The Basics of Turning Tours into Enrollments

So you’ve given a new prospective family a tour. Do they enroll immediately? If not, then this is a great opportunity to continue to nurture your preschool’s relationship with the prospective student’s caregivers. Here’s how you can use your online and offline marketing to strategically and authentically build that connection.

Phone Follow up

This one is obvious, but it’s important so I need to talk about it. Follow up after the tour to build trust and show you care by asking them relevant, thoughtful questions about their experience.

• What do you think about the school?
• What is your favorite part?
• Do you have any questions or concerns that I can help to answer?

Keep in mind that you’re trying to work in these questions and concepts naturally into the conversation (you’ll want to avoid sounding like you’re debriefing them).

Postcard/Notecard

After the tour, it’s a nice touch to follow up with a personal postcard or notecard. Let your prospective caregivers know what a pleasure it was to for you to meet them. Want to go the extra step? Use personalized, branded stationery. It’s easy to design using an online printing service (like Vistaprint), and fairly inexpensive. You can also have some of the children from the prospective child’s class sign the card as well. It’s an endearing touch that helps to create a bond between the family and your center.

Newsletter

When families come to visit your center for a tour, make sure you include an option to sign up for your newsletter. This allows you to follow up with your prospective student’s families by email, and keep them in the loop about news, events, and other going-ons at your school. You can also use the newsletter to remind prospects about important dates and deadlines.

Extra tip: Make sure you’re segmenting your lists into appropriate groups (especially if you’re using the same newsletter system to keep in touch with your current families too). When you keep your subscriber lists properly segmented, you can always be sure the right message is getting out to the right group.

Social

In your tour information packet, make sure to include some marketing collateral that will allow them to easily connect with you online. This could be as simple as a document that lists your domain name, and the location of your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, etc). Or you could go the extra step and create a small business card with QR codes for your major accounts.