How to Manage Family Leads Like a Pro
A step-by-step guide for childcare with actionable tips and examples to help you find the right lead management system that scales your business.
Table of contents
- What Is Lead Management?
- Benefits of a Childcare Lead Management System
- The Difference Between Centre Management and Lead Management
- Lead Management Best Practices
- How Does Lead Management within a CRM Work?
- Essential Lead Management Features
- Expanded Features for Childcare Enterprises
- LineLeader Enhances Lead Management
Check Out the Guide
There are a lot of factors to consider when you're trying to find the right lead management system for your centre.
Searching for childcare lead management solutions isn't always easy but we've created this guide to help you remember the little details that can make a big difference in the success and adoption of your selected system.
What Is Lead Management?
More than 79% of leads don’t convert due to a lack of proper lead management and organisation.
Missed opportunities are common when you manage family information, leads, and communications with spreadsheets, notebooks, and sticky notes. You can’t easily access the information you need because your data is stored in various, hard-to-find places. See how lead management comes into play by creating lead records, organising family information, and automating follow-up with families.
It’s essential to have a systemised way to acquire and capture family leads, organise their activities, and track follow-up tasks to generate more enrolments. A lead management system is a software that streamlines and organises all enrolment processes and transforms disorganised family information into easily accessible lead records. Keep in mind that a lead is any person who shows interest in your childcare centre by engaging with your content, ads, walks in, fills out an enquiry form, or sends another form of communication.
Benefits of a childcare lead management system.
There are several large lead management solutions in the market. The biggest solutions include features designed to meet everyone’s needs. These are a great option for companies like Amazon that are involved in dozens of industries but may not be the best fit for someone like you, a childcare professional working within a specific field.
A great lead management system should be designed for the childcare industry to help you organise new leads, enquiries, tours, waitlisting, and registration. Easily assign follow-up communications that nurture families to enrol.
It should be built for childcare businesses, from automating collecting prospective parent information to creating workflows and integrating with software to keep family data fresh. Find a niche lead management system that's customisable and focused on your childcare industry-specific needs.
Other Key Benefits Include
- Increased occupancy.
- Improved parent enrolment experience.
- Get real-time insights across childcare centres.
- Save time with marketing automation.
- The ability to attract interest with integrations.
- Effortlessly organise family data for new leads.
- The ability to run standard and detailed analytics.
- Improved communication with families.
- Learn more about the benefits of efficiently managing a childcare lead management system.
The difference between Centre Management and Lead Management.
Keep in mind, lead management is different than centre management because lead management systems run by using CRM (customer relationship management) software to manage enquiries and leads more efficiently. CRM software helps you grow your childcare business with less work by automatically organising family information, leads, and communications all in one place. On the other hand, CMS software helps you manage families after enrolment.
Although CRM software is more suited for actual lead management, both solutions can talk to each other to keep family data in synch. For example, a partner integration pairs your CRM software with your CMS software – if you integrate a CRM with the management system like Kangarootime, lead records automatically update in both systems.
How does Lead Management within a CRM work?
Lead management software uses automated processes to achieve enrolment initiatives by sending fast follow-up communications. An efficient way to run a lead management system is to use childcare-focused CRM (customer relationship management) software. A CRM helps childcare businesses better manage prospective families and retain them, while proactively building relationships.
Because CRM software keeps family information organised in one place, you can easily get your hands on lead contact information, parent names, and child’s name with just a few clicks. It’s great for personalising communications that help parents navigate the enrolment journey. Typically, CRM lead management follows these steps...
1. Lead organisation – Parent information and initial enquiries are organised so you can automate follow-up responses. After all, the likelihood of gaining a new lead significantly drops 21 times if you respond to parents in 30 minutes, compared to 5 minutes. You need a lead management platform that quickly stores data after a parent’s initial enquiry to respond fast or leads will slip through the cracks.
2. Lead qualification – Once a family lead enters the system, ensure they’re actually searching for care – and in your area. Next, do they fit one of your segments or your ideal parent audience? Qualify the lead by accepting it – and your CRM software will help guide them to schedule a tour, complete registration, and pay fees online.
3. Monitor lead progress. After you qualify the family lead, the best CRM software monitors and visibly displays the progress of each family. See which communication and enrolment tasks need to be assigned. Know how long it’s been since each task was completed with a lead progress bar.
4. Lead generation and increasing quality leads are top priorities for 68% of professionals. Get the most out of your CRM with landing pages and web forms that turn your website into a lead generator. Increase the number of families that find your childcare business and commit to care.
5. Lead reporting details where families hear about your childcare business, which enrolment efforts gain the most attention, and help you make data-driven decisions about future initiatives. For marketing leaders and directors, track staff performance to ensure tasks are completed in a timely manner. Improve productivity and enhance oversight with reports to save marketing dollars.
6. Efficiently nurture leads after viewing reports on your most successful enrolment efforts. Build and send personalised communications, behaviour-based advertisement campaigns, and automated messages.
Essential Lead Management Features
Now you know what lead management in childcare CRM software looks like – but what are the most crucial features that boost enrolment?
Stay organised with a family hub.
Excel spreadsheets can be good for managing basic data, but not so good for managing and building relationships with families. Organise information and follow up fast with a cloud-based childcare centre customer relationship manager.
For example, LineLeader software is specifically designed to organise your family information, leads, and communications—all in one place. Manage family records—from information and activities to meetings, messages, and tasks—all while keeping tabs on current enrolment statuses. Plus, quickly see family information at a glance.
Create workflow automations to follow up with every lead, faster.
Workflow automation takes repetitive tasks off your staff’s hands. Use workflow automation to easily guide parents to enrolment and improve parent satisfaction with prompt responses. For example, easily automate email communications for new enquiries, scheduled tours, post-tour engagement, waitlist sign-ups, enrolment reminders, and more. Consistently communicate with families throughout the entire journey to enrolment.
Use dashboards and standard reports to monitor enrolment success.
Spend your marketing dollars wisely. See which lead sources generate the most enrolments and understand your top enquiry types with easy-to-read reports that display information in charts, graphs, or other visual ways.
Know how many families are in each enrolment status by quickly seeing your updated enrolment progress for leads by individual centre, regional, or corporate levels. You can see everything on your team's plate, like tasks, tours, and meetings to increase efficiency, productivity, and organisation across all your centre locations. Further, use the data to enhance future enrolment initiatives.
Expanded Lead Management Features for Childcare Enterprises
Quickly overseeing leads for every team is hard without centralised software. For larger childcare enterprises with multiple locations and teams at both corporate and centre levels – saving time has never been more vital. Save time with less work by using features that automate your marketing and follow-up, organise lead capture, scale lead generation, and implement integrations to boost enrolment.
Automate your advertising and marketing campaigns.
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Email and Text Templates – spend less time writing emails and/or texts by storing templates with brand elements (logos, colours, fonts). For multiple childcare brands or franchises, store various brand elements to keep the imagery consistent. That way, more family leads will recognise your childcare centres.
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Drip Campaigns – take advantage of behaviour-based visual workflows to easily build email campaigns. Drip campaigns allow you to communicate with prospective families based on how they interact with the content you share. Build professional email campaigns to save teams and centre directors more than 40 hours of work every month. Drip campaigns are also powerful tools for re-engaging families who have become disengaged and may be considered a lost opportunity.
Generate and capture more family leads with ease.
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Fill your centres and waitlists by attracting and capturing more leads. With a variety of lead sources, you need software that automatically sorts families for easy access.
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Take advantage of LineLeader’s Facebook integration. Integrate Facebook Messenger and Facebook Lead Ads with LineLeader to answer parents’ questions in real-time and capture more leads.
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Attract interest with childcare listing directories. Easily integrate childcare listing directories like Toddle, and Careforkids directly into LineLeader. You’ll keep families happy and organised by integrating all lead enquiries into a single system.
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Optimise your website with custom web forms and landing pages. Create web forms and landing pages that capture important family information, then drop them straight into your CRM. Capture more web leads with ease, as they continue to increase. Enhance your website and use it as a lead generator.
Track performance with in-depth reporting.
Understand how marketing is performing across centres and make data-driven decisions on where you can improve. See detailed analytics and lead sourcing tracking with reports to measure how efficiently your marketing budget and resources are being spent.
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Track enrolment trends. Report on leads, tours, enrolments, and more by week, month, quarter, or year to develop proactive marketing strategies. Create these strategies to never lose out on gaining leads again.
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Understand conversion success. Report on conversions for each stage of the enrolment journey and analyse by child age group, lead source, marketing campaign, and more.
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Analyse campaign results. See which marketing campaigns are producing enrolments so you can double down on your best converting campaigns.
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Know where your leads are coming from. Track lead sources—website, search engines, direct mail, referrals, and more— to understand where families are coming from, and which sources are most effective.
LineLeader Enhances Lead Management
LineLeader is your key to streamlining the enrolment journey by organising leads, follow-up, and ensuring easy access to the data you need to boost enrolment.
Schedule a demo to see how your childcare business can save time and grow with better lead management provided by LineLeader.
