In an interview with Tim Ferris, marketer, Seth Godin says that 97% clients drop out from his online courses. And under good conditions, 80% drop out. Yet there's are three core reasons why clients drop out and unless you tackle those issues, it's impossible to stop the dropout rate from spiralling. At Psychotactics, our dropout rate is a measly 10%. Which means that 90% of the clients finish the course. How is that possible? How come there's such a massive difference? This episode shows you what you can do to achieve far superior goals than many, if not most trainers online. ------------------------------------ In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The power of energy management Part 2: Why the Safe Zone is important Part 3: Why you need group filtration and how to design it ------------------------------------ The Dropout Factor 97% of client drop out in most online courses. 80% of clients drop out from my courses. – Seth Godin The responsibility of the learning depends on the teacher. – Michel Thomas When you think about dropouts, you almost always think about the student. Yet, the responsibility lies with the teacher. It’s this seismic shift that rattles most trainers because in their mind it’s clear that they’ve done the best they could. Despite their best efforts, students still drop out. So why does this dropout occur? And what could you do as a teacher to avoid this dropout? There are three core areas which cause a dropout 1) Energy management 2) Safe zone (or the lack of it) 3) Group filtration and design Dropout Factor 1: Let’s start with energy management Back when I was about 12, my uncle gave me a Nintendo video game called Snoopy Tennis. The game was pretty simple. Snoopy, the dog, had to bat off the tennis balls being hit at him by Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown had this languid, easy-going serve that was easy to handle. And then Lucy would show up and hit the tennis balls at high speed. If you survived the Lucy barrage, she’d go away, and it would be back to the nice and easy Charlie Brown serves. So what’s Snoopy Tennis got to do with energy management? Energy management involves designing your training module. Does it just have modules that jostle each other for prominence or is it designed like Snoopy Tennis? A training module that has Snoopy Tennis in mind will have modules that are easy, slightly difficult and then screamingly tough. But you can’t sustain the screamingly tough part for too long. You have to go back to easy once again. If you don’t, you get dropouts When the going gets too hard for too long, your clients are going to have an enormous amount of energy depletion. Handling Lucy in that video game is fine for a while, but if the intensity isn’t reduced, the client gets tired. Tiredness, not your course, is the biggest reason for dropouts. Once the fuel needle goes consistently down to zero, dropouts are guaranteed. To avoid this situation from ever occurring, you’ve got to sit down and design your course. But design is often not enough because you’ve also got to consider flexibility in your agenda Take for example the Article Writing Course that’s in progress right now. The entire course has been designed to be like a Snoopy Tennis game. From Week 1 to Week 4 there’s a gentle progression. Week 5 is a bit of a jolt. After spending the first four weeks building up topics, outlining and working on the start of their article, the writers now have to turn out a chunky part of the complete article. Almost immediately the “truancy” rate spikes The writers are frozen because the jump is so great. And yet there are times when you can’t help but bring on Lucy into the game. In the past, I’d make sure Lucy stayed on for a long time, and it would cause an enormous amount of exhaustion. Exhaustion is one thing, but I noticed that if I reduced the intensity shortly after, the work would get better. So once the intensity is turned on, you keep it on, but then you get Charlie back into the mix. Which means th