How to navigate the parent enrolment journey.
A step-by-step guide for childcare with tips and best practices to help understand changing parent expectations.
Table of contents
- The Challenges with Today's Parent Experience
- The Parent Journey - Inconvenient and Time-Consuming
- Standardise Enrolment Across Childcare Centres or Franchise Locations
- Offer Easy Ways for Parents to Enquire Online, Then Respond Quickly
- Enable Parents to Self-Serve
- Communicate the Way Parents Want
- Guide Parents through the Journey
- The Impact of Covid-19 on Childcare Businesses, Parents, and Children
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Check Out the Guide
Changing parent expectations have created an environment where the old way of managing the parent experience from initial enquiry through family retention doesn’t work anymore. It’s inconvenient, time-consuming, and full of obstacles that cause families to choose another childcare centre altogether.
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Childcare organisations that make the parent experience digital and convenient will grow enrolment, increase retention, and remain competitive in the childcare market. In this guide, you'll view the key takeaways from our research and provided recommendations to help you grow your business by optimising the parent experience.
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The Challenges with Today's Parent Experience.
The parent experience defines the journey a parent takes from initial enquiry to retention, including key conversion points along the way. Today’s parent experience is often a series of starts and stops that can take several months. It is inconvenient, time-consuming, and full of obstacles that cause families to choose another childcare centre altogether.
A recent LineLeader enterprise customer explains, “Our families have indicated dissatisfaction with the current enrolment process. Families told us that our process for enrolment was lengthy, painful, incorrect, information was lost, and lacked customer service satisfaction.”
Common challenges with the parent experience include:
- Slow or no response to new enquiries and tour requests.
- Wasted time with back-and-forth emails and calls to schedule a tour date.
- No follow-up after completed tours to discuss next steps.
- Time-consuming and lengthy enrolment paperwork.
- No options to pay enrolment and waitlist fees online.
- Sitting indefinitely on waitlists with little communication.
- Limited or no ongoing communication to encourage retention.
The Parent Journey - Inconvenient and Time-Consuming
There are many obstacles for parents to navigate as they move from initial enquiry to retention which contributes to a poor parent experience. With these obstacles, parent communication is affected.
Read more about the challenges of today's parent experience, why it isn't working, and how to fix it.
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Standardise enrolment across childcare centres.
For childcare organisations with multiple brands, schools, or programs - increasing revenue and keeping families happy is vital for growth. Your Millennial parents need a uniform, high-quality experience, regardless of location.
Standardising business processes has a significant impact on time savings, costs, and most notably on quality. In fact, standardisation improves quality by 61.9%, on average. Create consistent enrolment processes across all your franchise locations to ensure every family has a great experience and a positive association with your brand – leading to higher conversion success and profitability.
To achieve consistency, all location marketing approach and advertising material must follow all your corporate brand guidelines. Your organisation should have a lead management system that supports all other location staff as they guide families through the decision-making journey while also ensuring each centre is delivering a consistent parent experience.
Communicate the Way Parents Want
Each type of parent requires a level of quick, personalised follow-up - whether it's to generate prospective enrolments or reengage lost opportunities. Your target parent audience - Millennials - were one of the first generations to grow up in the digital age. Enhance your enrolment process with quick, streamlined communications.
60% of today’s parents prefer to communicate with businesses through text messaging. They see text messaging as less invasive than phone calls and more personal than other forms of communication, such as email. Childcare centres that use text messaging to communicate see higher and faster response rates. Compared to email, open rates for text messages are as high as 98%, and on average it only takes 90 seconds for someone to respond to a text.
Another important part of text messaging’s appeal to the Millennial audience is largely based on convenience, speed, and flexibility. Text messages such as tour and payment reminders are a great example of using text messaging to effectively communicate. In a recent survey, 48% of Millennials said they prefer to receive notices about payment information through text, while more than half preferred to receive appointment reminders through their mobile device.
LineLeader top converters send 13 times as many individual text messages and 76 times as many group text messages to their leads compared to the lowest converters. Use a few simple tactics to ensure your messages are as effective as possible. Keep messages short and to the point. Texts are viewed on smaller screens than most emails so the shorter the message, the better. Keep the tone friendly, rather than too formal. Texting a parent is a more personal communication than emailing so they expect the tone to match the channel of communication. Plus, the Marketing Rule of 7 states that you need to engage with a family seven times to gain that childcare enrolment.
Use group text messaging to communicate with new leads and engage your waitlist.
It’s essential that you stay top of mind with both enquiring and waitlisted families during the enrolment journey. Send group text messages at regular intervals to maintain their interest and keep them excited about enrolling at your centre.
Keep families updated about events, open houses, holiday hours, and more. Establish a personal connection by including the parent’s name either at the beginning of the text message or within the body.
Use individual text messaging to schedule tours, send reminders, and more.
Today’s parents are busier than ever before. It’s not uncommon for them to accidentally miss appointments because they didn’t receive a reminder. Keep parents on-track with automated tour and enrolment reminders.
Look for CRM software that enables both individual and group text messaging directly from the software. Automate text communications to nudge parents through the enrolment journey.
Provide multi-language options on forms.
In a 2021 survey by LineLeader, 56% of childcare owners and directors said that families at their centre request forms in languages other than English. A parent's inability to read registration forms in their native language prevents them from being able to fully understand the terms of care which leads to decreased conversion rates for those who use English as a second language.
Find a solution that offers enrolment forms in multiple languages so parents can easily complete forms in their preferred language.
Guide Parents through the Journey
There are many steps in the parent journey from new enquiry 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 that let them know what to do next and how to move forward. Use automated marketing to not only provide parents with clear, consistent communication, but also save staff time by minimising the number of manual email and text reminders they need to send.
LineLeader found that 5-10 workflow automations is the ideal number to guide families through to enrolment and retention, saving staff more than 40 hours of work every month. Workflow automations include pre-scheduled emails and text messages sent to families at each stage of the enrolment journey. For example, a new lead might get an immediate, automated ‘thank you’ email with information about your centre and a link to schedule a tour. After two days, a text message is automatically sent to remind the parent to check out your website and schedule a tour.
74% of marketers say that the biggest benefit of marketing automation is saving time. By automating outreach and follow-up efforts, reply rates can increase by 250%. Many marketers also saved 80% more time by setting appointments or meetings with an automated tool. While marketing automation clearly saves time on repetitive tasks, it also ensures all leads are followed up on and moving towards enrolment.
See a standard enrolment funnel to better understand how to help parents navigate each enrolment stage.
Use workflow automations to help families navigate enrolment and re-enrolment.
Consistent and fast follow-up is an essential component of childcare enrolment success. Marketing automation allows you to build email and text templates in advance. You can then schedule them to send to every family after a specific stage in the enrolment journey is complete.
Personalise each communication with information like the parent’s name, desired room, or special care requests. These communications ensure that parents move forward towards enrolment as quickly as possible all while saving hours of manual work for centre staff. Plus, you retain more children after a family's initial enrolment start date with streamlined communications and a consistent workflow.
Save staff time and reduce manual work with task management.
Nearly 70% of workers say the biggest opportunity for automation lies in reducing time wasted on repetitive work. Managing tasks for your entire team in CRM software is like having a virtual office assistant guiding everyone through their daily priorities.
Staff members can see their current and upcoming tasks in one place, and you can monitor progress towards completed tasks. Save hours each day, boost productivity, and increase organisation across your business with task management and automation.
Use software integrations to increase enrolment retention.
The average manual data entry error rate in management systems is 62%. Enabling your CRM software to automatically communicate with your Childcare Management System ensures that family information is accurate and stays up to date. For parents, this means that they don't have to enter the same information multiple times and that they won't miss out on important communications due to wrong information in their records.
63% of LineLeader centres integrate with Childcare Management Systems, ensuring higher rates of parent satisfaction and retention.
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Execution Plan: Marketing and Sales
The marketing and sales plan section of your business plan details how you propose to reach your target market segments, how you plan on converting those target markets, what your pricing model looks like, and what partnerships you may need to make your centre a success.
Your Positioning Statement
Once you understand your audience, the first part of your marketing and sales plan is your positioning statement. Refer back to your value proposition to create a simple, straightforward sentiment, explaining where your company sits within the competitive landscape and what differentiates your venue from the alternatives that a customer might consider. This statement should be written for an investor or loan provider, rather than for your customer.
For example, a positioning statement for a 24-hour childcare centre in Sydney, New South Wales may look like this:
“For the Sydney-based family who is seeking childcare around the clock, Jenny’s 24-Hour Childcare Centre is a safe option for young children with nutritional meals, best-in-industry sleeping arrangements, a clean outdoor play area, and highly trained care teachers and educators. Jenny’s 24-Hour Childcare Centre is the first centre of its kind within 10 km of the Sydney city centre and offers competitive pricing and competitive daily rates.”
Use this formula to develop a positioning statement for your centre:
Your Mission Statement
Your mission statement is a scaled-down version of your positioning statement. This should be just one-two sentences that are geared toward your target consumer and describe what your business plans to accomplish. This statement usually includes company core values that explain your childcare’s purpose and how you serve your audience.
For example, Busy Bees is a leading early childhood education provider with the mission of “high quality childcare and exciting learning opportunities that give every child the best start in life.”
Pricing
Your positioning strategy will typically determine how you price your memberships and packages. There are some basic rules that you should follow when deciding on your price point:
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Cost-plus pricing: For the most part, you should be charging your customers more than it costs you to host them at your centre to ensure your venue is profitable and is appealing to investors.
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Market-based pricing: Look at what your competitors are charging and then price based on what your audience is expecting.
Financial Forecasts
A typical financial plan will have monthly sales and revenue forecasts for the first 12 months, and then annual projections for the remaining three to five years. Break your sales forecast down into several rows, focusing on just high-level buckets at this point.
Knowing how much your childcare will cost to open ahead of time can save you money, stress, and time. Childcare start-up expenses vary by size, enrolment capacity, and miscellaneous needs.
Keep in mind that you can save on staffing costs and cut down on overhead with technology that helps to streamline your centre’s operations. After all, 40% of Millennials prefer self-service over human contact when interacting with businesses.
It’s essential that you find ways to enable families to book tours and enrol online without ever having to make a phone call to the centre- reducing time spent on necessary-but-manual tasks for both your staff and enquiring families.
Finally, articulate your profits and losses based on the data from your sales forecast and your personnel plan plus a list of all your other ongoing expenses associated with running your childcare centre.
Formula
Step 1: Average daily rate per child x your expected enrolments x 12 (annual revenue – assuming each family is still enrolled during the holiday periods).
Step 2: Childcare businesses make around 16% profit from their overall revenue, after Childcare expenses. Multiply your number from step 1 by .16 to get your predicted profit.
Example: Let’s say you plan to charge families an average of $110 per day for childcare. With that, your goal is to enrol 60 students by the time your childcare centre opens. Multiply ($110 x5) 60 x 12 (annual revenue). This should come out to $396,000. Lastly, multiply your revenue of $396,000 by .16, which equals a net profit of $63,360 per year.
How to gain enrolment at your childcare.
The next step after successfully starting your daycare business is to grow your centre and gain enrolments.
Begin by building a string company culture, actively marketing your childcare centre, and finding the right childcare technology to optimise your enrolment process and save time.
Create a culture where staff want to work.
A childcare centre that stands out from the rest has happy staff members that want to work hard. Create a diverse employee culture that feels comfortable openly talking about situations. Provide support, patience, and room for growth.
Market your centre.
A childcare marketing strategy starts with an achievable goal. Do you want to fill your enrolment spots? Do you want to build a waitlist? Should you focus on scheduling more tours?
Choose an objective and measurable results – so you can track and analyse your marketing performance.
Market, promote, and advertise your childcare centre with...
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Social media (especially Facebook – 83% of Millennials have a Facebook account).
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Landing pages and contact forms on your website
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Listing directories
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Email and text marketing campaigns
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Referrals
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Digital advertisements
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Flyers
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Word of mouth marketing
Tip: Childcare software that automates the reports you need helps you to saves time and improve your return on investment (ROI).
For example, with a Source of Families report, you can see where your leads are coming from. It helps you enhance your marketing efforts and refine your spending. Invest in the channels that are popular and spend less on the ones that aren’t working to generate more high-quality leads.
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