YogaTrail Messenger
Communicating with your yogis can be challenging... but it's also crucial to your business because it gets people coming to class, signing up for events, and booking privates, among other things.
A Messaging System for Yoga Professionals
The YogaTrail Messenger provides yoga teachers and studios a reliable and straight-forward way to chat with their students and clients. Messages reach your students in their message center, on their phone (if they have the YogaTrail app installed), or via email.
Use the Messenger to send out announcements and updates, survey your students, inspire them, and generally keep people in the loop with what's happening on your end.
YogaTrail is different from other messaging apps: it's designed specifically for yoga professionals to communicate with their yogis. So for example, when a yogi replies to an announcement you've sent out, it's in a 1:1 chat — so all the other recipients don't have to be annoyed by having to "listen in" to various group conversations going on.
The Messenger can augment the notifications that you can trigger automatically on YogaTrail, like when you cancel a class, or when you're subbing for someone, etc. So when you need to say something "special" in your own voice, simply send out a message to all your students (from your dashboard).
YogaTrail vs. Social Media
Most yoga teachers and studios maintain some kind of presence on social media. Sadly, for many of them, that's the extent of their connection to their clients.
YogaTrail's core mission is to provide you with the right tools to communicate with your clients and keep your community in the loop with things. Here are some of the wrong tools:
Facebook: many yoga providers still use Facebook as their main platform for reaching and "engaging" clients, without realizing that nowadays, the posts from a typical Facebook page are seen only by about 3% of the people who "liked" the page. That's one out of 30 people — effectively nobody, unless you pay to promote your posts. Yes, it's true what they say: "everyone is on Facebook". But that doesn't mean everyone actually sees what you are posting. They don't.
Facebook Messenger: the Facebook messenger app won't let you cram more than 150 people into a group chat, and of course chatting with lots of people all at once can be very annoying (for everyone). The same goes for Whatsapp (where the limit is 256 people) and WeChat (limit: 100). On YogaTrail, even if you've got thousands of students and followers, you can send them all a message without any problem.
Instagram: it's communicating with pictures and hashtags only. "Yoga Selfies" are very popular, and pictures of healthy food, too. But how does posting this really serve you? Most people don’t read the description text of Instagram posts, so if you want to actually say something and have it be noticed, you’ll need to craft an image that has your message embedded... fun? Maybe. Best way to communicate with your yogis? Maybe not.
Twitter: very few of your students will have a Twitter account, but even when you do have some followers there: Twitter so oversaturated that it is unlikely that anyone will see your tweets unless you @mention them directly. And what profound insights can be delivered to your students using 140 characters or less?
#Wasteoftime
Building a following and engaging your community — you hear these buzzwords all the time. Sounds great, but what does it really mean? And how does one do that without wasting lots of time posting cute but irrelevant pictures, inspirational quotes, vegan recipes, or links to other people's content?
It's actually very simple: just talk to your yogis directly, and let them know what's going on with you or happening at your studio. YogaTrail Messenger works great for that!
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