With online classes, you can serve students all across the country! This is great because it widens your reach and boosts your ability to connect with exactly the families who are a perfect fit for your offerings. It also means that you should be sensitive to the fact that some students might be in a different state, in a different timezone, with totally different weather.
Some important things to consider:
- You're in control of the start-time. When you create your online location you can set your local timezone. This timezone will be displayed on your widget, on the register page, and in the confirmation email.
- The Sawyer Marketplace shows your online class in the customer's local time! When parents are browsing the marketplace, they'll see everything in their own timezone. That makes it easy for them to quickly identify which of your classes fit their schedule (especially last minute!) Once the parent clicks on your class and arrives at the register page, your local timezone is shown. You may want to include a note in the activity description and/or in the confirmation email that reminds parents to double-check the timezone.
- Use the Class Link field in the scheduled-activity setup to send reminder emails to parents. As long as you have the Class Link field filled out, a "Starting Soon" email with a link to join your online class will be sent to all students 30-minutes before the start time of each class day.
- You may want to offer a flexible makeup policy if you can. Students miss class. There's no way around it. The question is what you're willing to do to retain them as customers when it does.