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What a trial class is actually for
Almost every school in this trade offers a first class free. Very few can tell you how many they gave last month, how many of those children are still coming, and which of the two numbers moved when they changed something.
The trial is not there to be generous. It is there because a parent cannot judge a school from a website and a child cannot judge one from a description. Forty-five minutes on the mat answers both questions at once, and it is the only thing that does.
That makes it the hinge of the whole business, and it is worth treating like one.
Two numbers, not one
Schools that measure this at all usually measure one thing: how many children joined. That is the end of the funnel, and when it drops you cannot tell why.
There are two numbers and they fail for different reasons. Enquiries that become a booked trial fails because of the website, the reply time, or a schedule nobody can find. Trials that become members fails because of the class, the instructor, or what happens in the ten minutes after it ends.
One is a marketing problem and the other is a teaching problem. Added together they are neither, and you end up changing the wrong thing.
“They came and didn't join” is not an outcome
This is the mistake worth avoiding. A child who came to the trial and has not signed up is not a lost cause — they are a family that is deciding. So is the one who booked and did not turn up, who very often had a sick child rather than second thoughts.
If your records treat both as closed, nobody calls them, and the decision gets made by silence. Give the family a window — a week or two — in which they are still open, and put the list of open ones somewhere you look on a Monday.
Measure the window from the class, not the booking
A subtlety that costs you if you get it wrong: if a parent books in August for a class in September, a two-week window starting at the booking has expired before the child walked in.
Count from the day of the class. It is the only version that describes what you actually want to know, which is how long a family has been deciding since they saw you teach.
What to do with the number
Nothing clever. Look at it monthly, next to what you changed. If you moved the trial to Saturday morning and the first number went up, that is the schedule. If the second number went up after you started calling on the Monday after, that is the call.
The value is not in the number itself but in having it attached to the thing you did, which is impossible if you count it once a quarter from memory.
What this means for your website
A trial booked on the site opens a record on its own, with a window measured from the day of the class. You get one screen with the children still deciding, their parent's phone number in the row, and how long is left.
The conversion figure counts only families that have actually decided — the ones still inside the window are neither a win nor a loss, because counting them as losses makes every good week look bad.