Case Study: How Parent Phone Call Scripts Can Increase School Visits By 40%

The School

This school is a small organization, a small school that hadn’t invested in a marketing strategy. The only marketing activities they did, were, for the most part, sparse and uncoordinated, consisting mainly of newspaper ads and placing ads on the local radio stations.

When the new principal came, they decided to make a planned effort by investing their budget in a real marketing strategy and started working with us.

Challenge

In their own words:

“It’s really incredible, the number of inquiries. They’re just flooding in. March doubled to 29 inquiries. That is the highest the school’s ever had in its entire history. Almost daily, I get phone calls and emails asking for more school information.

After working on our marketing plan for over a year, doing all the planned campaigns, and having seen a huge increase in the number of leads every week, we still didn’t hit the enrollment number that we had hoped for.”

So, What Went Wrong?

They were seeing all the results that were expecting to see from their Facebook campaigns, yet that didn’t translate into student enrollment growth. They were still concerned with the cost and getting the return on their investment.

Solution

By that time, we had already witnessed an 83% increase in inquiries that only yielded a 10% increase in enrollment numbers.

So, what had happened?

Not being able to make any secure assumptions at that point, we decided to assign any new incoming leads to our dedicated call center in order to figure out what made parents suddenly lose interest in the school.

We monitored the whole process for two months, and the results we saw even within the first month were astounding.

Conclusion

The total number of new enrollments is not based on a single factor, e.g., leads, but rather is the sum of many aspects and elements, like the image of the school itself, its online presence, the interaction with the parents, and the community (word-of-mouth).

The way you follow up with parents interested in acquiring more information about your school plays a tremendous role in sealing the deal and winning a new application or in putting them off and losing them to the competition.

This should not come as a surprise.

How you start a conversation, the questions you ask, even the order of the questions, making their child the “star” of the discussion, making open-ended questions, and actively taking an interest in what they have to say, are all very crucial elements to having a successful first impression and further continuing the conversation.

And this why you need a script that combines the best of both worlds.

There are many cases and examples of how implementing the best “selling” techniques, using the right tone of voice, and making the conversation “all about them”, even in a brief phone-call with a busy parent, can make all the difference, making your school stand out and finally reaching the desired enrollment targets.

Are you prepared before taking that call?