Guide to Choosing the Right Childcare CRM
The guide explains that choosing the right Childcare CRM system is essential for boosting enrolment, streamlining sales and marketing, improving parent communication, and increasing productivity by automating tasks, providing real-time insights, and enabling detailed marketing campaigns, ultimately helping childcare organisations grow efficiently and retain more families.
Check Out How Choosing the Right CRM Positively Impacts Enrolment
The right CRM for your childcare organisation can boost enrolment, save time, and simplify sales and marketing. But choosing the best CRM takes careful consideration.
View our latest guide to learn why having a CRM is essential to success, who should be included in platform evaluation, and essential CRM features.
What Is a CRM System?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to the strategies and tools used by organisations to manage both potential and current families to optimise conversion success and increase revenue.
CRM software simplifies sales and marketing, boosts enrolment, and improves productivity. With the right CRM, you can automate sales and marketing activities, streamline communications, simplify task management, get real-time reporting, and register parents online.
Many CRMs gather data from multiple sources to provide a comprehensive view of a family and any past communications. This insight allows you to build long-lasting, meaningful relationships that help you stand out against other childcare centres.
Businesses that utilise CRM software see a 47% higher customer retention rate than those that do not. CRM software helps you grow your childcare business with less work.
Key CRM Benefits
- Increased enrolment
- Improved parent enrolment experience
- Real-time insights across childcare centres
- Standardised marketing through automation
- Reduced staff turnover and decreased new employee ramp time
- Ability to run detailed marketing campaigns
- Improved communication with families
Why Is Having a CRM Essential for Your Childcare Organisation?
Managing childcare sales and marketing without the right software is frustrating. Leads and follow-up slip through the cracks. Oversight and accountability are hard to come by. You can’t get real-time visibility into the metrics you need to grow your childcare organisation. This leads to lower enrolment and reduced retention.
CRM Versus Pen, Paper, and Spreadsheets
Many childcare organisations still manage new inquiries with pen and paper or spreadsheets, resulting in inconsistent, slower follow-up and missed opportunities. A recent study found that the childcare centre that follows up with a prospective family first has an 80% higher likelihood of gaining that enrolment. Using a CRM to manage new enquiries and family contacts automates marketing communications and increases organisation within your enrolment process.
Benefits of an Industry-Focused CRM
A great CRM eliminates extra hours of work, helping your team do more in less time. Parents expect fast, convenient experiences from their childcare provider. An industry-focused CRM helps you respond to enquiries faster and stay connected through text messaging—the communication medium of choice for today’s millennial parents. A specific childcare CRM ensures everyone in your pipeline receives timely communications through automation.
Who Should Choose Your Childcare CRM Platform
Choosing a CRM platform is an important decision that requires careful consideration. The right people on your team need to be involved.
Single Centres
The key decision-maker should be the owner or director of the centre. The director will use the CRM daily to manage sales and marketing tasks. The owner and director will also be interested in reports that help optimise marketing spend, manage performance, and estimate revenue.
Multiple Centres
The key decision-maker should be in marketing, sales/enrolment, or communications. This team will use the CRM every day to automate sales and marketing activities, streamline communications, simplify task management, get real-time reporting, and register parents online.
Involve those marketing your centre and overseeing communication with prospective families. They should be included in the demonstration process of CRM platforms you are evaluating.
How to Evaluate Your CRM Options
Outline Your Growth and Marketing Goals
Determine your current classroom availability and what capacity your centre(s) need to reach for sustainable profitability. Set measurable objectives for yourself and your team to achieve your goals and grow your childcare business.
Research CRM Options Based on Your Goals
Once you’ve outlined your metrics and understand how many students you want to enrol or how many tours you need to give for higher conversion rates, look at CRM options with proven track records of helping organisations like yours meet similar goals.
Set a Go Live Date for Implementation
Be mindful of how many staff members you need to train and get an estimate from your CRM’s implementation team on how long it takes to learn the software. A user-friendly CRM system will help your staff transition and implement a new platform more easily. Work with your implementation specialist on transferring contacts and important family data.
Map Out Key Milestones Necessary to Start Proving Value
Some examples of key milestones when beginning your journey with a CRM are:
- Send and receive your first emails and texts—both individual and group communications.
- Track new leads and where they are coming from to measure the return on investment of marketing and advertising campaigns.
- Assign tasks and regularly monitor how quickly they are being completed by your staff.
CRM Essential Features
The best CRM features allow you to automate sales, marketing, and communication tasks. Easily view the performance of each centre with a CRM to adjust your enrolment initiatives.
Lead and Child Management
Look for a solution that helps you manage all incoming family leads and is tailored to the childcare industry—tracking parents and their children.
Task Management
Choose a solution that makes it easy to manage and prioritise daily tasks. You’ll want easy task sorting by today’s tasks, past tasks, and future tasks. If you’re managing a team, you’ll also want the ability to create and assign tasks to team members and see task statuses across your team.
Automated Communications
Automate communications to save time and manual work. Look for a solution that enables you to create, customise, and personalise email and text templates, automate their delivery, and track replies.
Text Communications
Millennials are quickly becoming the world’s most numerous generation, and many are parents. Studies show that 60% of millennials like to communicate with businesses via text messaging. Text messaging is less invasive than phone calls and more personal than email. Childcare centres that use text to communicate see higher and faster response rates. Open rates for texts are as high as 98%, and on average, it only takes 90 seconds for someone to respond to a text.
Text messages such as tour scheduling reminders and payment reminders are convenient, fast, and flexible. If your CRM does not provide a tool for sending and receiving text messages, you may miss out on prospective families and enrolments.
Lead Capture
Capture family interest with web forms. You need the ability to create unlimited landing pages for various marketing and enrolment initiatives, with web forms that flow directly into your CRM platform.
Self-Scheduled Tours
Top-performing centres book nearly 80% of parent tours within 24 hours. Millennial parents especially like the convenience of self-scheduled tours. Choose a CRM platform that gives parents the ability to schedule tours right from your website.
- Save time and get organised: See all your family information in one place and easily review all communications.
- Increase conversion rates: Communicate with leads more quickly and consistently.
- Scale personalised interactions: Send personalised emails to leads throughout the enrolment journey.
- Develop better targeting: Segment leads by program type and start date to send more targeted content.
- Build a strong brand image: Make a strong impression through the enrolment journey from enquiry to enrolment.
Dashboard Reporting
Dashboard reporting allows childcare organisations to focus on lead behaviour, improve the enrolment experience, and increase family retention. The best CRM platform visualises your data in real-time to easily share with centre directors and staff. CRM reports help organisations identify and enrol families with precision.
Some of the most important reports your childcare centre needs are:
- Lead Sources: Where your leads are coming from.
- Task Completion: How many tasks are completed on time versus those that are overdue.
- Response Rate: How quickly you and your centre’s staff are following up with families.
- Enrolment Rate: How many leads enter your system and move onto an enrolled or waitlisted status.
Online Parent Enrolment
Paper forms are often extensive and time-consuming. Having the ability for parents to register for your childcare centre online makes the process more intuitive and error-proof. You’ll find fewer data entry mistakes or errors in important contact information.
Integration with Childcare Listing Directories
Choose a CRM that integrates seamlessly with childcare listing directories like Toddle or Careforkids so you can increase your incoming leads and have them flow directly into your CRM for follow-up and marketing automation.
Integration with Childcare Management Systems
Software integrations save time and improve data quality. Look for a CRM solution that has proven integrations with key childcare management systems like Kidsoft, Qikkids, or Xplor.
Document Attachments
Having a CRM with the ability to attach documents is essential for your childcare business.
Mobile App
Make sure the CRM provider you choose also has a mobile application for on-the-go access.
Simple, Easy to Use Interface
Choose a CRM that’s easy to use for you and your staff. The more intuitive the interface, the less training and onboarding you’ll need.
Cloud-Based Software
Choose cloud-based CRM software that you can access anywhere, anytime on the web.
Security
Your CRM should be securely encrypted and managed by a team with experience protecting their platform. Each CRM provider should have documentation about their security measures and best practices.
CRM Essential Services and Support
Look for these essential services and support options from the software providers you evaluate:
Implementation and Training
Choose an experienced provider that has proven implementations at thousands of childcare centres. Look for a CRM provider that can guide you through implementation, providing best practices and recommendations.
Free, Live Customer Support
Look for a CRM company that gives you free support via chat, phone, or email, as well as self-service support through a knowledge base.
Expanded Features for Enterprise or Franchise Organisations
Customisable Workflow Automations
Workflow automation allows your teams to automatically send and schedule communications, post-tour messages, waitlist engagements, and other marketing emails or texts.
Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns can be used throughout the prospective parent’s journey to enrolment and for re-engaging families who have become disengaged. These campaigns allow you to communicate with prospective families based on how they interact with your content.
Document Storage
Ensure your CRM solution also stores commonly used attachments and files sent by new leads.
Custom Reporting and Analytics
For larger organisations, look for CRM software with customisable reports and capabilities with extensive filtering, selection, and exporting options.
Multi-centre Views
Look for a CRM provider that gives you multi-centre views so you can manage your enrolment pipeline in real-time across centres.
Multi-centre Branding
Choose a CRM solution that gives you branding flexibility so you can handle multiple brands within your organisation. Ensure locations can be tagged by brand, templates can be set up by brand, and reports can be run by brand or location group.