How a School Secret Shopper Can Improve Your Enrollment Process

Take your school tour and enrollment process from good to great with a school secret shopper.

Every teacher at your school is evaluated to ensure the classroom experience is effective. But what about your enrollment process?

Each interaction affects a prospective family’s perception of your school. When you “wow” families, not only do they want to enroll but they also will likely tell others about your school.

Using a school secret shopper gives you an opportunity to understand exactly what prospective families experience when they try to enroll with you.

Are You Employing a School Secret Shopper?

You might associate secret shoppers (also commonly called mystery shoppers) with industries like fast food, where the company pays someone to go into the restaurant, interact with employees, order, and document the experience.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, you can also use a school secret shopper in K-12 education.

Getting feedback through the eyes of a consumer — or a parent or guardian, in this case — can be an invaluable tool and allows improvements to both marketing and enrollment operations.

Improving your school tour and the percentage of families who tour and then enroll is one of the most cost-effective, important improvements you can make in your whole process. 

If you are not “closing the deal” through the school tour process, you are wasting your efforts that made them interested in your school in the first place.

To improve your school tour, become your potential customer — by hiring a school secret shopper with SchoolMint’s strategic marketing services!

How Your School Can Benefit from a Secret Shopper

A SchoolMint representative will pose as a prospective parent or guardian and arrange to tour your school. Using more than 25 metrics, we’ll evaluate your school’s enrollment experience and identify key areas for improvement.

Once the evaluation is complete, you’ll receive a written report with detailed, third-party observations and recommendations on how you can improve your web presence and tour process.

Additionally, you’ll get to discuss these findings during a one-hour conference call with SchoolMint’s chief enrollment officer, Nick LeRoy, and ask any questions you might have.

As a small exercise, trying conducting a small audit of your school’s website yourself — starting with your online presence and reviews.

Understand How Easy it is to Find Your School Online

First, do a quick Google search based on how you think parents would search for your school.

Use phrases like “best school in [my city]” or “local charter schools.” What page was your school on? If you were not on the first page, you have work to do. 95% of people searching on Google won’t go to the second page.

To improve your chances of showing up first in a Google search, improve the keywords and search engine optimization (SEO) of your website.

What Do Online Reviews Say About Your School?

The majority of shoppers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. For a key (and free) marketing channel, gently encourage families to honestly review your school.

• Learn more: How to Use School Review Sites to Your Advantage

Another reason to have a good presence on review sites is that many of them provide content to local real estate sites like Zillow.

If you are trying to capture the attention of people moving in, you need to have a strong showing on these sites.

Key Metrics in Your Mystery Shopper’s Report

Getting a family to a school tour is your chance to shine and show why they should pick you over everyone else in town.

Making your school tour stand out is one of the most important improvements you can make to your recruitment efforts. And you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken.

• Learn more: How to Conduct a Winning School Tour

After your school secret shopper is done, you’ll get a report that covers over 25 different metrics to ensure you are providing the best experience possible. The report will cover these key metrics: 

• How easily prospective families can find your school via Google search
• Your school’s online reputation and use of school review sites
• Your school’s search engine optimization tactics to improve your visibility in digital searches
• The ease of navigating your website to learn about your school and to engage with your staff in person
• The customer interaction when a tour or visit is scheduled
• The quality of the school tour or other virtual recruitment tools in telling your school’s story
• The quality of your follow-up activities after the school tour

Interested in learning more about how a school secret shopper can enhance your enrollment operations?

Get in touch with our team!