The Learning Experience, an early childhood education franchise, serves children ranging in age from 6 weeks to 6 years at 460 locations across the U.S. and three in the United Kingdom. On any given day, the director of one of these centers has myriad responsibilities. In addition to overseeing operations and curriculum, and ensuring the safety and well-being of around 175 young children, a center director gives tours to parents seeking educational and child care options.
For a busy center director, following up on leads, connecting with parents, scheduling center tours and checking back with prospective clients was a time-consuming challenge, prompting TLE to seek a tech solution through SMS marketing.
The goal was to improve communication with parents and increase conversion from leads to center tours. Leaders with the brand partnered with Voxie, an SMS platform built exclusively for franchises. The result of their SMS marketing campaign: a 48% increase in the lead-to-tour conversion rate from July 2023 to July 2024, says Christian Manzano, TLE senior marketing director.
The process began with integration of TLE’s customer relationship management software with Voxie’s platform. All contacts from leads, staff members and families with children enrolled at the centers were pushed into the centers’ Voxie accounts, making it easy for staff members to send texts to anyone in communication with their centers, Manzano says.
“We have built a very robust strategy with Voxie where we’ve given the center directors all the right templates for messages they need to be sending to prospective families. These curated templates make it easy for center directors to message parents quickly, while still providing the opportunity to personalize the messages. We do follow-up to try to make sure people come in for tours,” he says.
“We’ve even gone as far as running a test where we’ve utilized the Voxie AI autoresponder. So, if a parent is seeking more information and texting back and forth with the center, we taught AI what to say and how to explain our curriculum and how to sell it and how to entice that person to schedule a tour. And when we did the AI test, we saw a 33% increase in that center’s tours.”
When a lead comes to a TLE center from a parent seeking child care, it’s routed to Voxie. Center directors then use TLE’s curated templates to message parents back quickly. The text might go like this: “Hi, this is [name]. I’m reaching out from The Learning Experience. I saw that you’re looking for child care. Please give me a call when you have a second. We’d love for you to visit our center. You can schedule a tour today.”
If there’s no response in a few days, a text following another curated template goes to the parent with an invitation to chat or take a tour, Manzano says. If there’s still no response or the parent isn’t ready for a tour, texts go out with other types of content explaining the curriculum and providing links for more information.
After a parent tours a center, there might be additional texts following other curated templates, which ask if the parent needs more information or wants to register their child, he says.
Last summer, Manzano says TLE started sending headquarters-driven text blasts. “We would communicate with the centers and tell them we would be sending out this text message on their behalf on this day. Then I would write a text blast from my desk, and the Voxie team would send it to all the leads that we had across all centers. So, I’m sending a text blast to about 200,000 leads on a specific day. There’s a clear call to action on these messages, which is to schedule a tour. So, the parents would just click that button to go to our scheduling software, and then find the right time to take a tour of that center,” he says.
“And we saw results on that one given day of about a 45% incremental lift in the number of tours that were scheduled. So just like that, I was able to get 200 or 250 more tours for all of our centers on a specific day, something that didn’t require staff at the centers to lift a finger,” Manzano says.
“I’m painting a picture of how the SMS marketing strategy works, and how having the right tool in place and the right strategy for a franchise can drive more revenue for our centers,” he says.
An increasing number of businesses are turning to SMS marketing to engage directly with customers, as evidenced by the growth in the U.S. SMS market, valued at $2.86 billion in 2023 and expected to swell at a compound annual growth rate of 20.8% to 2030, according to Grand View Research.
“You have to meet people where they are today,” Manzano says. “Maybe 10 years ago, a phone call was sufficient and you were able to reach people. But we have the ability to send a quick text and get that person to do what we need them to do next, which is to schedule that tour, and that’s the world we live in today.”
For more information about The Learning Experience and franchising opportunities, go to its website.
Lisa Ocker’s career began at her hometown paper, The Baytown Sun, covering everything from city government to chemical plant disasters, a hurricane and a controversial FEMA buyout of a flood-plagued neighborhood. From there, she moved to South Florida, reporting for the Palm Beach Post and South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspapers, and serving as editor of the regional magazine, Boca Raton. Returning to her home state, she led the re-launch of SUCCESS magazine as editor after a Texas-based entrepreneur bought the 100-year-old brand.
Lisa’s work also has appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Newsweek. She has covered major news events including the space shuttle Challenger explosion and the rape trial and acquittal of William Kennedy Smith, nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Edward Kennedy. Her coverage of immigration issues included reporting on Haitian and Cuban refugee crises while traveling with the U.S. Coast Guard and from the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Her work with SUCCESS included profiles of entrepreneurs Steve Case, Ted Turner and the late Tony Hsieh.
Now living in and working from Santa Fe, NM, Lisa enjoys sharing the challenges and successes of franchisees and franchisors as senior editor of
FranchiseWire and Franchise Consultant Magazine.
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