Let's face it. Childcare is a business that requires you to offer quality care for families and their children. There are many things that you can do to improve your childcare business externally and internally, but using data to make informed decisions is one of the most important and can affect your long term-goals. In this post, I'll explain how understanding data can help make improvements and decisions in your childcare business.
No data = no insight into what’s working (and what’s not) in your enrolment process.
Data is the key to unlocking your childcare centre's potential. Without it, you're flying blind. You don't know how your marketing campaigns are performing or if they're reaching the right people. You can't tell if staff productivity has improved since they started using a new software system--or if it's gone down because someone's been slacking off (or worse, not working at all). And most importantly: you don't know which areas of your enrolment journey need improvement so that more families can be enrolled and waitlisted families get their spot sooner!
Why is data and reporting important in your childcare?
Data and reporting are essential to helping you understand how your childcare program is performing. They allow you to know:
- How are you doing? Are you meeting the needs of the children in your care? Are there any areas for improvement? Data can answer these questions and more, so that you can make adjustments as needed.
- What works and what doesn't work. If one approach isn't working out, try something new! Data helps guide decision-making by providing insight into what's working well versus what could use some improvement or refinement (or even elimination).
- How to improve results--and make better decisions overall--by understanding how things actually work on a day-to-day basis within an organisation like yours rather than relying solely on intuition or guesswork when making important choices about its future direction
What kind of results to look for?
Once you have your reports, you can use them to identify areas where your centre can improve.
- Conversion Success: This is the number of parents who enrol their child in a centre out of all those who visit or call to enquire about places. If this is low, it means that many families are not enrolling at your centre and already considered or have enrolled at another centre in the process of engaging with them to enrol . You might want to look at how much information your staff gives out during visits; some centres allow prospective parents only limited access until they've made a decision about whether or not they want their children there (and this can lead some applicants feeling like they're being pushed into making an immediate decision). Another factor could be – what has the enquiry journey been like for them, have they needed to wait for a response, or were they not satisfied with the kind of communication you were offering to them?
- Marketing source: The marketing source report is an important report for childcare centres to look at regularly because it helps them to find the best ways to market their business and where they can budget their marketing dollars. It can be used to identify which marketing channels are driving the most leads, and how many leads come from each source. This can help you to develop a strategy that focuses on your most effective channels and maximise your return on investment. It can also help you identify where you need to improve in order to attract more customers. You can use this information to refine your marketing strategy, or even change it completely based on what's working for other businesses in your industry.
- Marketing Campaign ROI report: Overall, this report tells you which marketing campaigns are the most effective. It details an account of which active marketing campaigns are producing enrolments. Unfortunately, lacking a Campaign ROI report leads to inefficient campaigns that run longer than they should, or shouldn’t be running at all. You’ll possibly experience a loss of revenue without access to this data. See the results in the Marketing Campaign ROI report of each marketing campaign and the outcome of specific conversion or revenue opportunities.
How to use these results in your childcare business + How reports can help you make changes that lead to more enrolments and higher profits
In this section, we'll look at how you can use the results of your childcare lead management report to improve your business.
- Use data to make decisions. If a certain marketing channel is producing more leads than others, but not enough enrolments or profits, then it's time to shift focus and allocate resources elsewhere.
- Use data to grow your childcare business. If one area of your childcare business has lower than average conversion rates (the number of people who buy after visiting the website), then this could be due to something as simple as having an outdated website design or poor copywriting on landing pages; both easily fixed problems that have huge potential impact on overall profitability!
- Pull accurate data to increase your return on investment and see what kind of marketing campaigns are working with increasing your occupancy and engagement with families.
In the end, it's important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to lead management. The most important thing is that you keep learning from your data and making changes based on what you find. We hope this blog post has helped you understand how useful reports can be in helping childcare providers improve their enrolment process!
Want to take your business to the next level? Want to invest in a system that pays for itself within 3 months?
Schedule a demo or learn more to see how LineLeader can help you grow and manage your childcare business – today.
