Are you having trouble capturing leads for your center?
Often times, when your staff find it difficult to engage prospects and capture leads, you’re not giving your parents an optimized enrollment experience. With numerous options for childcare centers, it’s important that your center implement strategies to make the enrollment process smoother and make your center stand out from the rest.
Today’s parent experience is often a series of starts and stops that can take a very long time. Parents can become impatient if the enrollment process is too tedious and lengthy. Furthermore, you’re likely interacting with millennial parents. Many millennial parents grew up during the Internet boom, so they are expecting fast responses and digital options. Today’s parents don’t want any wasted time or inconvenient processes.
The parents that you’re interacting with want self-service options, immediate responses text communications, and convenience. Having these types of features implemented and automated in your enrollment process can boost enrollment overall. Moreover, these types of features make it easy for parents to search and inquire online, schedule tours, and makes it easier to determine next steps.
If you’re missing a few leads, not following up after tours, and losing parents that never completed enrollment paperwork, then you are offering your parents an unoptimized enrollment experience. The parent experience should always be your priority because not only does it affect enrollment, but it also affects retention. It actually costs twice as much to attract new families, rather than retaining the families already enrolled.
In order to capture leads and boost enrollment, you must understand the parent journey. There are seven steps in the parent journey:
Parents begin researching childcare centers online.
Parent lands on your website.
Parent expresses interest in your center.
Parent completes a tour and is interested.
Parent is ready to enroll or they are waitlisted.
Parent pays fees.
Your center starts to work on retention.
Understanding the parent journey is the first step in learning how to capture leads and boost enrollment. Once your understand the parent journey, then you can offer your prospective families an optimized parent experience.
To learn more about this subject, watch the webinar linked below.