Hot yoga teachers and studio owners enjoy proverbial rock-star status in their burgeoning profession. Newbie yoga pros take us on their journey to brand themselves as the top of this downward-dog-eat-dog world. In April 2010 Ashley Lively, then 23, opened SyncStudio, a wellness studio offering yoga and cycling classes in Durham, North Carolina. “I knew if I wanted to attract people in my demographic to my studio then social media was something I’d have to do,” says Lively, a co-owner and vice president of operations at Sync.
To say she’s shaped social media into an attractively flexible asana is an understatement. “Although it’s difficult to quantify exactly the extent social media has helped increase our income, it has helped us create a tremendous buzz for the studio and gain recognition in our community,” say Lively.
As soon as she opened Sync, she immediately created a Facebook page, a blog linked to Sync’s website, and a Twitter account. Three months after the opening, she reached out to potential customers through Groupon, offering a five-class pass for $10. Because Groupon takes half of the ticket price, Lively made a $1 profit on each sale. “Our profits came from the customers we retained,” she says.
Typically her revenues are generated from a one-month unlimited class pass for $99, and class passes—the most popular offering is the 15-class-pass for $150. More than 500 people responded to the Groupon offer—about 70 percent have since showed up for classes, and Lively says the studio retained half of them as repeat clients.
Cultivating a relationship with Groupon, Lively earlier this year signed up again but this time she offered a 30-day unlimited pass for $30—a package that normally cost $99, with a half-hour private lesson thrown in for good measure. “I knew this package was selling well at the studio, and was hoping this deal would get new customers hooked,” she says. She had more than 300 takers. “Groupon is a tool that helps access a whole group of people without paying for print ads. However, once you get people to come through your door, it’s your job to create other promotions to keep them [coming back].”
That’s where Facebook comes in. Lively, for example, offered five free classes to her clients who, for a 30-day period changed their Facebook profile pictures to include a Sync logo. Over a hundred fifty people did so. Back at the studio she offered a “give and receive” promotion, wherein she offered clients free classes if they took a certain type or amount of other classes. And she gave a month of unlimited sessions, with an eye toward retaining customers, to the person who was first to the finish line in her multi-platform social media Valentine’s Day scavenger hunt—it cost her nothing to set it up—that included searches on Flickr and YouTube.
If you’re needing to inhale, exhale, just reading about Lively’s strategy, remember that she does have youth on her side. “I like to get my clients involved in all my social media portals,” she says. “Social media has played—and continues to play—a crucial role in the success of the studio.”
Despite Lively’s entrepreneurial savvy—she opened the studio with a joint investment of about $150,000 from four of her friends who she met in a cycling class; she expects to be profitable by early next year—she still showed up at the two-day Business of Yoga workshop presented as part of the Yoga Journal Conference in New York held last week. The business intensive part of the conference presented various yoga professionals who addressed subjects like opening a yoga studio and other legal, financial and marketing issues. Lively does sell yoga-mat bags from Thailand, it’s less than one percent of her business, and hopes to create a teacher-certification program for cycling. All her teachers and trainers, a total of about 20 full-time and part-time, are certified in their areas of specialty.
“Every yoga conference we’ve done in the past four years has featured either a one- or two-day business intensive,” says Elana Maggal, Yoga Journal’s conference director, noting that the earlier seminars were offered in response to yoga teachers wanting to know how to open studios. Now, she says, social media and how to green your yoga studio are popular topics. About 100 people attended the business intensive in New York.