Top 10 Tips for Daycare Lead Nurturing Success
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Why is lead nurturing important for childcare businesses?
Lead nurturing is a crucial part of the daycare business.
Without consistent, personalized marketing messages within your campaigns – you're likely to lose prospective families to the center across the street.
We all know it's important to nurture leads through your daycare lead nurturing process. But what if I told you that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost? That means daycare lead nurturing is at the core of childcare success.
The good news is there are some simple best practices you can adopt right now to strengthen your childcare business with lead nurturing. Here are our top tips:
1) Start with a goal.
When it comes to nurturing families, there are a lot of great ideas for how you can reach your goals. But if you want to be successful, it's important to have a plan in place. That way, you can track key metrics and achieve milestones as you go.
For example, if you want to gain more fall enrollments—break down what you could improve throughout your enrollment journey. Do the tour completion rates need improvement? Consider increasing the number of times you send tour communications out to families. Get creative – ask parents to respond with an emoji, send a gif, or attach a video that highlights the value of your center.
On the other hand, maybe your center needs to improve how many families fill out enrollment forms. Provide self-service options like digital forms so it's easier for families to finish and submit enrollment packets.
Tip: set up a drip campaign or even automate your communications. That way, parents get reminders and helpful suggestions automatically sent their way when they're ready for them! It's a win-win for your lead nurturing strategy.
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2) Develop your ideal customer persona.
When you know your ideal customer persona (ICP), you can craft a targeted message that speaks directly to them.
Your ICP is simply a segment of your daycare target market. You’re identifying one primary group to become your ideal audience for advertisements, email nurture, social posts, and more. It’s vital to select a group that makes sense for what your childcare business offers (programs/ages catered to), where it’s located, and its hours of operation - to ensure you’re finding and attracting highly qualified leads.
For example: if one of your centers offers full-time childcare, your target audience may be parents who have children under 5 years old. To break this down even further, most parents of children under the age of 12 are Millennials and Gen Z. Now, you have a unique bracket of parents to primarily market to – your ideal customer persona! Offer fast, digital choices and send valuable messages to garner interest from Millennial parents.
For more childcare marketing tips, check out this article for a strategy that sticks.
3) Ask the right questions to determine your lead management framework.
If you're a childcare provider or childcare director, you likely have some questions about how to manage your leads.
The truth is, we all do. It's hard to know what's working and what could be better when it comes to lead management. That's why we asked ourselves five key questions to evaluate the stability of our lead management strategy:
- How many family leads do you generate each month?
- What’s the main source/place your leads are coming from?
- Do you have any new or upcoming features, amenities, or programs that could attract interest?
- How are leads organized, managed, and nurtured across your centers?
- Could your lead management process become simpler with the help of industry-specific technology?
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4) Disqualify leads that aren't the best fit for your programs.
Not all families are right for your center – and that's okay. Even if a parent has a child within the appropriate age range of the programs your center offers, they could live too far away. Or it's possible that their schedule is irregular, and you don't presently have the staff to accommodate every family with flexible options.
Whatever the case, to achieve lead nurturing success, you need to occasionally disqualify the families that won't ever enroll at your center.
How to Disqualify Leads
You want to stick with families that match your ideal customer persona. To determine this, you need to consistently communicate beyond each initial inquiry.
Create a Disqualification Workflow
Workflows help build a sequence of tasks, processes, or follow-ups to automatically guide parents through each stage of your enrollment journey. Workflow automation saves you time and takes care of the hard work for you – engaging families that are in various stages of your enrollment pipeline.
The right software should automate sending these text messages or emails based on any status or condition you set. Always keep things positive, end these automated messages with a touch of humanity, and promise to reengage if their situation changes. Just because a process easily stores and sends messages for convenience, doesn't mean it has to lack personalization.
Plus, you can easily build a disqualification workflow. Automate an email or text (to disqualify or qualify people that aren’t the right fit for your center) based on these guidelines:
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Top 6 Questions to Ask to Qualify/Disqualify Leads
- Does the child’s age fit my program
- Does the child have any unique care needs that we cannot meet
- What is the family’s desired care schedule
- Does the family live or work within a reasonable distance of the school
- Does the family fit our core values and principles or will they be hard for staff to manage and keep happy
- Will the family require financial assistance for childcare
Gently tell families that your center, unfortunately, can’t meet their needs at this time.
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5) Make it easy for families to respond.
Did you know that 80% of the benefit of lead nurturing is achieved by the first 20% of effort?
That's right, you can do it! You just need to be prompt, responding promptly from the initial inquiry through registration. That way, you'll beat the center across the street to the punch. Plus, Millennial parents prefer digital, convenient options when they communicate with businesses. Respond via email, text message, web forms, commenting on social posts, replying via Facebook Messenger… whatever works for your business!
You can use landing pages to manage family leads that inquire online. Learn how to use landing pages to effectively fill your enrollment spots.
But don't stop there! When there are too many leads to be addressed promptly, automate follow-up communications to keep new families interested in your childcare brand over time so your childcare brand remains top of mind.
6) Build your content engine.
Fuel your content engine with messages that provide value to families. Often, the foundation of successful lead nurturing is exceptional content. This can be in the form of blog posts or articles, videos, or any other type of media that educates prospective families about your center. For example, share potty training tips for toddlers, and how to encourage education and learning at home.
- Page Views – number of unique entrances per blog article
- Traffic by Channel – number of sessions (based on different sources – direct, organic, paid social - ads, etc.)
- Time Spent on Page – the average length of time visitors spent on your blog page
- Bounce Rate – how many visitors came to your blog article and exited quickly (with little to no interaction)
- Top Traffic Posts – your most popular content pieces, based on unique entrances
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7) Send relevant and timely communications.
75% of customers are more likely to buy from brands that offer personalized digital experiences.
The first way to send relevant content is to segment your campaign. For your childcare centers, you may want to segment your audience and ICP by...
- Program of interest
- Child’s age
- Lead source
- Location
- Parent’s behavior
Use marketing automation to easily segment your leads to deliver valuable articles to the right families. Communicate in the right way at the right time to get real enrollment results.
8) Use multiple channels to remain top of mind.
The likelihood of enrolling a new family drops 21 times if you respond to parents in 30 minutes, compared to 5 minutes. In marketing, there’s a communication guideline called ‘The Rule of 7' that states a prospective family needs to hear, see, or read about your childcare program an average of seven times to become most likely to enroll. Follow these tips:
- Repetition is key. Use similar messaging and imagery, so that people become more familiar with you each time they see or hear about you. Consistent communication helps to build your brand and establish a reputation with families.
- Nurture and guide families through your enrolment pipeline. The ideal range to properly nurture families through enrolment is 5-10 workflow automations.
- Track your most popular sources to determine which channels your leads prefer. For example, if more families are finding you through Facebook, you may want to decrease your Google ad spend.
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9) Drive parents to your landing pages.
If you want to generate more leads for your childcare business, you need to have landing pages.
Landing pages are standalone pages on your website where you provide a solution or resource in exchange for someone’s contact information. Landing pages are a vital part of marketing your childcare center. They’re used for the specific purpose of converting website visitors to leads, and eventually to an enrolled or waitlisted status.
For example, if one of your centers that needs to convert more leads decides to throw a holiday event for prospective families, you may find a landing page with center contact information, directions, and a relevant inquiry request form useful for getting families to sign up.
10) Track, test, and adjust your campaign results.
Test Your Subject Lines and Header Copy
You can get a better idea of what your audience is interested in by testing two versions of your campaigns. For example, if you were sending out emails about a new program, you could test subject lines like: "Have you heard about our new program?" versus "Our new program is here! Have you heard?"
You'll be able to see which version gets more clicks and opens.
Track Campaign Results
Marketing reporting is a great tool for childcare providers and childcare directors to use.
Marketing reporting allows you to access and run all the reports you need in one place, so you can eliminate the manual processes that eat up your time.
Marketing Campaign ROI Report
One of the most important reports is the Marketing Campaign ROI Report. This report shows which campaigns are leading to enrollments, so you can identify which marketing efforts are successful for your business. Then, apply what worked to future campaigns. This will all lead to higher conversion rates and will help improve your ROI (return on investment).
Most marketing professionals recommend looking at campaign data once a week to learn which channels are working the best.
Use a Source of Families Report to monitor success.
It can be hard to figure out which marketing efforts and channels are worth your precious time and money. That's why we've put together this easy-to-read guide to help you track your lead sources, so you can better focus on the ones that will yield the best results for your business.
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 spending 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
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Streamline lead nurture with LineLeader.
Today’s enrollment journey is full of lengthy processes for you, your staff, and even for parents. You need to make lead nurture simpler – for everyone.
LineLeader Enroll is your ultimate solution for optimizing lead management and keeping parents engaged throughout enrollment and beyond. Give your staff 10 hours back each week with...
- Ultimate lead organization and management
- Marketing automation to keep nurture consistent
- In-depth reports to gain real-time insights that help you enhance your campaigns
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