The business case for online class registration can be difficult to make if you don't know how many of your customers register for your classes because of it.
It is conventional wisdom that, with a good implementation, about 80% of customers will use it, but that begs the question of how many would have just registered by mail, walk-in or phone anyway. This is not an easy number to understand, but I wanted to offer a few statistics that may help...
The chart above is an average for a large number of websites, all equipped with online registration, for 6 months covering both high and low enrollment seasons.
While 80% of enrollments may come from the website, this chart takes a different view, and says first that about 5% of visitors to the website will end up enrolling there.
Over half of these come to the website from links on other websites (Referrals), and for these visitors the rate of conversion (enrollment) is 6%.
About a third of online registrations come from customers who already know the website address and type or paste it in. Again about 6% of such visitors register online.
Finally, a little less that 20% of online enrollment is from paid or unpaid (organic) search. About 4% of all these visitors convert.
A conservative, maybe even pessimistic, view of these numbers would be to assume that the only truly NEW customers are those from search. I think the "Direct" customers probably knew of you already and are probably not new business, but the referrals, in this sample, do include many new customers.
So what's the takeaway? I think it is clear that a studio management solution needs to include internet marketing to drive business growth: