Growing and Engaging your Childcare Waitlist [Email Templates]

The Problem with Today's Enrollment Journey

Missing out on lead inquiries due to disorganization, slow response rates on communications, and having to manually input family information from registration paperwork makes the enrollment process lengthy. It wastes the staff's and parents' time. Plus, a lack of targeted outreach with no data monitoring leaves your teams with an inconsistent strategy.

Not to worry – from inquiry to registration, LineLeader by ChildcareCRM provides the ultimate childcare checklist for directors. Easily manage the enrollment journey with marketing automation features and tools to optimize the experience for parents. Discover how to increase conversion success and parent satisfaction across your multi-center organization. using our childcare checklist.

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What You Need to Know About Millennials

80% of today’s parents make up your target demographic – Millennials. Planning your advertising, communication, registration, and follow-up strategies to meet the needs of your target demographic increases the number of prospective families that convert. Since Millennial parents appreciate saving time and convenience, your business should consider the busy schedules of parents.

Build Connections with Families through Regular Communication

According to a 2015 survey by The Wall Street Journal, most Millennials view phone calls as “overly intrusive...as though you’re prioritizing your needs over theirs.”

Millennial parents prefer targeted text messages over impersonal, lengthy emails and phone calls. These more traditional forms of communication are often lost or overlooked by today’s parents. Plus, text messaging is seen as faster and less invasive. But above all, 60% of Millennials say they prefer texting when communicating with businesses.

Childcare centers that consider Millennial communication preferences by using texts see higher response rates. Compared to email, text messages have a high open rate of 98%.

Another important part of text messaging’s appeal to your Millennial audience is mainly due to convenience, speed, and flexibility. Texts allow parents to respond immediately or conveniently choose to wait until a better time, ensuring they have a flexible, self-service option for communicating with your center. Texts are also a more personal form of communication than email and allow your center directors and marketing staff to convey important messages quickly and in a friendly tone.

Organize and Assign Daily Tasks

Simply use LineLeader's task management functions to delegate and track tasks for your entire enrollment team. The ability to schedule or manage tasks and automate reminders is like having a helpful, virtual office assistant to guide you and your staff through your daily to-do list. Stay on track and prioritize your schedule seamlessly...

1) Manage Your Daily To-Do List

ChildcareCRM's task management tool can act as a virtual office assistant to maintain a timeline of tasks for each family. See what follow-up tasks need to be completed, assign yourself to a task, or keep your teams in the loop with which texts, emails, and phone calls need to be made. Oversee which prospective parents are coming in for a tour, access your calendar, and plan the center staff's daily schedule with ease.

3) Delegate and Assign Tasks to Your Staff

There are a variety of reasons why a family may be placed on your waitlist. For example, if a child has not yet been born, if they are moving into the area within the next few weeks or months, or maybe you’ve reached capacity at your center for the current enrollment period. But remember, you must stay top of mind with these waitlisted families as they could still be looking for care in other areas.

Use marketing automation to send email and text communications at regular intervals. You’ll maintain waitlisted parents’ interest and keep them excited about enrolling at your center. Nurture parents on your waitlist with relevant content—specific to the child’s age group or program of interest—and status updates as spots become open.

4) Keep Track of Tasks with an Audit Trail

Easily oversee your marketing and staff activity, as well as upcoming tasks, in one centralized place. An overview of a task assignment drop-down list with a completed results task list is accessible from the gear icon in your ‘to-do settings.’

An audit trail (you must turn on this feature within your CRM: Add-Ons – Families Add-Ons – then toggle the audit trail feature on). When enabled, the "All Activity" tab will have an alternate "Audit Trail" view that displays content in a table or view the timeline of assigned and completed tasks in the same location you manage tasks.

5) Monitor Task Completion Data

Under your ChildcareCRM ‘standard reports’ tab, simply keep track of scheduled tasks and tasks completed (communications, tours & meetings, conversion success) with easy-to-read data and charts. Utilizing this feature helps you understand task performance by location to optimize your follow-up strategy.

Increase Conversion Rates with Consistent Campaigns

Nowadays, parents have more options for care than ever before. Today’s parents inquire at 5-7 centers, tour 3-4, and deliberate between 2-3 before ever making a final choice. If you’re not staying top of mind for families as they search for care, your program will be left behind.

Occasionally, families are lost along the enrollment journey due to a lack of consistent, personalized communication that makes them feel valued. This makes or breaks family acquisition, especially if they’re on waitlists with multiple childcare centers.

1) Personalize Your Messaging

In short, customize your campaigns with personalization keys to drive engagement. Easily segment your families based on the child’s age, classroom, or desired start date. Then, select a group of families to address.

Tailor your language to the target audience and attend to them by using verbiage that speaks to their unique care needs or enrollment status. Ensure consistency across all your organizations with cohesive campaigns and improved reporting that helps you identify your ROI (return on investment). Simply build text and email templates for each center location or brand, but include personalization keys (child name, parent name, state, zip code, etc.) and add variable tags (brand logo/name/image, outbound location tags – Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., staff at center location/position, staff at organization location/position, task due date/task type, or user tags).

2) Automate Workflows to Effortlessly engage Families

Consistent follow-up through workflow automations generates 50% more enrollment-ready leads by maintaining a steady flow of communication with prospective parents. They encourage engagement and nurture families to enroll. Workflow automation allows you to:

Re-engage with lost opportunities by sharing relevant information about your childcare centers via email or text.
Communicate with families in your pipeline at every stage to help them navigate the enrollment journey.
Send automated text and email confirmations and reminders.

Streamline Enrollment with Integrations

Often, manual data entry errors happen when moving a lead from your customer relationship management software to your childcare management system. The average manual data entry error rate found in information management systems is 62%, meaning that roughly 37 of those 60 entries will prove to be inaccurate.

Additionally, childcare listing directories make it easy for parents to browse childcare centers nearby and view prices, reviews, and photos. Childcare centers can create a listing to showcase their programs, receive inquiries, and respond to reviews. When you integrate these platforms with LineLeader, new leads are automatically input as 'pending leads' allowing you to begin automating follow-up.

When you and your childcare staff (or marketing teams) are stuck sifting through inaccurate information – you lose countless hours that could’ve been used to follow up with leads or ensure current families are satisfied.

Minimize Manual Data Entry

Integrations streamline what are otherwise tiring, manual administrative processes. CMS (childcare management system) integrations, in particular, help decrease time-consuming tasks for you and your staff while minimizing data entry errors. This ensures you meet your enrollment quota, fill your waitlists, and speed up response times – all of which lead to greater enrollment success.

Generate More Leads Using Childcare Listing Directories

Childcare listing directories serve as an organized listing of childcare providers often grouped by location, services, or pricing that help you promote your childcare organization and get in front of actively searching parents to generate more leads.

A few examples include Winnie, Kinside, and Care.com. Get instant access to new leads and ensure each family is followed up with in a timely manner as they automatically move from the directory to your LineLeader platform.

Use Data-Driven Insights to Build your Childcare Marketing Strategy

Not surprisingly, data-driven childcare organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire families. Disorganized lead information paired with a lack of campaign analysis all contributes to a lack of clarity for your business. Analyzing the wrong data or simply not factoring recent marketing results into your strategy gives you no insight into which marketing efforts are working.

If campaign performance isn’t being monitored regularly, it’s difficult to know how to optimize your marketing budget to increase your ROI. Keeping track of your conversion success and lead source data are essential components of successful marketing and advertising efforts.

Adopt Paperless Forms to Simplify Registration

Based on our recent Building Blocks for Success Report, today’s parents are busy, task-oriented, and want to cut down on time-consuming enrollment processes. On average, families must repeat the same information in standard paper enrollment packets 9 times.

Don't waste time on manual childcare enrollment paperwork—sending reminders, deciphering handwriting, or chasing down missing information. LineLeader has scoured hundreds of childcare enrollment packets to create an industry-standard packet—available digitally.

Resources to help you run your childcare business.

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Master Enrollment Tasks with a Childcare Director Marketing Checklist

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Boost Enrollment by Having a Helpful Checklist in Your Pocket.