A parent’s enrollment journey can be filled with a number of challenges as they try their best to enroll their child in the right Montessori school. Schools that help a parent overcome the usual challenges to improve and optimize their experience come out on top here. Understanding the parent enrollment lifecycle and how it works with respect to your Montessori school can help you identify common pain points and areas of improvement. How do you do that, though? Read on as we discuss the various components that make up a parent’s enrollment lifecycle and how you can improve them.
1. Start With Your Website
A parent’s enrollment journey often begins with their search for information on Montessori schools in the area. They usually use the internet, particularly search engines like Google, for this purpose. Fun fact: 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
This is where your website comes in. Your Montessori school is easily one of your most important digital assets here. Having a user-friendly website with an effective layout, good pictures, and informative content can deliver the right impression on a prospective parent, encouraging them to find out more about your Montessori school. You can also optimize your website to rank high on search engines or invest in search engine marketing. This can improve your visibility online and drive more traffic to your website.
2. Offer a Useful Resource and Get Parents to Subscribe
The second thing you need to do to optimize a parent enrollment lifecycle is offer a free resource that encourages parents to sign up for your mailing list. This initiative is for prospective parents who have visited your website but aren’t ready to enroll their child at your school yet. You can add an appealing content offer, such as a viewbook, to get their contact information. Once you have this information, you can use it to nurture leads and tell parents more about your Montessori school to gain their trust.
If you are interested in learning more about the kind of content offers you can make, read 5 Marketing Strategies to Increase Montessori Enrollment.
3. Arrange an Exciting Tour
If you have successfully nurtured a lead, then these parents will likely want to take a tour of your school. Making this process easy for them can help you make a good impression from the get-go. For example, you could allow parents to automatically schedule a tour using software like Calendly instead of having them call you up and do it manually.
Other things to keep in mind include starting the tour on time, making sure the tour is informative and addresses a parent’s concerns and questions, and organizing it in a manner such that parents can quickly grasp vital information without getting bored.
You can also do a virtual tour. These tours offer more convenience to parents as they can join in from the vicinity of their home. Virtual tours provide greater 1:1 time with prospective parents, allowing Admissions Directors to connect with parents in a way that can’t be done with in-person group tours.
4. Streamline the Application Process
At this stage of the parent enrollment lifecycle, parents will either decide to enroll their child at your school or look for other options. For parents that opted for the former, we recommend identifying problems in your application process and streamlining it. You can offer an easy-to-understand resource about your application process or have a staff member walk parents through it. Either way, it’s important to ensure parents don’t experience any hiccups that may force them to change their minds.
5. Continue to Educate Parents
Besides making sure the enrolled students are treated in a way that meets their parent’s expectations, you can also continue to educate parents on what they can expect from your school. For this purpose, you can initiate an email campaign that offers updates on school events and emphasizes the importance of Montessori education.
You can create newsletters, shoot short videos capturing a school’s welcome activities and other activities that students engage in. This will reassure parents that the Montessori school is invested in the growth and personal development of their children.
You can also create blogs and social media posts that allow parents to be part of an online community. Other resources include a picture library, whitepapers, eBooks, etc.
6. Ask for Feedback
Another simple way of improving a parent’s enrollment journey is to ask for feedback. You can ask parents what changes they would like to see or any problems they faced during the enrollment process. After all, what better way to improve things besides asking your target audience directly? Doing so can help you pick up on things that you may have missed early on and use this information to make improvements.
There are two easy ways to ask for feedback here. You can arrange an online survey that allows parents to provide their feedback. You can also engage in one-on-one discussions that offer a more in-depth overview of their experience with your school.
Key Takeaways for Optimizing a Parent Enrollment Lifecycle
Offering an optimal parent enrollment lifecycle can improve the overall enrollment rate of your Montessori school. It can allow you to address common concerns and ensure a smooth enrollment journey.
We recommend focusing on making content offers that encourage parents to subscribe to your mailing list, nurturing leads, and offering an engaging and informative tour. You should also make the application process easy and make sure parents remain happy and satisfied while their child is enrolled at your Montessori school. Besides this, we recommend engaging with the parents online via emails and social media posts. You can also ask for their feedback on the enrollment cycle to improve it further.
If you need help optimizing your parent’s enrollment journey, reach out to us today and let us assist you!
