During the last year, many parents have experienced the flexibility of working from home and have been able to balance the childcare between themselves, but now many parents have to go back to the office in the coming months, they are looking for a cost-effective, reliable and convenient childcare setting.
But as a wraparound care provider, how do you attract these parents to your provision?
The magicbooking system can help by offering an easy way to provide discounts to your prospective clients, such as making it easy to run marketing campaigns with promotional codes to attract new business eg. running promotional days such as 'bring a friend Friday'. Another way to promote your out-of-school club is by word-of-mouth and getting your current customers to promote your services amongst their contacts and as a rewa, you can issue one-off promo-codes as a referral programme.
Some magicbooking features you can offer will help you promote your club and you can highlight these in any online and offline marketing you may do. These may include:
- All your services are accessible on the go, 24/7, including the ability to register, book, view availability and pay online.
- Monitor sessions that haven't reached capacity and promote them.
- Parents can register online and update their information at any time.
- Parents can pay online by card and also by other payment types including childcare vouchers and Tax-Free Childcare.
- Parents can pay by instalments, and the system lets them pay for the academic year, and spread payments throughout the period as well as calculate a payment plan.
- You can offer a variety of discounts, such as sibling and weekly discounts (when a parent books for a full week of sessions a discount is applied at the time of booking) as well as special rates for cohorts of individuals such as those children entitled to pupil premium, staff members or those parents that use your services regularly.
- Run 'special days' where you can add sessions that are non-standard, with a cost or time which is different to your standard sessions.
- Create one-off extra activities for sessions, such as offering a cooked tea, which enables you to charge an additional fee for providing a meal that is outside the regular session cost.
- Send reminder emails or texts to parents that haven't yet booked.
Here are some additional ideas that we have compiled to help jog your memory about useful things you can do to bring in new children to your out-of-school club: