Double Your Lead Coversions, Double Your Enrollment

I talked to a camp director this weekend who’s frustrated because she’s having a hard time converting leads into enrollments. She says she gets all the leads she can handle from her website, but she can’t turn them into paying customers.

Considering she spends over $23,000 on marketing each year, you can imagine her disappointment at how much money she’s wasting generating dead-end lead after dead-end lead.

If you haven’t read my blog post, How to Double Your Sales in Just One Year, now might be a good time. In that post, I talk about a very easy and obvious — yet overlooked — method of increasing your camp enrollment without spending all your time, money and energy chasing leads that go nowhere.

If you need a cost-effective way to increase your enrollment right now, here’s the kind of thing I’d do:

• I’d contact all your families from last summer who haven’t registered for this camp this year. (You can call them on the phone or email them, but calling is better.) Tell them you’re giving them a courtesy call because you noticed they were missing from your current enrollment list, and if they’re planning on coming back to camp this year, they really can’t afford to wait any longer to register otherwise you might not have room for them.
• The other thing I’d do, I’d try to get your currently enrolled families to extend their initial enrollment, which you can do right now even before camp starts. Offering a special discount or incentive to anyone who adds an additional week or two to their original enrollment should do the trick.

Now with either of these two approaches, I’ll bet you’d get a bunch of new enrollments and extensions immediately. Best of all, since everything is directed at your current customers, not new ones, your lead generation and acquisition costs are nothing.

Check this out. Let’s say for every 100 leads you get, one turns into a paying enrollment — granted that’s just a 1% lead conversion rate and it sucks. But what if you could increase that number by JUST ONE KID? Now you’ve doubled your enrollment and lead conversion rate!

Again, you can find that one person — or however many more you need — already hidden within your current customer base.

And considering the time, money, and energy resources you’ll save, I’d get started ASAP hitting up your current camp families to build your enrollment now.