Is the secret to increasing enrollment found at your local ballpark?
A few years ago, the movie Moneyball gave us some great lessons in using data to drive results. In the movie, the Oakland A’s used a process called sabermetrics to drive wins. Sabermetricians collect and summarize the relevant data from this in-game activity to answer specific questions. In the movie, Peter Brand, says, ”It's about getting things down to one number. Using the stats the way we read them, we'll find the value that no one else can see.”
We live in an increasingly competitive market where families have options, so it’s important to follow the advice of Steve Jobs and “think differently” in how we approach enrollment. To “think differently,” let’s look at four common uses of data in the childcare industry, which are understanding the market, eliminating waste, tracking performance, and solving problems.
Understanding the Childcare Market
We can utilize data from the enrollment process to understand the market and discover unique selling points to highlight in our direct mailers, social media ads, and prospecting emails. We also want to evaluate factors that are leading prospective enrollments to our competitors so that we can make necessary adjustments. Finally, keeping an accurate record of how parents hear about us can exploit areas that are producing results, but could also give insights into where we are wasting marketing dollars.
Plus, the childcare market should embrace the future of data by investing in unified technology. Quickly get the insight you need with an all-in-one system! Intuitive childcare software should provide automated reports, so you know exactly how many leads are coming from digital channels. Then, use this data-driven insight to streamline your center.
Eliminating Waste
It is estimated that inefficiencies cost businesses anywhere between 20-30% of their revenue every year. What could enrollment look like with an extra 20-30% in your marketing spend? When done correctly, data can help us eliminate wasted resources by mapping out our market to see which key areas or neighborhoods respond better than others to our messaging. Data can also show us how parents prefer to receive communication.
Tracking Childcare Enrollment Performance
Obviously, it is important to understand how many inquiries we are seeing, but a deeper dive will help us understand how many inquiries we are gaining, how long it takes to contact our inquiries and our conversion rate on tours.
Solving Enrollment Problems to Improve Your Web Strategy
After a slow enrollment month, how do you pinpoint and assess what went wrong? Reviewing your conversion rates at each point in your follow-up process can help determine areas for improvement. Looking at statistics such as our tasks per inquiry helps us determine if we need to increase the engagements for each family to help us convert at a higher rate.
Tracking lost opportunity reasons can give us good data on families who might be prime candidates for an outreach campaign to catch up. Ideally, the generation of this information would be automated so that we can spend less time looking for good data, and more time using the data to make an informed decision that will lead to growth in our enrollment.
