Most people who start flight training do not finish, and every one of them is a past customer already on your list. How a flight school can email former students, discovery flight customers and cold inquiries the right way, with numbers from AOPA, Harvard Business Review, Mailchimp, Google and the FTC.
Because most people who start flight training do not finish, and each of them already knows your airport, your aircraft and your name. AOPA’s student retention research estimates the overall dropout rate at 70 to 80 percent, and about 60 percent of people who earn a student pilot certificate never earn a higher one. Those people are not strangers, and an email is the cheapest way to say hello again.
Think about what a past customer list really holds. Students who flew twice and went quiet, discovery flight customers who never booked a second lesson, certificated pilots who might rent or add a rating, parents and friends who came to an open house. Every one of them took a step toward your school once. A paid ad has to find a stranger and earn that first step all over again.
The business case is not unique to aviation. Harvard Business Review reports that, depending on the study and the industry, winning a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than keeping an existing one, and cites Bain & Company research that raising retention by 5% raises profits by 25% to 95%. Those are cross-industry findings, not flight-school numbers, so treat them as the direction of the effect rather than a forecast for your school. The direction is clear enough: the people who already chose you are the best audience you have.
Five groups: current students, lapsed students who stopped training, discovery flight customers who never enrolled, certificated pilots and renters, and inquiries that went cold. They need different emails, so the first job is to sort them. A single “newsletter to everyone” treats a student who flew last week the same as one who stopped a year ago, and neither of them hears what they need.
Most schools already have this data. It sits in a scheduling system, a payment tool, a form inbox and somebody’s phone. Export it, merge it into one sheet, remove duplicates, and tag each row with the group it belongs to and where it came from. That sheet is the foundation of everything below.
The FTC’s CAN-SPAM guide says the law covers all commercial email, makes no exception for business-to-business email, and gives “a message to former customers” as an example of mail that must comply. In short: accurate sender information, a subject line that is not deceptive, your physical postal address, and a clear way to opt out that you honor within 10 business days.
The same guide says each separate email in violation can carry a penalty of up to 53,088 dollars, which is why we treat the unsubscribe link and the postal address as part of the template, not an afterthought. Make unsubscribing a single click with no login and no questions, and process requests the same day if your tool does not do it for you. Anyone who opts out is off the list for good, including your newsletter, your win-back note and your event invitations.
This is a summary of public guidance, not legal advice. If you have students in other countries, other rules apply as well.
Google’s sender guidelines, in force since February 1, 2024, require every sender to Gmail accounts to authenticate with SPF or DKIM and to keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. A flight school will not send 5,000 messages a day, but the basic rules still apply to you, and the way to meet them is to set up authentication properly and stop emailing people who never engage.
Authentication is a one-time setup at your domain provider, and your email platform walks you through it. The spam-rate rule is the one schools forget. If you email a stale list from five years ago and a few people hit “report spam”, you hurt delivery for everyone else, including your current students. Start with the groups that know you best, and send older contacts a short, honest “do you still want to hear from us?” note before anything promotional.
One idea and one next step per email. A win-back email to a lapsed student says you would like to see them back and offers a call with an instructor. A news email shows a new aircraft and links to the booking page. A story email shares a real student or instructor and links to the program. If you cannot name the single thing you want the reader to do, the email is not ready.
Four kinds of email cover most of what a flight school needs: the win-back note, the program or aircraft news, the student or instructor story, and the event invitation. Keep each one short enough to read on a phone, put the action in a button, and write like the person at the front desk, not a brochure.
For a sanity check on results, Mailchimp’s benchmark, built on billions of delivered emails, shows Education & Training campaigns averaging a 35.64% open rate, a 3.02% click rate and a 0.18% unsubscribe rate, as of December 2023. Treat those as a reference, not a target. Mailchimp itself warns that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection can distort open rates, so watch clicks, replies and booked flights instead. An email that gets two replies from lapsed students has done its job.
Segment by relationship, tag the source, and prune quietly. Segmenting means each group gets mail that fits its stage. Tagging the source tells you which contacts came from a discovery flight, an event or a form. Pruning means moving people who have not opened or clicked in a long time to a re-permission note, then removing those who do not answer, which also protects your spam rate.
Once a month, remove hard bounces, check that unsubscribes and spam complaints are zero or close to it, and look at which segment clicked.
The last piece is people. When somebody replies to a win-back email, a person has to answer, ideally the same day. The best subject line in the world loses to a reply that sits unread for a week.
Our case study lists email as one lane of the work: Mailchimp campaigns written and sent, the list imported, segmented and maintained month over month, and interview-based student and instructor stories to feed it. The same work sits next to lead follow-up by text, email and call. We run it as an ongoing program, not a one-off blast.
That is the whole claim, and we want to be clear about its limits. The case study’s published numbers are leads and the Google Ads results, and we do not attribute any of them to email. What we can say is how the program works: the list is a living asset, the stories give each send something real to say, and the sends happen on a steady schedule instead of when someone remembers. You can read the rest of the lanes on the Take Flight case study.
It also ties to the rest of the system. People clicking from an email land on pages that should work like the ones we describe in our landing page checklist, and any inquiry that comes in gets the fast reply we describe in the speed-to-lead post.
Start with the lapsed students. They know you, they started something they once wanted, and a plain note is often all it takes to reopen the conversation. If you want help sorting the list or writing the first email, the free consultation is the place to start, and our services page shows how email fits with the rest of the marketing we run.
Yes, as long as you follow the rules: accurate sender information, a truthful subject line, your postal address and a working unsubscribe. The FTC’s CAN-SPAM guide names former customers as an example. For a very old list, send a short “do you still want to hear from us?” note first so you protect your spam rate.
Consistently enough that people remember you and rarely enough that they do not tire of it. For Take Flight Aviation we run the program month over month. Watch unsubscribes and spam complaints and adjust; if either climbs, send less and say more.
There is no published flight-school benchmark we trust. Mailchimp’s Education & Training average is 35.64% opens and 3.02% clicks as of December 2023, but Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection can inflate opens, so judge your emails on clicks, replies and booked flights.
Use a platform. Sending from a personal inbox to a long list breaks the unsubscribe rules, hurts delivery and cannot report on clicks. A platform handles the postal address, the unsubscribe link, authentication and the segment tags for you.
On the free consultation we look at what you have today: where your past students and inquiries are stored, which of the five groups they fall into, and what the first email should say. You keep the plan either way.
When a flight school pays for a click, the landing page decides whether it becomes a lead. The seven jobs that page has to do, with numbers from Unbounce's benchmark of 41,000 landing pages, Google's Quality Score rules, and what we built for Take Flight Aviation's ads.
Read the post →Harvard Business Review audited 2,241 U.S. companies: the average reply to a web lead took 42 hours and 23% never responded. Here is what response time does to a lead, and the follow-up routine we run inside a flight school.
Read the post →We run the whole marketing department for Take Flight Aviation, and have since December 2024: website, Google Ads (99 to 173 leads a month, February to April), email, YouTube aircraft reviews, lead follow-up and reviews. Here is where the students actually came from and what we would do first at any school.
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