's not necessarily a price point, it's more a Again, like a, a package, a, a, a value add that they're getting that they ne- you know, it's not rather than just get a PT session. These are all things that you might be doing anyways, but listing it out to people is actually really, really good, and it allows them to see what they're actually going to be walking away from. They don't resonate with like, oh, manual therapy and kinesio taping. They don't know what that is, and they don't know what it will do for them. But they do know that doing a running gait analysis is probably something they can get information from, and a postural analysis, because those give them objective measurements So while I don't wanna say that there is a right perfect intro offer, the only right one is the one that's actually working for you and bringing you, bringing in the right type of clients. I would try to encourage you to stay away from free and deep discounts, unless you're just doing that for a very brief, short period of time and for very, very specific reasons, right? Once you get your pricing and really understand your numbers, bridge pricing really works when you're like, "Okay, we're gonna give you four classes for $99," and then the next tier up is you get four classes for 129. So you're only paying really $29 more, which is really great for people. They're like, "This was amazing." Okay? So what I'd love for you to do is think about, rethink your intro offers. Do your intro offers have next steps, follow-ups, whether they be personal touch points, and they should be a combination of personal touch points and automated ones? What is your sales process? There should be something that's very specific, and everyone on your team that's responsible for that should be able to say, "Well, this is my, my role in the sales process." You need to build it out. You need to articulate it so that you can follow the process and figure out where it broke, where the kink in the chain was, and evaluate it, right? It's not just about copying what the person next door to you did or down the street. All right? It's really looking at yours and seeing how is this benefiting me? Is it working or is it not working? As always, I always like to hear what you guys think. You know, if you want to DM me over on Instagram what your current intro offer is, and I'll take a look and let you know what I think or, you know, I'll probably ask you some questions about do you know your metrics? Do you know the back end? Do you know how many people are coming in? Do you know what your conversion o- conversion rate is? 'Cause those are some things you should know. But feel free to DM me over on Instagram. And that's all I got for you today, so I hope you enjoyed it. And until next time, my friends, bye for now.