Parents navigate a complex path when selecting a school. There are confusing starts and stops, weaves, bops, turns, and ups and downs, but understanding and influencing this journey directly impacts your school’s enrollment numbers.

That’s because by mapping the distinct phases of a parent's decision-making journey, you can anticipate their needs and provide targeted support when they need it most.

Proactively guiding parents through each stage of their decision-making process with care is what turns potential inquiries into committed families.

Understanding the Parent Journey

Right now, parents are evaluating your school, and their decision to enroll hinges on their experience. Do your school's marketing and admission offices understand the steps they take?

The parent journey unfolds in distinct phases:

1. First, parents become aware of your school, and this might occur through the ever-important word-of-mouth, online searches, or social media.
    
2. Next, now that they know you exist, they move into the consideration stage. Here, they compare schools, research academics, and evaluate the school's culture.
    
3. The decision phase involves narrowing down choices, attending events, and engaging in direct communication before, finally, enrolling.

Why Does the Journey Matter?

If your school can fully understand and guide parents through each of these stages, you’ll increase your chances of attracting, converting, and retaining families. Also, a well-defined parent journey allows your school to allocate marketing resources more effectively, personalize communication, and improve your overall admissions experience.

Sounds great, but you’re not going up to each family and asking where they are in their journey. So how do you know which stage they’re in, and how can you leverage what they’re thinking, feeling, and researching? Data helps paint that picture.

Data-Driven Insights

The stages of the parent journey require some metrics to understand their effectiveness. Knowing parents move from awareness to enrollment is one thing, but understanding how they move is another:

• Awareness: How do parents discover your school?
  • Is it primarily through organic search, paid ads, or referrals? Website analytics track traffic sources and reveal where parents first interact with your brand. Social media monitoring tools can also show which platforms generate the most interest.
     
• Consideration: What content do parents engage with most?
  • Heatmaps and click-tracking on your website show which pages and resources are most popular. Analyzing user behavior can shed some light on their pain points, your website's user experience (UX), or areas where parents struggle to find information, like your tuition page or directories.

Within the analytics dashboard of Finalsite's AI chatbot, Ask AI, admins can see the percentage of questions relating to topics like admissions and enrollment, alumni relations, academics, and many more. Insight into the questions users are asking lets you adjust your content as needed, and better anticipate what on your parents' minds.

• Decision: Which admissions events generate the highest attendance?
  • Which communication channels result in the most applications? Once again, data tracks interactions and important events, which allow you to measure the effectiveness of your various touchpoints.
     
• Enrollment: Where are drop-off points in the application process?
  • Online application analytics show where potential inquiries or enrollments abandon the process.

Keep Reading: How Do Parents Research & Choose Schools? [Key Stats]

Now, you don’t have to be a data wizard or a pro at Google Analytics to unlock this data. Sure, it can be overwhelming at times, but data shows how parents interact with your school online, so you can better understand their interests and behavior, and if your interactions or touchpoints are having an impact.

Intentional Touchpoints 

Each touchpoint is an opportunity to influence the parent's perception. The data gathered provides the foundation for improvements, but understanding where parents engage and how they behave allows you to optimize each touchpoint for the most impact.

• Website Optimization (Awareness/Consideration): Website analytics reveal which pages have high bounce rates, or rather, low engagement. If a page with crucial program information suffers from high drop-off, you can improve its content, design, and mobile responsiveness. Heatmaps can also show where parents click and scroll, highlighting the areas to really focus on for the user experience.
   
• Social Media Strategy (Awareness/Consideration): Social media monitoring identifies which platforms generate the most engagement. If Instagram ads drive a lot of interest, you can invest more. Then again, if the numbers reveal that those types of posts aren’t resonating, you can tailor your messaging or create more visually compelling content, for example.
   
• Email Marketing (Consideration/Decision): Email marketing data shows which email campaigns have the highest open and click-through rates, so you can tweak email content, subject lines, or send times to improve engagement. Data can also show which emails or workflows lead to event registrations or application submissions, so you can focus on those successful campaigns.
   
• Admissions Events (Decision): Registration and attendance data inform event planning. If virtual events attract more attendees than in-person events, you can adapt your approach. Feedback surveys and post-event analytics can reveal which aspects of the event were most effective.
   
• Application Process (Enrollment): Online application analytics identify drop-off points. If parents abandon the inquiry or application, you can simplify the process, provide clearer instructions, or send them another reminder to meet the deadline.

Personalization

• Tailor your marketing messages to the parents' stage in the journey. You want to deliver content that meets their specific needs, but a parent in the awareness phase needs different information than a parent nearing the decision stage, and vice versa.

For example, a parent exploring academic programs benefits from details about your curriculum, while a student considering enrollment would find more value in quotes from students and information about clubs and activities.

Visitors to Western Academy of Beijing’s website can toggle between parent and student views to access different types of information, speaking to aspects that both personas would find valuable.

• Website Personalization: Website analytics can track your users’ browsing patterns. If parents are repeatedly visiting and leaving the admissions page without engaging, you may want to explore how you can keep them on the page for longer, or encourage families to submit an open house registration or use a financial aid calculator, like the ones found on Thaden School’s affordability page.

• Email Personalization: Data provides insights into a parent's interests and stage in the journey, and your email campaigns can be segmented based on these factors.
  • For example, parents who attended a STEM-focused event receive follow-up emails highlighting STEM programs, while parents who downloaded a financial aid guide get information about tuition assistance.
     
• Social Media Personalization: Social media engagement analytics reveal which types of content resonate with specific parent segments. If users interact primarily with pages about your arts programs, your social media ads target users with content about your dance program in their feed.
   
• Admissions Event Personalization: Parents and students who expressed interest in specific programs or activities during the inquiry stage (or consideration stage) should receive invitations to events focused on those areas. Furthermore, if they’ve asked for more information about financial aid or college preparation, 1:1 meetings can be scheduled based on parents’ interests and concerns.

Maine Central Institute strategically asks its inquiring families about their students’ academic and athletic interests, which they can use to personalize their communications later on. Better yet, families can inquire, schedule a campus tour, request a meeting with the admissions staff, and more from one embedded form. That allows them to reach families at different stages of the journey.

• Application Process Personalization: Application data allows for personalized communication. If a parent encounters a specific challenge in the application, admissions staff can provide targeted assistance and see exactly what step they are in the application or enrollment process within your enrollment management system.

Life of a Lead

At this point, it might be obvious that there’s a beginning, middle, and end to a lead. Ideally, your families will complete the journey, enroll, and re-enroll, but tracking the life of a lead provides the context you need to deliver consistent and relevant experiences.

It's not enough to personalize one interaction; you must understand the parent's entire history with your school, from the initial website visit to final enrollment.

• Continuous Data Collection and Personalization: As a parent progresses through the journey, their interests and needs evolve. Your messages and content will need to adapt to the parents' current stage and preferences, too.
   
• Identifying Key Engagement Points: Tracking the life of a lead shows which efforts are most influential in driving enrollment. Then, you can focus on optimizing these key interactions and personalizing them for maximum impact.
   
• Data-informed Decisions: No one has a crystal ball, but by analyzing past data, you can predict future needs and behaviors and start to deliver proactive communications based on the parents' likely next steps.
   
• Measuring Your Efforts: Tracking the life of a lead allows you to identify which messages and experiences lead to higher engagement and enrollment rates.

Key Takeaway

You don’t need to tackle all of this data analysis, content creation, and personalized messaging alone—who could? Partnering with school marketing experts can help you map your parents' journey through website analytics, user behavior analysis, and website traffic patterns to understand how parents interact with your school's online presence.

More importantly, they can analyze how users move through your website, identify key engagement points, and pinpoint areas for improvement, so your enrollment marketing efforts produce the best results.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Connor has spent the last decade within the field of marketing and communications, working with independent schools and colleges throughout New England. At Finalsite, Connor plans and executes marketing strategies and digital content across the web. A former photojournalist, he has a passion for digital media, storytelling, coffee, and creating content that connects.