How To Increase Your Acceptance of Enrolment Offers
EnrolHQ has many tools built in to help you follow up with your families that have been offered a place.
What can I do as a School Admissions Registrar?
Here are our top tips to help you build a process outlined in the graphic below:
1) Schedule Automated Email Follow-Ups
Inside EnrolHQ, we have an 'Automated Email Trigger' system which you can use to set up and send emails on an automated schedule to families after the letter of offer has gone out. The kicker is that at any time they accept the offer, any emails scheduled to go out after that will be stopped for that particular family.
2) Filter For Expired Offers and Look at Days Since Login
The whole idea of automated email reminders is to give you back time. In the first instance, this time should be focused on following up personally with anybody whose Offer has expired but they have recently logged in to their EnrolHQ Future Parent Dashboard (as this shows engagement). The parent may need just that small nudge to get over the line, and it's all about making sure they have no reservations, no objections and no issues with accepting the offer.
You can quickly filter on your outstanding offers and get some results. We recommend you look for the Days Since Login column and sort it to be less than 21 (3 weeks).
You should follow up with those families first, these are your lowest hanging fruit.
3) Set a Grace Period to Give a Second Chance
For all offers, we advise you set a grace period of 7 days on the offer expiry so these families can still log in and accept up to a week after the real expiry date.
Another tip we give to clients is to craft up an email to go to the remainder of the Offers Expired that says 'Your Offer Has Expired but we are extending given the current circumstances. This gives all those that have expired another bite of the cherry. We love this feature as it is something that is very hard to manage when you send out paper offers. Make sure you give parents the opportunity to speak with the school if they so desire by phone or by a virtual meeting. This particular email should be sent to all who have shown no engagement. What we are doing is prioritising your follow-up's to make sure you get the best outcomes possible. Recording the engagement level of each family is critical to this function.
4. Finally, you will need to follow up by phone...
Our final tip is that at the end of the grace period it's time to force a decision. You need to follow up with each outstanding parent again (preferably by phone) and ask them to either accept the offer or you'll put them on the 'Not Proceeding' list.
This strategy allows the school to continue to make offers to others but more importantly is a good sales method for closing, as it taps into the parents fear that their child might miss a place if they don't accept the offer. Once you have the acceptance, it's your job to keep engaging with them until you onboard