Top 10 Daycare Lead Nurturing Tips to Boost Enrollment

Top 10 Proven 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 3 3% 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.

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:

  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 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.

Top 6 Questions to Ask to Qualify/Disqualify Leads

  1. Does the child’s age fit my program
  2. Does the child have any unique care needs that we cannot meet
  3. What is the family’s desired care schedule
  4. Does the family live or work within a reasonable distance of the school
  5. Does the family fit our core values and principles or will they be hard for staff to manage and keep happy
  6. Will the family require financial assistance for childcare

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.

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.

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...

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:

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.

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?"

Track Campaign Results

Marketing reporting is a great tool for childcare providers and childcare directors to use.

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.

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.