How to turn Playtomic court bookers into academy students

A player who books twice a week has already proved the two things an academy needs: time in their week and genuine interest. They have also already chosen your club, so there is nothing to sell about location, courts, or parking.

What they lack is a low-risk way to try structured coaching. That makes the conversation much shorter than any advert to a stranger.

Player-level booking history lives in your booking platform, so start there. Playtomic Manager's own player and booking lists, or an export into a spreadsheet, will give you who booked how often over the last 60 to 90 days. Sort by number of bookings and work down the list.

Raw frequency is only the first filter. Three patterns say more about who will actually buy lessons:

• The same slot every week. A routine, not a one-off. These players can fit a class into the same habit.
• The same one or two partners. A stable pair often wants to improve together, which makes pair coaching an easy sell.
• Off-peak bookings. These players have flexible schedules, so they can take weekday lesson slots, which also helps with filling your quiet hours.

Your front desk and coaches already know many of these names. Write the list down anyway: a routine that lives in one person's head stops the moment they are on holiday.

Three segments are enough to start, and each one needs a different offer:

Use whatever level information you already hold: a self-reported level at sign-up, your coaches' assessment, or the level and assigned coach on the player's profile in your club management software. If you capture nothing today, add one question about level to your sign-up form. It costs a field and saves a lot of guessing later.

The barrier is rarely price. It is not knowing whether the class will be a good fit, too easy, too hard, or full of strangers.

Offers that remove that doubt:

• One discounted trial class with a small group cap, so the player gets real attention from the coach.
• A "bring your partner" trial, which suits the pairs you found in the list above.
• A short game assessment with a coach, framed as feedback on their game rather than a sales meeting.

Keep it to a single session and put an end date on it, for example valid for 14 days. An open-ended discount is what erodes your class prices, not a trial.

Start with permission. In the EU, marketing messages need the player's consent, and that duty sits with the club, not with your software. Collect an opt-in for club news when players sign up or book, and keep it separate from operational messages such as class reminders.

Then keep the outreach small and human:

• Work in weekly batches of a handful of players, not one blast to your whole base.
• Three messages at most: a friendly note that they are clearly a regular, the trial offer with one clear action, and a single short follow-up if there is no answer.
• One call to action per message. "Try one class on Tuesday at 19:00, reply YES and I'll book you in" beats "check out our academy".
• Stop after the second follow-up. Silence is an answer.

Respect the limits of the channel too. WhatsApp is where most clubs reach players, but it also has platform rules and rate limits for bulk sending, and players will forgive one relevant message far more readily than a weekly campaign.

Track three numbers a month, per segment:

1. Invited — how many players you contacted
2. Tried — how many attended the trial session
3. Paid — how many bought a package or joined a class

Two ratios come out of that: invited to tried tells you whether the offer is attractive, and tried to paid tells you whether the class and the coach deliver on it. If a coach converts trials far better than the others, that is worth knowing before you plan next season's timetable, and it belongs next to the rest of your revenue per court picture.

Keep the record in the same place as the classes and payments themselves. A funnel tracked in a separate spreadsheet gets abandoned by March.

In PadelEco, classes, packages, and payments are part of the core plan, while WhatsApp messaging and the Playtomic sync sit in Pro — see pricing for what each plan covers.

• Pitching lessons to everyone. It reads as spam and burns the goodwill of the players who would have converted.
• No single, concrete action. A specific class at a specific time converts; "we also do coaching" does not.
• No follow-up. Most yeses come on the second message.
• Running it once. New players cross your "regular" threshold every month, so put 10 minutes in the calendar for it, every month.
• No consent, no records. Messaging players who never opted in is both a legal problem and a fast way to lose them.