The Inverted Enrollment Funnel
In case you’re not familiar with the idea of the traditional digital enrollment funnel, it works like this: you get lots of visitors to your site —they’re at the top of the funnel.
With every new ad, you limit the extra information you send out and start asking them to inquire.
At this stage, many visitors drop out.
As you increase your 'ask', they stop engaging with you.
Your prospective parents are these few parents who are left clicking on your ads as they consider whether to inquire.
We're experimenting with a totally new way to take prospective parents through the funnel.
We’ve turned the whole idea upside-down.
We start by targeting a select few qualified parent prospects within a 10-mile radius with a very dry, sterile introduction to your school.
We keep it simple.
No brand awareness. No excitement. No entertainment or fun.
If we were to make our ad more engaging, we would pull in a bunch of unqualified leads that are merely 'freeriding' on our snappy copy and have no intention of shopping around for schools.
We also often gate our content with a very high 'ask' -seven questions including their cell phone number and zip code.
So we let very few parent prospects into our funnel, but once they are in, we show them a lot of love.
We spend very little money on a narrow set of parent prospects at the top of the funnel and amplify the amount and variety of ads that follow them around.
As these select few parents consume our content, we intensify our effort, our creativity and our ad spend.
How is the inverted funnel better?
1. It saves us a ton of marketing spend.
We let a select few qualified leads into our funnel and invest most of our time and effort only them.
2. It carries concentrated and concerted power.
There is no dilution of ad spend. By showing them at least one ad a day, there is no chance a prospective parent forgets about us. If they are genuinely interested, they will pick up and call us at some point. They will undoubtedly reply to our email.
3. It allows us to tell your story
By targeting as few as 1000 targeted parent families with a series of Facebook ads we can sequence our copy in a way that captures the imagination, seeds suggestions to the unconscious and truly impacts the parent's decision-making.