Freemium Marketing: The Secret to Sky High Conversion Rates for New Jiu Jitsu Memberships

Sometimes giving your services away for free makes you more money.

This sounds absurd, and it gets more absurd, but I promise it will make sense. We’re going to do something that martial artists never do: borrow business ideas from other industries.

In his seminal 2006 paper on software business models, trailblazer Jarid Lukin reveals the freemium trail-to-member strategy:

Give your service away for free…acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium

priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to

your customer base.

For software, the freemium model can raise conversions into paid memberships by as high as 20%. For a local service-based business like jiu jitsu, I think it could easily be just as high. 

So, what if you could do the same thing with your jiu jitsu program?

Well, it turns out you can…with a little creative thinking: by delivering a martial arts course through your gym management system.

It requires leads to sign up to your martial arts management portal, and it also gets them familiar with you (or your lead instructor) and your brand before they ever step foot into the dojo. 

Both of these represent a form of investment in your school, biasing them toward signing up for in-person lessons.

A caveat:

This strategy depends on a combination of trial membership and content management features in an integrated martial arts management software. Without a combined member management and content member portal, covert onboarding won’t work.

In this article, I’ll be using Gymdesk’s features as an example of how to do this.

Step 1: Build an Awesome Mini-Course or Webinar…

…and put it in Gymdesk’s content management system.

Giving prospective new members a taste of what they’re missing at your jiu jitsu school starts with a valuable piece of content that shows off what martial arts can do for them and your knowledge.

For this, I think a low-lift production like a mini-course (like a small collection of instructionals you’d put on YouTube) or a webinar on a hot-button topic are the best content assets to make.

Some ideas for mini-courses include

• Top X self-defense techniques you need to know
• The fundamental movements of jiu jitsu
• X ways to defend against punches
• X ways to bully proof your child

Webinar ideas might include

• How to breathe your way through any difficult like a martial arts master
• Tips for situational awareness
• An enticing case study on how jiu jitsu changed/saved a student’s life
• How jiu jitsu helps you manage stress
• How to protect your children from predators

You can try a written course, but I highly recommend a video course, because it’s more engaging and it lets watchers feel like they are getting to you (or your main instructor). Building this like and trust factor is crucial to converting these users into jiu jitsu program members.

Pro tip: Build separate courses for adults and children. If there are significant differences between different adult and children’s programs, consider building custom-tailored courses for them, too.

How to Build a Course in Gymdesk

Everything you need to host this course for your leads to access is in Gymdesk’s member management system. Follow this step-by-step guide:

1. Go to the members screen from the left side navigation.
2. Go to the “Memberships” tab in the horizontal navigation.
3. Create a new trial membership only for the mini course. Ensure it costs $0.
4. Navigation to the “Content” tab in the horizontal menu. 
5. Click “Add new post” to create pages for each separate video or piece of content. Be sure the visibility is not limited to paying members.
   
6. Set the membership value of the post to the trial membership you created. 

I also recommend adding your mini course or gated webinar to its own category, so you can create another point of separation from other content in your Gymdesk content library.

Gymdesk comes complete with a built-in mobile app in addition to the web application. Users can easily access your content from both mediums–and once some of them become paying members, they can manage their payment, contact, and other data from the same portal.

Step 2: Promote Your Mini-Course or Webinar

There’s a combination of organic and paid strategies you can use to keep your lead pipeline full with this covert onboarding strategy.

The first is to make your landing page visible in your main navigation. Visitors to your site through SEO or referred by Google Maps, or any other review app, will see that upon landing on your web page. 

This makes it far more likely that they will opt-in to your Gymdesk instance and thus far more likely to become paying members.

But organic search can be slow, depending on where you live. That’s why I also recommend adding QR codes and url links to your flyers, brochures, and other promotional material. 

A fantastic strategy is to pair sign up to your mini course with a booth at a big event. Advertise it clearly. You are more likely to get interest if you are offering something to the crowd, and signing up to access your course is a great way to do it while also exploding your lead count.

Also, don’t forget local Facebook groups and city-specific subreddits as a place to share this.

Finally, paying for social ads (Meta, TikTok, YouTube, etc.) could be the more effective way to use this strategy. You don’t have to wait for people to come to you; you can get in front of them. If you can dial in the campaign to where you made more money than you spend, you’ve basically created a money printing machine.

Social ads require you to put some thought into creative, and some ad spend, but overall the fact that you’re selling a valuable information product for $0 should lead to lower ad spend.

If you haven’t connected the dots already: this is a fantastic way to build your jiu jitsu school’s newsletter. Even if not all of them convert from leads to students, many will stay on your email list and you can continue to remarket to them over time for free.

Step 3: Convert to Memberships

The biggest mistake martial arts owners make with their sales process is neglecting to ask for the sale directly. 

Speaking from experience with both my own school and working for others, they leave things vague to the prospect and leave it up to them to reach back. You don’t have to be aggressive, but this passive approach is costing you money and might explain why your marketing ROI is bad.

It’s important that you directly invite (ask) these leads to come in and try a class out at multiple points. Here are the quickest wins:

1. Add a “P.S.” after your signature on their welcome email, before they’ve even signed in to consume your content, mentioning that if they want in-person training, they can book a free trial class with you.
2. Advertise it in the videos that actually make up your mini course inside Gymdesk.
3. Make it the main call to action (CTA) on one or more followup emails. Our email automations take this off your plate.

People typically need to see a call to action more than once before they decide to take action. And, let’s be real, they often totally miss them, too. I know I do.

Conclusion

Giving a service away for free can counterintuitively increase revenue, a strategy borrowed from the software industry’s freemium model.

The idea is to give away a martial arts course—like a mini-course or webinar—through a gym management system like Gymdesk to efficiently acquire leads and build familiarity with the brand.

This covert onboarding requires leads to sign up for a free trial membership specifically for the content, familiarizing them both with the school’s portal and main instructor before they ever step foot in the dojo.

The steps are:

1. Build a valuable mini-course or webinar (video is recommended) and place it in the management system’s content portal.
2. Promote the course using both organic methods (website navigation, local groups) and paid strategies (social media ads, event booths) to keep the lead pipeline full.
3. Convert leads to paying members by directly asking for the sale, using multiple calls-to-action (CTAs) in welcome emails, within the course content, and in follow-up emails or texts.

This process essentially builds a valuable newsletter of warm leads, biased toward signing up for paid in-person lessons.