Discover These 5 Proven Text Marketing Best Practices for Childcare

Nearly 80% of consumers shared that they like receiving offers via text.

Your communications must be personalized and brief to engage families. Without sending the right messages at the right time – your carefully crafted words will get lost in a sea of crowded inboxes.

Use text message marketing to meet parents where they’re at. Provide a convenient communication channel to increase opens and clicks. Plus, you and your staff save time for what really matters – providing quality childcare and making connections with families. Read the blog to learn about 5 proven text marketing best practices that improve conversions.  

Benefits of Using Text Marketing at Your Centers

• Boost enrollments: Use text message marketing to share promotions, discounts, and limited-time enrollment offers that boost conversions and grow revenue.  
• Build relationships: Provide better communication and guide parents through your enrollment journey with ease.  

• Engage your families: Quickly share important waitlist updates, send encouraging content to parents, or simply keep the conversation going with families who are looking for care.
• Generate excitement: Send surveys or polls to continually check in with families.  
• Collect and nurture leads: Allow potential families to sign-up for texts or send them one-off questions and follow-up quickly.

Schedule a demo to start building meaningful relationships with parents through a more personal form of communication.

5 Text Message Marketing Best Practices  

Read these text marketing best practices to elevate your campaigns.  

1) Build Urgency with Limited Time Offers

It’s likely that your childcare campaigns change depending on the time of year. Maybe you have a one day only back-to-school karaoke night that you want to advertise to all new and returning parents. On the other hand, the fall months are all about garnering attention for your limited-time winter camps. Either way, let parents know the date, time, and choose at least one ‘alert’ word to make your message sound urgent.  

Take a look at a few eye-catching options you can use...  

• Limited time  

• Now  
• Today  
• Deadline
• One day only  

2) Send Your Texts at the Right Time

The most popular time to send texts is at noon, but you should always be responding to new inquiries within 15 minutes or less – unless it’s late at night or very early in the evening as texts can be disruptive at this time. With software that automates these texts for you, you can practically market in your sleep and ensure that texts are only sent within reasonable waking hours.  

3) Keep Your Texts Brief and to the Point

Texting should be straightforward, clear, and concise. Try to sum up your message within 160 characters or less to keep it engaging for families. Also, consider using simpler words wherever possible. This is known as the Hemingway Method and ensures your marketing communications use words with only 1-2 syllables. Since most American adults read at an eighth-grade level, this will help increase your readership and engagement levels. Text marketing helps you plan and schedule concise texts, ahead of time.

4) Segment Your Lists for Greater Personalization

Today’s parents expect personalized experiences. Segmentation allows childcare marketing and enrollment teams to create content for specific parent groups, while personalization means looking more in-depth into each parent within an individual segment.  

For instance, you split your list of new parent inquiries into groups based on their initial responses based on child’s age, desired start date, location, and more. If one family wants their child to join your toddler program and the other parent needs a spot in one of your infant classes – they'll go into different groups. Sending unique text messages to each group is vital because their needs aren’t the same. You may want to share potty training tips to nurture the family that’s shown interest in your toddler program. On the other hand, you might send ‘12 Simple Developmental Activities for Your Baby’ to engage the family with the infant.  

The right marketing automation tool ensures you can accomplish all this without having to lift a finger! Get to know more about ChildcareCRM’s marketing automation features, such as:  

• Personalized and dynamic content stored in text templates to save valuable save time.
• ‍Multi-step, response-based text campaigns to act on parents’ behavior as it happens.
• ‍Campaign success reports – track opens, clicks, bounces, and more to refine your campaigns.

To learn more about proven text marketing best practices - view our Ultimate Guide on How to Build Text Campaigns for your centers.

5) Enable Two-Way Texting to Respond Faster

Two-way texting lets users send and receive text messages from a single platform. You should receive a designated phone number to communicate with parents through a web-based messaging system by using an API (application programming interface). Automated text marketing saves you valuable time.

It’s time-consuming to monitor inquiries from prospective families on multiple platforms. You’re juggling conversations on Facebook, via email, and text just to keep up.

Simplify Communication with the Right Software

Simplify communication. Set up two-way texting with a one-stop-shop Childcare Experience Platform like LineLeader by ChildcareCRM. In fact, LineLeader by ChildcareCRM easily captures inquiries across platforms for you. Connect with families faster to keep them opted into your text campaigns. Use text marketing best practices to refine your enrollment strategy.

Communicate in the right way at the right time with automated text messages that are personalized, brief, and build urgency. 

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