As a childcare owner, you need a solution for responding to prospective parents fast enough and understanding where they’re coming from. Spending hours building your waitlist only to let waitlisted parents fall through the cracks due to a lack of timely communication is a disaster for your business, costing you time, money, and resources.
To optimize the parent experience and grow your revenue, it’s essential to automate your enrollment funnel. Using leads management and online registration software will let you deploy marketing and follow-up communication strategies that are most effective. Not just that, it empowers you to keep track of the needs of waitlisted families, automate follow-ups and personalize your enrollment experience to improve parent communication.
With various options for childcare centers, here’s why you should use Illumine to manage your waitlist and keep families in your enrollment pipeline.
Disadvantages of offline registration
Gone are the days of using pen and paper. Now, childcare admissions can be digitized with online registration software. If you’re still stuck in the dark ages, here are the setbacks you’re likely to face:
- Limited to a single branch: Running a daycare franchise? Centralizing the offline admission data for different branches will be a logistical nightmare.
- Less flexibility: You’re losing out on business with on-the-go millennial parents who would avoid the hassle of altering their schedule to fill an admission form offline.
- Low security: An Intel Security report holds employees responsible for 43% of loss of offline data, half of which is intentional, half accidental.
- Unskilled workforce: As strategies for boosting enrollment rates keep evolving, your new and old staff will need regular training, which will cost you dearly.
Don’t be discouraged yet. You can document all the information from each interaction with parents while keeping it secure with online registration software.
Also read: 5 ways technology is transforming childcare centers
Advantages of online registration
Here’s why you need to use admission pipeline management software to optimize each stage in your enrollment, from inquiry to registration.
1. Document family information with online registration forms
Capturing lead information beyond the child’s name and age will help you foster a personal relationship with the parents and have a competitive advantage over other childcare providers. Parents can conveniently autofill an online admission form on their mobile or desktop anytime and anywhere, which will make the enrollment process faster.
2. Follow up with a new lead faster
When communicating with millennial parents, a speedy response is crucial. A childcare provider has an 80% chance of enrolling a prospective family if they follow up first. The optimal lead response time is 5 minutes after the inquiry is posted. But how do you respond to a parent inquiry outside of your working hours?
That’s where online admission software helps – you can automate a response to the inquiry you receive on the registration form on your website.
Also read: 12 Toughest Challenges Faced by Childcare Owners in 2022
3. Engage your waitlist
Have you reached capacity at your childcare and had to turn away a child? With online waitlist management software, you won’t lose another revenue source. Create a waitlist with the help of the data you’ve collected from admission forms and warm the leads by sending them regular emails, like the one below. Illumine lets you send emails and automate them at every stage of the leads cycle from the platform internally.
You keep them interested enough to wait until a spot opens up in your center, helping you cut on advertising costs.
Also read: 15 Proven Daycare Advertising Ideas to Onboard 5X Parents
How Illumine helps with online registration
Here’s how our childcare CRM ensures your center has a healthy enrollment pipeline by automating lead capture, lead management, and admission pipeline management.
Enrollment stage 1: Lead inquiry
Filling out paperwork manually is time-consuming for both the parent as well as the staff. It takes nearly 2 weeks for a family to return their paper forms. It takes twice as long for the teachers to enter the data in Excel, reducing teaching productivity and efficiency. While manual registrations take two months to the process, online enrollment with Illumine only takes 2-4 days.
Offer millennial parents an option to enroll their children online by including a digital enrollment form on the childcare website. It’s a foolproof way to boost conversions and make registrations easy and convenient. e. With Illumine, you can customize the fields of the form and ask the parents as many additional questions as you want to gather ample data on customer behavior. You can plugin the form on your website and as soon as the parent fills in the details it gets created in Illumine. You and your team can also modify the lead status depending on where the parent is in their unique enrollment journey.
Enrollment stage 2: Follow up with lead
Want your center to remain on top of mind for parents? With Illumine, you can create a task for yourself or for your staff to follow up with an interested family. This way, you can prioritize parents who want to start childcare assistance early and put families in the waitlist who haven’t yet decided if they want to enroll.
You can also communicate with teachers anytime, anywhere by passing them notes on the latest communication you had with the new parents. This step eliminates any miscommunication challenges a preschool teacher faces. By creating a reminder for them on Illumine, you rest easy knowing each prospective parent receives the same rate of quick follow-up.
Enrollment stage 3: Use real-time reporting on our childcare CRM
Without reliable lead reporting, your revenue will stop growing and as a result, your center may shut down.
Reporting helps you estimate your potential revenue so you can budget marketing, hiring, and construction. With Illumine, you can easily know which source you’re getting leads from and which campaigns helped you land new families. You can invest in those rather than draining money in daycare marketing strategies that bear no fruit.
Moreover, you and your staff can see who’s on the waitlist on our powerful childcare CRM dashboard. Our CRM is intuitive and easy to use, helping you deeply understand if you’ve huge demand for a childcare branch as opposed to other franchise centers. Know where you should establish new centers or open a new classroom with Illumine’s real-time reporting.
Our conversion report will give you accurate information about how many leads are converting and at which stage of the enrollment process. You can analyze how long the conversion takes so you can work on strategies to shorten the funnel. With Illumine, you can also analyze which age groups you’re attracting the most.
Tip: If you want to achieve the best conversion rate in the childcare industry (73%) and stand out from the rest of the centers, choose Illumine over industry-agnostic CRMs. Hubspot and Salesforce, although big players, lack childcare-specific fields and are not fit for your niche field.
Enrollment stage 4: Manage your waitlist
If a parent requests a start date that is months or a year ahead, make them feel involved and enable them to experience your childcare center’s values and ethos with regular communication.
On Illumine, you can use our no-code, drag-and-drop editor to create a newsletter and send it bimonthly to a segmented list of waitlisted families. This step will ensure they see you as the best choice for their child. For instance, by sharing communication about how to include healthy options in a child’s diet, you’re framing yourself as a center that cares about the child’s physical well-being.
Enrollment stage 4: Automating your lead tasks and emails
Illumine’s lead generation software helps you automate your follow-ups, and lets you schedule tours and emails with a click of a button
Never miss another follow-up.
Get reminders on upcoming tasks and stay on top of every lead. Leads flow directly into Illumine for automated, fast follow-ups ensuring no opportunities fall through the cracks.
Hassle-free tour scheduling
Enable parents to easily book and schedule tours directly from your website eliminating back-and-forth cancellations and an increase in visitor rate.
Personalize your emails
Our drag-and-drop email editor or built-in email templates lets you save customized emails and allows you to send them to your parents.
Advantages of lead management with Illumine
From viewing important family information at one glance to managing waitlists and assigning follow-ups, there’s nothing that Illumine can’t enable you to do. Here are the pros of choosing Illumine over other childcare CRMs and online registration software.
Save time, money, and efforts
Once you decide to use our system, you will be able to learn more about the platforms and social networks that your potential customers use thanks to our thorough reporting, which is displayed in simple-to-read standard reports. Simply look at the places where new families are learning about your daycare or making inquiries, and then alter your advertising budget to make more use of these well-known channels. By doing this, you will cut down on unnecessary spending on childcare budget, efforts, and time.
A seamless experience for parents
40% of millennial parents prefer self-service over face-to-face interaction. To serve them, more than 100 childcare facilities have teamed up with us to embed digital registration forms on their website.
As a result, there will be a higher success rate for daycare enrollment since families will be contacted in a way that increases the likelihood that they would reply. Families are furthermore more likely to sign up for care at your childcare facility if they feel that their requirements are being handled in a manner that they want.
Also read: All You Need to Know About Childcare Management
Segment your parent audience
Even if they engage with you, not every parent will convert or advance to the next level of the registration process. And that’s fine, but it’s crucial to take the initiative by figuring out who your ideal parent audience is in order to better your targeting and advertising efforts.
With the help of Illumine’s childcare CRM dashboard, you can identify problem areas by seeing where families are leaving. Customize each stage of the parenting journey, standardize enrollment across all your centers, and make sure every family has a world-class experience.
Automate emails and task creation
Do you find yourself having to send the same email over and over when a lead changes from waitlisted to admit? Use our lead automation feature to set up emails or action items ahead of time. Once you’re done, these emails and tasks will be generated automatically by our system!
Wrap up
As a childcare provider, are you losing precious time on paperwork and chasing missing information from families? Offer digital admissions with Illumine to capture important registration information like centers they’re interested in enrolling, parent information, emergency contact, etc. Let parents e-sign enrollment packets to save time and make admissions smoother for them.
With Illumine, you can personalize parent communication and improve your marketing campaigns to secure more enrollments using the reporting feature of our childcare CRM. Prioritize the top-performing channels for your business today to get more leads by booking a demo with childcare experts from Illumine.
.svg)
