When a Student Ghosts You: Why I Don't Chase Them

A student who used to book every week stops booking. Or someone sits through your trial lesson, tells you it was great, and then you never hear from them again. No message, no reason, nothing.

Almost every piece of advice about this says the same thing. Follow up. Follow up again. Stay on their radar. I think that’s mostly wrong, and I think doing it is what makes it worse.

Here’s what I do instead, and it’s different depending on who went quiet.

When a student you already teach goes quiet

Don’t try to do a follow up. Leave them there for a while, a week or two, and then go and talk to them. I mean actually go and talk to them. Text them, whatever, as a friend. How are you, what have you been up to lately, that kind of way.

They will of course definitely think of you as their tutor coming here to push them back to the course. That’s what they’re braced for, because that’s what everyone else does. But you don’t do that. Just really talk to them as friends, instead of an “oh I’m doing this because this is my job” kind of way.

When it was a trial lesson that didn’t convert

That one is different, and yes, you should follow up. But only once or twice, and don’t be pushy.

Don’t sell your course. Just talk to them about the subject you’re teaching, and answer their questions about learning it. Showing your expertise in that area will always leave a better impression of you than trying to sell them something, because nobody likes to be sold on things. Psychologists have a name for that one, reactance, and it is why pushing somebody tends to move them the other way.

The best thing you can do is leave them a good impression of you on the subject. Remember, we don’t make the choice of buying. They do. We can only influence.

If the trial itself is the part you want to fix, that’s how to teach a trial lesson.

When it’s someone who never met you at all

This is the one case where chasing is right, and I’ve written about it before. A cold lead who has never sat in your lesson isn’t ghosting you, they just forgot, and there the unglamorous answer really is to follow up more than once with something useful in hand. That’s how I landed my first independent student, and it’s a different situation from everything else on this page.

The difference is whether they know you yet. Someone who has already sat with you and gone quiet has made a decision about you. Someone who never met you hasn’t made any decision at all.

You can usually see it coming

There are many cases where you can almost tell by the way they talk to you and the questions they ask.

They ask only about price. How much can we do it cheaper. How long before I see some result. Normally this kind of question, and then not even saying thank you at the end, then they just disappear, and rude with it. Honestly, most of the time these are just low quality people, and it’s the attitude more than anything.

I’m not saying you should refuse anyone who asks what it costs. Price is a fair question, and there is a whole literature on why buyers fixate on price when they cannot yet see what else they would be paying for. It’s when price is the only question, and there’s no thank you anywhere in it, that you’re usually looking at someone who was never going to stay.

Was it a bad lead, or was it you?

Not entirely different, is the honest answer. Some prospects are just wrong leads who were never your ideal customers anyway, and losing them costs you nothing.

But be careful with that, because it’s also the most comfortable thing to tell yourself. If you’re in the early stage of building your tutoring career then this is not the case, since you haven’t found your voice and your perfect audience yet. At that point you don’t have the standing to call anybody a bad fit.

So my advice at that stage is don’t think, just do it. More iteration beats everything in that regard.

What makes it happen less

Two things, and they come in this order.

The first is the trial lesson. Just be yourself and tutor the best way you can, and don’t fake anything, because authenticity always wins. The people who don’t want that version of you were going to leave eventually anyway, and it’s better that they leave before they’ve booked.

The second is marketing, and that one is for later, after you know what kind of audience and students you want to attract. Doing it the other way round, marketing hard before you know who you want, is how you fill your calendar with people who go quiet. That part is how to market yourself as a tutor.

You don’t have to let them go

I don’t formally write anyone off, and I don’t send a message to close it out. I just stop, and the door stays open.

The busy ones usually come back. They actually do remember you, without you screaming and making yourself visible all the time. That’s the whole thing, really. Attraction is always better than outreach, and that’s as true of somebody who went quiet as it is of somebody who has never heard of you.