Online tutoring allows you to work with clients far and wide from the comfort of your own home with a flexible schedule and great pay. In many ways, it's the ideal career. However, the amount of success you experience as a tutor comes down to how well you manage your current and prospective clients.
If you are new to being an online tutor, there are a few tips and tricks to attract and keep new clients. This article discusses how to find your ideal tutoring clients, how to communicate with and manage your clients effectively, as well as the best CRM software for tutors today.
You already have the skills to be a great tutor. Now, you need to learn how to grow and manage your clientele.
Finding Tutoring Clients
Your first step to building a thriving online tutoring business is dialing in your marketing plan. To effectively find tutoring clients, prospects have to know what you do. So, you'll need to implement a marketing strategy highlighting your tutoring services to match you with the right audience.
An effective marketing strategy will do the following:
- Establish yourself as a professional
- Display your testimonials, experience, and tutoring certifications to build trust
- Explain your services and subject matter expertise
- Bring value to potential clients through lead magnets
- Build a strong email list to interact with prospects and clients
As an online business, having a tutoring website and social media presence is essential. It allows you to cast a wider net beyond your immediate geographical area and provides a first point of contact. Many people rely on Google to direct them to their service professionals, and a Google-friendly website is the only way to attract them.
Also, an online presence is the best way to help prospective clients learn more about you, even if they hear about you through word-of-mouth, because they can confirm what they have heard with visual evidence.
Approach to Bringing in New Clients
You must approach and engage with potential clients, even with an outstanding website and social media. Lead magnets such as free guides and checklists are a fantastic way to engage with potential clients and demonstrate your value. It will also help you build an email list and passively maintain contact through newsletter subscriptions.
When you attract prospective clients to your online platforms, your portfolio and testimonials will further demonstrate your value. Straightforward contact methods and timely responses to inquiries, even if it is an automated response, will help with your conversion rate.
A referral program is one way to build your client list and thank your loyal clients who refer you to friends and family. Whether you offer a free tutoring session or a percentage off, it pays to have your current clients do some word-of-mouth advertising for you.
Local Networking and Referrals
Building relationships with local schools and student communities is an effective grassroots tactic to advertise your tutoring services. It puts you in direct contact with your target audience, who have your face in mind when they refer to your website or social media later.
Some events and local advertising options you should consider include:
- Back-to-school fairs
- College fairs
- PTO meetings and events
- Buy ad space in school sports programs
- Sponsor an academic club
You can also connect with local educators and parents through LinkedIn. This platform works great for referrals, and your LinkedIn profile acts as a digital portfolio and resume.
Managing Tutoring Clients
Once you have established an effective way to advertise and find new clients, you need to learn how to manage the clients you tutor.
How you handle tutoring sessions will determine if clients want to refer you and leave five-star reviews and testimonials. Automating as many administrative tasks as possible will help you invest more time into planning lessons and delivering instruction to students.
As with any business, there will come times when you have to deal with a challenging situation, and it is essential to keep client satisfaction high. You need strong communication, organization, and client relationships to best navigate these waters.
Communication with Clients
Effective communication is the best way to build a solid rapport with your clients. When you communicate with your clients professionally, you have a higher customer satisfaction rate, and you are more able to stay in front of any issues as they arise.
Tutors with strong communication skills demonstrate their professionalism by:
- Handling feedback and complaints professionally
- Maintaining a professional attitude and communication manner with clients
- Resolving conflicts and handling complaints promptly
- Understanding and catering to the individual learning styles of clients
Organizing Sessions
Of all the tasks you manage as an online tutor, how you run your sessions is the most important. Planning and scheduling tutoring sessions efficiently can be challenging when dealing with cancelations and schedule changes. Still, it is vital to work through these obstacles as a tutor in a professional manner to maintain an overall level of customer satisfaction.
If maintaining an organized schedule is overwhelming, finding help with tutoring software is totally fine. This could help keep things streamlined and efficient so you can focus on lesson planning and building relationships. Tutoring software can help you schedule sessions, take payments, and email reminders so you don't have to think twice about them.
Maintaining Client Relationships
Tutors must walk a fine line when maintaining professional yet caring relationships with their clients, and there is an art to balancing professionalism and empathy in tutoring clients that isn't dealt with in other professions.
To avoid miscommunication and confusion, being transparent and honest in client communications is necessary. Provide regular updates for your clients with automated messages and individual follow-ups as needed. When something does fall through, quickly address it and take any difficult situation as a teaching moment to help you in the future.
Implementing a system for anonymous customer feedback will help you gain unbiased insight into how your service has worked for those you have tutored. You can use this information to improve as an online tutor and provide better service.
Sending notes to your clients periodically to thank them for their trust and support is a simple way to show appreciation and build rapport.
CRM Software for Tutors
Teaching is a full-time commitment. If you want a cost-effective way to offset some of your administrative burden, CRM software programs offer many tools and features to help you streamline your tutoring business. Here are five apps that make managing your clients more straightforward so you can focus on being a stellar tutor.
Practice is an all-in-one CRM software program for businesses-of-one to larger companies with multiple teams. It will help you with everything from scheduling sessions and collecting payments to communicating with students and families via the client portal. Teams can easily manage tasks, collaborate, and assign individual workflows. It is a one-stop shop for customer and employee management.
You can get started with a free trial, and plans start at just $28 per month.
Varsity Tutor is a learning platform that connects tutors with tutees. Product features include Student-tutor matching, scheduling calendar, lesson plans, automated emails, and invoicing. While this platform is free to join and does most of the busy work for you, you must apply to be a tutor with Varsity Tutor, and the pay rate is determined for you.
Honeybook is an all-in-one platform where you have everything you need to manage your tutoring clients and run your business. Online scheduling, invoicing, and automation help increase your overall productivity.
This platform offers a free trial, and their most basic monthly plan starts at $8.
Created specifically for tutoring businesses, TutorCrucher offers business analytics, scheduling software, and website integration to help you grow your tutoring business.
They offer a 14-day free trial, and monthly plans start at $30.
Like Varsity Tutor, Wyzant does the work of finding clients for you. After applying to be a tutor with them, you set up a free profile and start getting matches sent to you. You choose your hourly rate and have access to everything you need to manage your business. Some features tutors find helpful are scheduling software, online payments, lesson feedback, and student ratings. The caveat is that you must pay them a 25% commission to participate on the platform.
Conclusion
Online tutoring is a great way to positively impact the learning experiences of students in your community and beyond. Running a successful business depends on how you manage your clients and the day-to-day operations of your tutoring business.
For your business to thrive, you need a marketing strategy to attract clients, a digital presence for them to find you, and a robust communication system to boost client satisfaction. CRM software for tutors is one way to help you streamline these tasks so you can focus on providing high-quality tutoring sessions.
Get started for free with Practice, and see how our dynamic features can help your business find success.
