Are you giving your parents the most ideal experience throughout the enrollment journey?
Making sure your center is offering an optimized enrollment process can be a tedious process. However, once you understand and master the steps in the customer experience, you’ll be able to better your enrollment procedures. Read on to learn about the parent experience and what you can do to improve it.
What is today's parent experience like?
The parent experience is the journey a parent takes from inquiry to retention, and also includes key conversion points along the way. Today’s parent experience faces many challenges from slow response times and lengthy enrollment paperwork, to limited communication and no online payment options. Today’s parents want convenience, self-service options, immediate responses, and text communications.
Understanding the Parent Enrollment Journey
Understanding the parent enrollment journey can help you understand how to improve your center’s program. There are seven steps in your enrollment process - and each one is an opportunity to improve and increase your likelihood of converting those parents.
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Parent starts researching childcare centers online- In order to make it past this step, you need to make sure that your center has a digital and marketing strategy implemented to capture the interest of potential families.
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Parent lands on your website- The parent needs to be able to easily access information about your center and should be able to book a tour directly through your website. Doing too much back and forth communication wastes too much time, and can lead to the parent not being as interested in your center.
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Parent expresses interest- In this part of the parent journey it’s important to respond quickly. Response time is the largest driver of lead conversion. Shoot for a response time under 10 minutes.
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Parent completes tour and is interested- Make sure you’re providing consistent follow up after the tour. You want to stay on the parent’s radar for childcare center choices.
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Parent is ready to enroll or they are waitlisted- This is the tedious and extensive step in the parent enrollment journey. Be sure that you make it as seamless as possible. If a parent is waitlisted, be sure to maintain communication with them or they may consider a different center.
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Parents register- Many centers don’t offer online enrollment options. Providing digital registration forms can set your center apart from the parent’s other choices.
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Retaining parents- Now that you have a family enrolled, it’s important to continue to build the relationship with them. You want to be their first choice when re-enrollment comes around.
Enhance Your Enrollment Process for an Optimized Parent Experience
Improving your enrollment process for parents is the next step after learning about it. These are the seven ways to improve the parent experience:
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Design your digital marketing plan to generate inquiries
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Have web forms and multiple landing pages on your website to capture interest
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Make sure scheduling a tour is prominent on your website and easy for parents
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Use marketing automation to respond to new inquiries instantly
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Keep parents engaged and moving towards enrollment after their tour
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Offer parents online enrollment options
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Set up automated invoicing and billing for tuition fees.
View Additional Tips to Improve Your Parent Journey
The most prominent way to improve the parent experience is understanding the parent enrollment journey from start to finish. Once you’ve mastered that concept, you can work on improving the experience.
To learn more about how to improve the parent experience in depth, watch the webinar below.
