With a few adjustments to your marketing strategy, you can significantly improve your childcare conversion rates.
The below best practices are shown to drive enrollment in a really meaningful way; and when coupled with the use of a CRM (customer relationship management) system, it's a powerful combination. However, your marketing strategy is an ongoing exercise. You need to regularly reevaluate your processes to see what is working for your childcare business and what isn’t.
Based on our recent Building Blocks for Success Report, we've compiled a few basic principles to help you drive and improve your conversion rates through the implementation of these best practices:
The more information you gather about a family, the more effective you’re able to become in how you personalize your marketing towards them.
Personalization is a large component of effective marketing that allows you to build stronger engagement, and, by extension, develop a relationship with these families the longer you market to them. Over time, you’re able to gather insights that enable you to develop a better understanding of your inquiring parents, your enrolled families, and the childcare market as a whole. This, in turn, enables you to shape and narrow your marketing efforts.
To accomplish this, use personalization keys in your email and text communications such as a parent or child's first name.
Engagements are another important part of follow-up best practices. Inquiring families are much more likely to register if you consistently engage with them throughout their journey to enrollment. Be sure to use multiple channels of communication - emails, texts, phone calls, social media posts, and more.
These communications should also offer a level of quality, however. Meaning that surface-level social media posts aren’t quite enough to cut it as a true engagement. Instead of posting just a picture of your center on Facebook, add a caption that showcases your location in relation to major landmarks in your community or include a staff member in the photo and highlight them and their job role.
Then, look for true engagement from your families. Instead of focusing on just post views and likes, add a trackable link and see who clicks to learn more about your center. These actions are very easy to track in ChildcareCRM across social media, your website, your texts, and your emails.
Each communication with a family should be considered a task and should have a deadline for completion. By thinking of these follow-ups as top-priority tasks for you and your staffs' daily routine, you’re ensuring that the right families are being engaged at the right time with the right messages.
Timing is just as important as messaging, and can often be the difference between success and failure in terms of conversions. For example, you should be following up with new leads in less than 30 minutes to ensure maximum enrollment potential. It helps to keep your prospective families interested in your center, while further developing your relationship with them, and also grows your credibility as a childcare provider.
Reports are your bread and butter for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and enrollment initiatives. Remember - you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Marketing reporting is vital.
There’s no way to tell if your campaigns are truly the cause of any successes or failures unless you have the tracking in place to report on these efforts. More importantly, it allows you to pivot when you find something isn’t working, and to double down on what is.
Automated marketing communications can save you countless hours each week. They help you keep all your engagements manageable. By building out workflow automations, it’s like having another employee there to send out the emails and texts that you don’t have time to send. That sort of scalability is important for long-term growth in your business.
To view the full results, download our 2020 Data-Driven Enrollment Benchmarks.
In this report, we included 500 organizations comprised of 3,000 locations from our customer base. We required that the organization started using ChildcareCRM actively by January 1, 2020. For those organizations that did not have a full year of activity, we prorated those stats based on the number of months of activity between 7 to 12 months.
With ChildcareCRM, childcare organizations are staying on top of follow-ups and growing their businesses. Our user-friendly CRM system helps you quickly sort your follow-up tasks, automate email and text communications, and keeps your staff on track with inquiring families.