In this post, we’ll cover our best tools and strategies to get disengaged or inactive clients to re-engage with you and your online coaching program.

The fact is, clients disengage for a variety of reasons and they are motivated for a variety of reasons.

That’s why this is one of the most confounding problems facing online coaching business owners, and why there’s so little valuable literature on the topic online.

It’s important to understand that dealing with disengaged clients isn’t something you can avoid. If you’re running an online coaching business, your clients will become disengaged. Motivation is a limited resource for every human. And even the best coaching platform can’t prevent this for you.

It’s also not something you can afford to ignore. To successfully get disengaged clients to re-engage, you need a full toolbox of re-engagement tools that you’re ready to deploy periodically to refresh the status quo.

Because when you’re fighting the war against disengagement in your online coaching programs, your task is to alter the status quo. Without making changes, how can you expect different results? Unless you take action and implement strategies like these to re-engage disengaged clients, your business will stagnate. But if you do take action, every client could stick around longer and be worth more to your business in the future.

Thus, learning how to re-engaged disengaged and inactive clients is an essential skill to building a sustainable online coaching business.

With that in mind, here are the psychological tools you have at your disposal to disrupt the status quo and win back client engagement.

6 Science-Based Ways to Get Disengaged Clients To Re-Engage

1. The Why

The “Why” is the underlying root cause reason that a client is working with you to make a change. If you do the work up front of finding each client’s true “Why” you can use that important underlying motivation as a tool to draw your disengaged clients back in and get back on track. Just remind them why this was so important to them in the first place and that’s going to be their most powerful reason to re-engage.

Now, finding the “Why” isn’t as easy as just asking. It takes some digging. But sometimes that digging is almost as simple as repeating the questions to get to the layers underneath their initial response. Much like the 5 Why’s Method to get to the root cause of a problem.

If you’re a nutrition coach and you ask a client why they wanted to work with you the first response might be something like, “I want to lose 15 pounds.” That’s an answer, but it’s lacks the emotion roots you’re looking for to draw them back in so you continue to dig:

You respond, “Why do you want to lose 15 pounds?”

Client: “I don’t feel comfortable in my body right now.”

You: “Why do you think you don’t feel comfortable in your body?”

Client: “Well, my knees and joints hurt a lot and I think if I lost 15 pounds they’d feel better.”

You: “Why’s it so important to you that your joints don’t hurt when you’re active.”

Client: “Because I want to be able to pick up my grandkids and run around with them.”

A ha! That statement has some emotional/motivational juice to it. Add that to your Notes in your online coaching platform. (If you don’t have one you can try Nudge for free with your first 5 clients)

Now, when you want to get a disengaged client to re-engage with you, you can reference their Why to remind them that their goals are worth the effort, important and personal to them.

2. Newness

Sometimes you just have to shake things up. Psychologically, new and different things just naturally stand out and grab our attention. For example, you don’t realize the beauty of the town you grew up in until you leave for a long time and come back to it. Until it’s new again.

Or a more evolutionary example, our ancestors didn’t need to react to the 3,000th squirrel they saw bouncing around near the cave. That’s everyday stuff. But the 1st tiger they saw roaming around would’ve grabbed their attention pretty quick. When something’s new or different from the everyday pattern, we’re programmed to notice.

This means you need to get your clients out of the day-to-day habits of the program and shake things up with a new task, event or voice.

Consider promoting a live webinar session where your clients will learn something new, and/or even learn from a guest expert. Access to new knowledge and a new voice could both be just what the doctor ordered to get a disengaged client back on track.

As a final thought, if you’re familiar with the Novelty Effect, you’ll also be aware that this engagement bump strictly from newness won’t last. Lucky for you, this is only 1 of 6 strategies on this list to help you re-engage inactive clients.

3. Intrigue

Intrigue isn’t the easiest to pull off, but when you do it can be magical. One of the most destructive emotional forces to progress is ‘uncertainty’.

Humans hate uncertainty and the lack of control that comes with it. We hate not knowing what’s next. This is why, failing to set clear expectations during client onboarding about how your online coaching program will work is one of the most common reasons your clients will disengage in the first place.

The fun thing about intrigue is that it flips the usually harmful feeling of uncertainty on its head and uses it in a positive way to draw in people’s attention and interest in a positive way. 

Create a cliffhanger by teasing an exciting announcement or opportunity that’s available to only a select few clients in the coming weeks. The intrigue and exclusivity will work together to draw back in your inactive clients’ attention.

4. Herd Behavior

We are social beasts after all, we might as well take advantage of it. When we see someone do something we like or admire, we copy them. When we see someone want something, we tend to want it too.

You can’t explore developmental psychology and learning theories without coming across discussions of mimetic learning, or learning through imitation. The influential philosopher Rene Girard developed a whole philosophy called mimetic theory that starts with “mimetic desire,” or essentially imitating the desires of others.

So how does this impact how to get disengaged clients back on track?

Sometimes you just need to point out what all the other folks are doing.

Consider sharing how another client of yours is excelling by staying consistent. 

Or, better yet, invite your clients to participate in a new challenge that “47 other people just like them have already used to kickstart their success.” But instead of making it an individual challenge, create a cumulative goal for the group so everyone is working together. 

5. Enhancement

As coaches, we hate to generalize, but it’s often true that the type of person who would seek out a coaching program, is also the type of person who would be motivated by the idea of enhancement - by which we mean either becoming a better version of themselves, OR getting access to a better version of something they’ve purchased. 

If this sounds like it aligns with your clients’ personality type, don’t overthink it. Offer an special ‘enhanced course’ for certain clients who qualify based on participation to create a fresh reason to get inactive clients re-engaged.

6. A Clean Slate

Wouldn’t we all love more second chances in life? 

Sometimes, when a client’s fallen off track, nothing is more motivating than the opportunity for a clean slate and a second chance. Consider offering a full reset to wipe the slate clean, and get perceived ‘failures’ out of your clients’ heads. I had video game systems my whole life, and the reset button got plenty of use. It’s a useful metaphor to consider.

When it comes to using the reset strategy to re-engage a client, keep in mind that simply repeating the exact same program experience may not be the best idea.

If they fell off the first time around, the program might need a tweak or two to fit. If you have the bandwidth, have a discussion about why they fell off the first time around. If you don’t get any insight, the best fall-back strategy is to find a way to simply make it easy.

While your knee-jerk reaction as a committed coach will be to go the opposite direction - do more in an effort to over-deliver - oftentimes going the extra mile for a less than ideal client doesn’t actually influence how long they’ll stick with you.

Although it goes against your every instinct, the best business decision is to simply make it easier on them to get through what they absolutely need to have a chance to succeed and move on. This feels wrong, but customer service research would suggest our extra efforts are sometimes more futile than we’d like to believe.

Creating a separate “Easy Version” of your primary program in your Nudge account as a Sequence as a fallback to assign to low engagement clients may save you quite a bit of time and frustration.

You might even be able to re-package this “Easy Version” program into a lower-price offering or lead capture program - what we call an Alignment Program in this post about a favorite online coaching business model of ours.

Conclusion

Motivation is a limited resource in all of us. Like an electric car, it won’t last forever on one charge. It needs to be recharged - it needs a new spark - from time to time.

Another word for that ‘new spark’ is, “Inspiration”.

If you can use the tools listed above to spark fresh inspiration in your clients, you’ll help more clients find success, and your business will flourish.

What strategy intrigues you the most? What’s worked for you to get disengaged clients to re-engage in your programs?