Once a prospect is a parent, don't forget about them! Top tips for keeping current parents engaged!

Getting a new pupil through the door and registered in your school is only half the journey.

You have your application and admissions processes perfected. You have found an effective way to manage your enquiries and successfully support parents through the daunting application process and you are now basking in your inbox of happy and satisfied parents as they thank you for confirming their child’s place at your school. Mission accomplished.

So what next?

Parents fresh from the application process may have gotten used to regular contact with the admissions staff and receiving quick replies to their questions. However, as soon as the prospective parent becomes a parent at your organisation, they are often forgotten about.

It is often a far more difficult task to keep parents engaged once their child has started at your school and as your focus understandably shifts back to the next round of applicants. It is often seen as a difficult concept to manage for a busy admissions team as their energy is naturally redirecting itself to new prospective families.

Admissions teams will often simply not have the capacity to keep these ongoing conversations and communications with current parents outside of the monthly or annual school newsletters.

An effective CRM, such as HubSpot, can really help to enhance the overall experience for parents, throughout the early stages of enquiry to becoming a part of the school’s parenting community.

The benefits of building a clear strategy towards current parents and their needs is extremely important. Retention and satisfied parents are huge parts of HubSpot’s general ‘inbound approach’ that is very effective in education.

If we look at the flywheel model of inbound marketing, we can see all of the efforts come back around to the ‘attract, engage and delight’ theory. This sees your delighted customers becoming your promoters after their initial experience with your organisation of being attracted to what you have to offer and engaged with, based on their specific interests.

Here are 4 tips on how to keep those new parents engaged.

Smart content & email marketing
Thanks to HubSpot’s segmentation capabilities, you will easily be able to separate prospective parents from your current parents. Further segmentation based on your property mapping could also include further information such as year group of children, location, more than one child in the school and even a parent’s profession. (This could be useful for certain annual events that take place in the sector and perhaps sending after-school club information in advance for those longer hours!)

These little pieces of information create the perfect opportunity for individually personalised marketing emails to be sent to your whole current parent contacts in one click. Smart content enables you to alter a parent’s version of one email based on their unique data such as year groups and particular subject interests for their child.

All of the in-depth data you collected during the application process can now be put to further use. The parent who noted an interest in future scholarships when they initially joined the school 5 years ago and now their child is about to become eligible? They can receive a smart content link taking them to your scholarship application form for scholarships. The parent who has a child in nursery can receive a version of your email featuring imagery of your beautiful early years facilities and school calendars for the year ahead.

These small details go a long way with current parents and ensure that the information they provided during their initial applications and conversations with your staff ever since, are heard.

Automation
The phrase automation and customer service don’t usually go hand in hand. Automation has a bad rep for being associated with robotic automated emails. However, with list segmentation, smart content and personalised tokens, automation can feel hugely personalised and individual tailored to the parent.
Based on HubSpot’s requirement for a trigger point to enrol any contact into a workflow, the parent will, ultimately, put themselves into an automated wok flow of commutations from a form submission, list membership or page visit. This could be a long running, complex keep warm workflow simply sending personalised updates base on the individual's interests.
Automation can also be used to internally update parent data and add them to new lists, based on new information linked to their portal profile. This could be a simple property update from a new form submission with a change of address or phone number which then adds the parent to a new list based on home location update.

Conversations inbox and tickets
A simple yet effective method to manage incoming enquiries from current parents. When trying to find information on your child’s school website during your lunch break it can seem like an impossible maze of landing pages. A chat bot option tends to be the quick convenient fix parents are looking for. With this in mind, set your chat flows up with options for current parent support. For example, the first question the chat bot could ask, ‘Are you a current parent or prospective parent’, opening the conversation to the most relevant links and further questions. We often find building a knowledge base to be a really helpful tool for prospects but this could also be the case for current parents. Taking into consideration their common FAQs and making small articles and accessible links. This may seem small but is hugely appreciated in the world of busy parents trying to simply find your term dates to book their much-needed family holidays! Enquiries that require more complex solutions can also be easily linked to a ticket straight from the conversations page, to track the progress of the enquiry and ensure that your internal team are monitoring and responding accordingly. The great thing about tickets in this instance as well is that you are able to completely personalise your ticket pipeline, assign them to specific team members to resolve and associate to the parent contact record in your portal.

Reporting
Reporting in HubSpot is a great way to monitor new applicators but also a really insightful method of tracking retention with your current parents.
We would recommend setting up an entire dashboard of reports dedicated to current parent insights. This can be a mixture of pupil numbers and retention to engagement with your marketing content and event sign-ups. Certain engagement information such as email opens and click rates can be a great source for areas to improve. On the flip side, these reports also highlight the things that are working really well so you can potentially do more of this. These are great to review weekly with your communication teams to see if there are any areas that need extra attention.

Surveys
Want a sure way to know your current parents feel heard? A survey is always a great way to keep communication openly flowing and provides the perfect opportunity for honest feedback. HubSpot offers a variety of surveys, from quick smiley face satisfaction ratings, to numerical scoring or more in-depth text box responses that require more in depth responses. HubSpot’s survey tools are perfect for insights into customer support, satisfaction and loyalty.

In schools, a simple customer satisfaction rating for an application process may be insightful with a simple text box for additional comments and suggestions. Whereas, a more in-depth survey following your child’s first year at the school may ask for more specific feedback to help you to improve. These are particularly useful following open events, Sports days and perhaps even as an end-of-term check-in. A simple survey asking for any general improvements is a great way to create an open and honest rapore with parents where they feel their opinions matter.

If done right, your efforts with your current parents can ultimately turn them into your promoters. Word of mouth and community are extremely powerful tools within the education sector and can hugely impact your future prospects. Understanding personas and building strategies in line with these could also really benefit your approach. We have a great free resource for buyer personas which you're welcome to download below.