Are you not responding to prospective families fast enough?
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.
To learn how to automate your enrollment funnel, it’s crucial to understand the journey every parent takes, and how to optimize each enrollment stage with automation.
There are five stages in the enrollment funnel and learning how to automate those five stages will give your parents an ideal experience.
An exceptional parent experience looks like: giving the parents immediate responses, text communications, self-service, and convenience.
Let's dive into exactly how to automate each stage of your enrollment funnel. Get time back in your day.
Table of Contents
1) Automated Enrollment: New Lead Responses
3) Guide parents through your enrollment process, hands-free.
5) Use LineLeader's automation to act as an extra set of hands - so you can retain more families.
1) Automated Enrollment: New Lead Responses
Contacting a lead within 5 minutes of their inquiry is 21 times more effective than contacting them after 30 minutes.
Enrollment Stage 1: New Family Lead Inquiry
The center that follows up first has an 80% higher chance of gaining that enrollment. If you aren't taking the necessary steps, you could be losing up to 79% of your potential families. Combat this by using marketing automation to respond to new inquiries immediately.
Increase conversion success and parent satisfaction using automated workflows that ensure families are being followed up with - fast. Stay top of mind with quick, consistent communication – from initial inquiry and beyond.
Schedule a demo to see a platform that automatically responds to new family inquiries - for you!
Demonstration of Enrollment Stage 1
2) Instantly schedule tours.
After responding to an initial inquiry, include a link for parents to schedule a tour (online on your website). Then, automate tour confirmations, and reminders. Give your staff key points to talk about during a tour.
Enrollment Stage 2: Tour Scheduled
Automated tour confirmations and reminders lead to decreased no-shows and increased enrollments. Not to mention, busy center staff will gain more time back in their day and will also receive automated notifications and reminders.
Plus, scheduling a tour with a family lead within the first 24 hours of initial interest increases the chances of conversion success by 83%. Proactively highlight your center’s unique features, classrooms, and exceptional teachers by equipping your staff with tour talking points.
Improve the touring experience and standardize talking points by each individual center, region, or brand, to ensure staff is on the same page and every location is putting its best foot forward.
Example: digital tour scheduler
3) Guide parents through your enrollment process, hands-free.
There are many steps in your enrollment funnel - from new inquiries to tour scheduled, tour completed, and waitlisted or registered. Without guidance, parents can get lost along the way.
Guide parents through the journey with automated communications at each stage that let them know what to do next and how to move forward. Automated enrollment will eliminate the stress of forgotten follow-ups and crowded inboxes.
Enrollment Stage 3: Tour Completed
Keep parents engaged and moving towards enrollment after their tour, while also personalizing communications with families. Build a better connection with parents by adding personalization keys to your email and text templates. Add a parent's name at the beginning of your automated emails by including a variable tag like [Guardian First Name].
Also, make sure you're following up with them about the correct location with a variable tag for [Location Name] and [Organization Name] if you have multiple sites or brands.
Template for emailing a lead
4) Offer convenient, online options for registration: Provide a digital daycare form for families to easily enroll.
Filling out enrollment paperwork is time-consuming and requires parents to fill in the same information multiple times. It takes more than 2 weeks, on average, for families to return their paper forms. In contrast, it takes an average of 4 days to complete online enrollment and the completion rate is 65%. A digital daycare enrollment form ensures your packets are complete. Offer forms in a convenient way to boost conversions.
Enrollment Stage 4: Parents Pay Registration or Waitlist Fees
94% of Millennials are active users of online banking, 41% prefer to pay their bills using a debit card or ACH transfer, and 21% have never written a check. Yet nearly half of all centers only accept cash or checks for registration and waitlist fees.
When you provide mobile payment options, on-the-go Millennials can pay in near real-time, pushing funds to your center quicker than ever. Giving parents online payment options is critical to improving the parent experience by letting them pay for services the way they want to pay.
With automated, digital options – you’ll increase conversions at the end of your enrollment funnel.
5) Use LineLeader's automation to act as an extra set of hands - so you can retain more families.
The final stage of your enrollment funnel is retention. With automated enrollment and communications, families will get to this part of the funnel smoothly.
Watch our latest webinar to learn more about your enrollment funnel and how LineLeader by ChildcareCRM can automate each stage to boost enrollment.
Also, see how to seamlessly run your center from an all-in-one platform. 👇
Interested in Using LineLeader?
Schedule a quick demo to see how LineLeader works in real time. Discover how LineLeader saves time by guiding families through enrollment - for you.
Already a User?
See how to boost enrollment in the Ultimate Guide to Childcare Marketing Automation.
