For the past eight years, ChildcareCRM has analysed aggregated data from our expanding customer base—composed of more than 4,000 childcare centres—to identify insights and recommendations to scale your childcare business. ChildcareCRM’s goal is to share statistically significant drivers of growth along with best practices to boost enrolment and increase retention, with less work. Use the following best practices to plan your 2022 childcare enrolment strategy.
1) Standardise Parent Communication Across Centres
As you know, growing your childcare organisation has never been more challenging. The current parent experience is inconvenient and full of time-consuming obstacles that can cause parents to lose interest in your organisation. With continued industry shifts, staffing shortages due to COVID-19, and changing parent expectations, it’s vital to streamline the parent experience from initial inquiry through family retention.
Today’s parents want a convenient, easy-to-follow enrolment process. 73% of Millennial parents say that valuing their time is important. Implementing a standard practice and communication strategy throughout your childcare organisation ensures that all your centres are closely guiding parents through the enrolment journey, which speeds up the entire process and in turn generates a higher lead conversion rate. Standardising your enrolment communications is a crucial part of maintaining brand consistency so each family across all your centres is receiving the same information. Ensure that your staff is using automated on-brand email and text templates at each stage of the parent experience.
Also, communicating the way parents want increases childcare enrolment retention because parents feel that your centres match their needs and the standard of follow-up they want to see. Factor the busy schedules of parents and children into your organisation’s communication strategy with text. Because 60% of Millennials like to communicate via text messaging, there’s never been a better time to use personalised texts for enquiry confirmations, tour reminders, and links to digital registration.
Best Practice: Regulate Workflow Automation for Your Entire Childcare Organisation
Lose inconsistency by using a childcare solution to set up automated communications that lead parents through each stage of the enrolment journey. Workflow automation enables a set of organised, consecutive processes – from follow-up communications after a tour to registration payment reminders, that allows each centre within your childcare organisation to operate at the same pace and engage with parents at the same rate. Once your organisation implements a customary set of workflow automations where each centre follows identical tasks, sends consistent follow-up communications, and ensures cohesive engagement protocols with every parent, you can easily identify which centres are successfully sticking to that plan and manage performance with enhanced oversight.
ChildcareCRM found that 5-10 workflow automations is the ideal number to guide families through to enrolment. Choose to customise these workflow automations to best fit the needs of the families within your childcare organisation while standardising a process for families to follow and staff to manage.
Best Practice: Use Multi-Centre Branding for Consistent Messaging throughout The Parent Experience
A decentralised messaging system creates confusion for parents and childcare staff. Aside from standardising communication through organised engagement, follow-up, and response, you can also control how your brand is portrayed across centres. As your childcare organisation expands and increases its conversion rate and profits, having a scalable system to adapt to your childcare business is critical for long-term success. Standardise parent communications by using imagery and language that reflect your brand guidelines. Use the same tone and language (such as company-specific acronyms, certain emojis, fun terms/educational lingo, etc.) across each of your centres. You can ensure everyone is on the same page with ChildcareCRM’s multi-centre branding capabilities. Easily store multiple logos, colour palettes, fonts, and more to fit your multi-site organisation’s needs with ChildcareCRM branding functionality. This is particularly beneficial for operators with multiple logos and branding elements across several locations. Choose childcare software that scales with your organisation.
Get up to speed on how to streamline the parent experience with standardised parent communication through ChildcareCRM by downloading our 2022 Building Blocks for Success report.
2) Gain Oversight with Real-Time Insights
Not knowing how each level of your organisation is performing can be nerve-wracking. Since the childcare centre that follows up first has an 80% higher chance of getting that family converted, it’s important to have total oversight over the most successful centres within your childcare organisation that are streamlining their enrolment process by reaching out to parents faster, so you can ensure that every centre across your entire organisation is following up within 30 minutes of a parent’s initial enquiry. Tracking performance at the divisional, regional, and centre levels helps establish a standardised strategy by assessing what locations are performing best with real-time data. For example, if tour scheduled to tour completed rates are low at just one location, consider revamping their communication strategy with families using tour confirmation and reminder messages.
Best Practice: Track Childcare Enrolment KPIs with Reports
Optimising your ROI can be difficult and time-consuming without the right tools to help you. Because 51% of new leads come from online sources, your childcare organisation can benefit from tracking the origin of your latest leads with a source of families report. Easily view, manage, and oversee what your most popular media channels are and tailor your marketing budget and strategy for your childcare staff to implement accordingly. Save money with the enhancement of your organisation’s marketing and sales efforts by tracking where your leads are coming from.
In addition, with hierarchical performance reports, easily place your locations into unique groupings. Put top performers, under-performers, new locations, and established centres in separate categories to simplify reviewing specific reports. Using custom or industry-standard reports, you can view how your childcare organisation is performing at every level. For example, quickly view the overall conversion success of enrolments at each centre or take an in-depth look at the conversion rates of key points throughout your enrolment journey including – total count of new families, percentage of new families engaged, tours scheduled, tours completed, waitlist, registered, and lost opportunities. The data in these reports tell you which advertising and follow-up efforts are working for each location.
Here are a few examples of ChildcareCRM’s most popular reports:
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Current Opportunities
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Source of Families
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Tours and Meetings
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Scheduled Tasks
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Tasks Completed by Staff
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Conversion Success
3) Optimise Your Organisation’s Marketing Strategy
In ChildcareCRM’s recent Building Blocks Report, we found that parents prefer personalised marketing efforts because it makes them feel valued and appreciated. Use the data from your performance reports to better customise your conversations, advertising, and campaigns to build loyalty and increase conversion rates with your families. Develop targeted marketing strategies based on location or enrolment status.
For example, if one of your emails in a drip campaign series is only averaging a 1% CTR, you may want to swap out that message for a new one to see if you can raise engagement rates. The ability to view this information at each level of your organisation ensures that every single family receives the right communication at the right time, rather than a ‘one size fits all approach’ which often leads to decreased family satisfaction.
Best Practice: Target Your Key Demographic - Millennials
The first step to optimising your marketing strategy is to understand what your parents want from your centre. Millennials are now your number one parent demographic, making up 80% of today’s parents to children under the age of 12. Enhance the parent experience at every centre by upgrading your overall advertising and sales strategy in your childcare organisation to target Millennial parents.
Because 40% of Millennials prefer self-service over human contact with a business, they need streamlined, digital options for convenient self-service. Look for ways to make the enrolment process easier for your enquiring families. Online enquiry forms like contact forms, specialised program landing pages, and digital tour schedulers allow parents to enquire for care conveniently – at a time that works best for them. Beyond moving your enquiries online, consider digitising the registration process for parents as well. Online registration enables parents to fill out forms and enrolment paperwork at a time that fits their schedule. Millennials desire guidance when completing forms and tasks online, but at a time that works best for their family. Digitising the parent experience to expedite the enrolment process can improve parent satisfaction rates and lead to greater retention success.
Aside from these 3 tips for navigating changing parent expectations, ChildcareCRM has also identified five key best practices for streamlining the parent experience from initial enquiry through enrolment retention. Develop the ultimate childcare business strategy using the findings from our 2022 Building Blocks for Success report.
