How do you monitor the performance of your advertising campaigns? If you're not tracking leads, you could miss out on dozens of new enrollments. Every family that engages with your childcare business should be considered a lead or prospective customer. It’s important to document all contact, response, and inquiry information from each interaction with parents. This helps you keep track of their needs and allows you to better personalize the enrollment experience to communicate with each family better. But manually monitoring new inquiries and tracking where all your leads are coming from can be a tiring process. At any given point, you’re managing several childcare center duties on top of communicating with parents via email, social media, phone, or text.
As a business owner - you need a solution to help you understand where your leads are coming from. Knowing how families discovered your childcare business provides insight into which of your marketing, advertising, and follow-up communication efforts are delivering the best results. This allows you to make informed business decisions, saving you both time and money.
Occasionally, families are lost along the parent enrollment journey because a childcare business isn’t tracking leads, which makes it difficult to understand parents’ communication preferences. When you’re not tracking leads, optimizing your advertising budget and promoting the right inquiry channels becomes labor-intensive, wasting both your time and money.
40% of Millennial parents prefer self-service to human contact with businesses. To cater to this, many successful childcare centers offer a variety of inquiry options to parents, allowing them to express interest online, via phone, email, or in-person. Based on the parent's inquiry source type, these centers then plan their follow-up contact to fit the family's communication preference. This ensures families are followed up with in a manner which they are most likely to respond to, leading to greater childcare enrollment success. Plus, families are more likely to register for care with your childcare center if they feel that their needs are being met in a way that they prefer.
Tracking where your leads are coming from also provides insight into the best ways to tailor the messaging of texts and communications for your specific families. Each childcare center is unique and so are the needs of your parents and children. Invest in an efficient lead tracking process to increase your return on investment by learning the ways families prefer to contact your childcare business the most, then adjusting the language based on the source.
Understanding where your leads are coming from enables you to better grasp the behavior of your current and interested families. Once you know how to track your prospective families efficiently and follow up with personalized communications, you can optimize your return on investment. If you choose to implement a system with automated lead capture information displayed in easy-to-read standard reports, finding out which platforms and socials are used often by your prospective families becomes easier. Simply view where new families are finding out about your childcare center or inquiring for care and then adjust your advertising budget to use more of these popular platforms. Doing so helps reduce wasted spend and allows you to push more money towards the efforts that are working, which balances your budget with your return (aka those prospective families that enroll for care with your center). Plus, tracking your leads helps enhance your online marketing, since you know which leads are responding to your online efforts.
For example, if your lead tracking system shows a majority of your new families are learning about you from Facebook rather than Google, you might want to stop spending money on Google and invest more in Facebook ads or similar sources like Instagram.
Download our 2022 Building Blocks for Success report. Further explore how understanding where your leads are coming from helps you enhance your communication with parents and increase your return on investment.
Whether most of your recent leads came from Facebook, direct traffic from Google, or a referral, lead tracking allows you to assess what source works best for your center. And remember, what may work for one center won’t always work for the next... every location is distinctive, and your lead sources are too. On average, lead tracking helps businesses earn 30% more in annual revenue. For example, an email source is one of the most common types of lead inquiries. Help prospective families not fall through the cracks by keeping tabs on these common online and offline childcare lead sources:
Direct Mail
Referral
Childcare listing directories (like Kinnie or Winside)
Website
Phone
Walk-In
Community Event
The first step in focusing your enrollment efforts is to evaluate your best lead source platform. Lead Source Report by LineLeader helps you identify the primary origin of your leads to better adjust your marketing and sales efforts.
Once you know where a family has heard about you, you and your team can create tailored messaging to guide them toward enrollment based on the source data - whether it's a form inquiry or email source. Improve communication according to family preference based on the way they inquire. Use lead source data to pinpoint your target audience and create tailored messaging according to their unique needs. This helps increase read, response, and open rates for your communications by engaging your leads using the family’s preferred form of communication. Quick, personalized follow-ups between you and your prospective families build trust and a positive care relationship.
Generally, tracking lead source data will tell you:
Which marketing channels and efforts encourage your families to enroll the most. Then, you can adjust your spend to enhance your return on investment and enhance the parent enrollment journey.
How families prefer to contact your childcare business. Start promoting those channels more to increase inquiry rates.
Which communication efforts you should use more based on your primary lead sources.
Okay, but how do you manage and track all your leads when they’re coming in from a range of different sources? The simple solution: Childcare Experience Platform. The best childcare experience platform will display reporting data in easy-to-read visuals so you can clearly see which sources are generating the most prospective families at-a-glance, allowing you to prioritize the top-performing channels for your business.
Learning where your leads are coming from allows you to personalize parent communications and improve your marketing campaigns to increase your return on investment. Never miss an opportunity to customize your communication messaging based on your most popular sources. Secure more enrollments by downloading our 2022 Building Blocks for Success Report.