Top 10 Daycare Lead Nurturing Tips to Boost Enrollment

The article emphasizes the importance of lead nurturing in daycare businesses to boost enrollment by using personalized, consistent marketing strategies, starting with clear goals, automating communications, and developing an ideal customer persona to target and engage prospective families effectively.

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 competitors. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Daycare lead nurturing is at the core of childcare success.

The good news is there are simple best practices you can adopt right now to strengthen your childcare business with lead nurturing. Here are the top tips:

1) Start with a goal

To be successful in nurturing families, it's important to have a plan in place. This allows you to 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. If 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.

If 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 automate your communications. This way, parents get reminders and helpful suggestions automatically sent their way when they're ready for them.

2) Develop your ideal customer persona

Knowing your ideal customer persona (ICP) allows you to craft targeted messages that speak directly to them. Your ICP is a segment of your daycare target market—one primary group to become your ideal audience for advertisements, email nurture, social posts, and more. Select a group that makes sense for what your childcare business offers, 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. 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.

3) Ask the right questions to determine your lead management framework

Evaluate the stability of your lead management strategy by asking:

1.How many family leads do you generate each month?
2.What’s the main source/place your leads are coming from?
3.Do you have any new or upcoming features, amenities, or programs that could attract interest?
4.How are leads organized, managed, and nurtured across your centers?
5.Could your lead management process become simpler with the help of industry-specific technology?

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, they could live too far away or have an irregular schedule that you can't accommodate.

To achieve lead nurturing success, you need to occasionally disqualify families that won't ever enroll at your center.

How to Disqualify Leads

Stick with families that match your ideal customer persona. 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.

Automate an email or text (to disqualify or qualify people that aren’t the right fit for your center) based on these guidelines:

5) Make it easy for families to respond

80% of the benefit of lead nurturing is achieved by the first 20% of effort. Be prompt, responding quickly from the initial inquiry through registration. 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.

Use landing pages to manage family leads that inquire online. 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.

6) Build your content engine

Fuel your content engine with messages that provide value to families. The foundation of successful lead nurturing is exceptional content—blog posts, 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.

Track these metrics:

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 – average length of time visitors spent on your blog page
Bounce Rate – how many visitors came to your blog article and exited quickly
Top Traffic Posts – your most popular content pieces, based on unique entrances

7) Send relevant and timely communications

75% of customers are more likely to buy from brands that offer personalized digital experiences.

Segment your campaign 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.

Tips:

Repetition is key. Use similar messaging and imagery so 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 enrollment pipeline. The ideal range to properly nurture families through enrollment 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.

9) Drive parents to your 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 vital for 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 needs to convert more leads and decides to throw a holiday event for prospective families, a landing page with center contact information, directions, and a relevant inquiry request form is useful for getting families to sign up.

10) Track, test, and adjust your campaign results

Test Your Subject Lines and Header Copy

Test two versions of your campaigns to see what your audience is interested in. 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 allows you to access and run all the reports you need in one place, so you can eliminate manual processes that eat up your time.

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. Apply what worked to future campaigns to 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

Tracking lead source data will tell you:

Which marketing channels and efforts encourage your families to enroll the most
How families prefer to contact your childcare business
Which communication efforts you should use more based on your primary lead sources

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 a solution for optimizing lead management and keeping parents engaged throughout enrollment and beyond. Give your staff more time 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

Content Resources

1.Discover how to boost enrollment with a proven lead nurturing strategy for your centers.
2.Get expert childcare marketing tips from real professionals - like you.
3.Learn how to use landing pages to effectively fill your enrollment spots.