This holds whether the person guiding them is called a coach, a care manager, a health educator, or a navigator. The session is only a fraction of the member's week, and no one can be in the gap manually for every member, which is exactly why the gap is where programs quietly bleed people.
Why members drop off between sessions
Behavior change lives in the days between conversations, not in the conversation itself. That is where a member either practices the new habit or slides back to the old one. Without a nudge, a reminder, or a reason to re-engage, the default is drift, and each missed week makes the next session easier to skip.
None of this is unique to one program. The pattern is established enough in digital health to carry a name, the law of attrition, which describes participants tailing off from a program over time as interest fades, rather than quitting at one identifiable moment.
Close the gap with between-session touchpoints
The fix is to make the gap active. Short check-ins, a piece of content tied to the member's goal, a reminder timed to when they usually slip, a two-minute task that keeps the goal top of mind. None of it replaces the session; it keeps the member warm until the next one.
The impact shows up in completion. In a controlled study of 300 non-incentivized participants:
The lift came largely from staying present between sessions, not from the sessions themselves.
Make it automatic, not another job for your team
Between-session engagement cannot depend on someone manually texting every member. That does not scale, and it is the first thing to fall off when caseloads are full. The touchpoints have to fire on their own, personalized to the member and their goal, so your team's time stays on the conversations that need a person.
Small asks beat big ones
The between-session touchpoint that works is the one members actually do, which means small. In one program, 31 employees got a single two-minute quiz by email each day for a week, with no incentive:
Tiny, frictionless, and daily beats ambitious and occasional. A member who does something for two minutes stays engaged; a member asked for thirty minutes goes quiet.
Measure drop-off so you can fix it
You cannot reduce what you don't track. Watch completion and between-session engagement, not just session attendance, because attendance looks fine right up until someone stops showing. If your platform reports where in the journey members go quiet, you can place a touchpoint exactly there instead of guessing.
