Your First Week

Setting up automatic follow-up for new inquiries

Quick answer: Build a workflow that triggers when a parent submits your tour request form. The workflow should send an instant confirmation email, send a tour reminder the day before, create the student opportunity card, and notify your admissions team. Five minutes after a form is submitted is too long to wait for a human reply.

Why this matters

Prospective families decide which schools to consider in the first few hours after submitting a form. A school that confirms instantly feels organized and responsive. A school that takes 48 hours to reply often loses the family entirely.

Automatic follow-up does the basic work — instant confirmation, gentle reminders, internal notifications — so your team is free to focus on the higher-value conversations.

The standard inquiry follow-up workflow

Here's the workflow most schools build first:

Trigger

Tour request form submitted.

Actions (in order)

1. Send instant confirmation email — "Thanks for requesting a tour. We've received your request and an admissions team member will be in touch shortly."
2. Create or update the parent contact — automatic from the form submission
3. For each student named, create an opportunity card in the Admissions pipeline at the "Inquiry" stage
4. Tag the parent with tour-request and the current academic year
5. Notify your admissions team — internal email to the staff group with the family's details
6. Wait 1 day
7. If they haven't booked a tour yet, send a follow-up email — "Did you have a chance to look at our tour schedule? Here's the link..."
8. Wait 3 days
9. If they still haven't booked, send a final automated nudge — and create a task for an admissions team member to call them

Step-by-step

1. Open the workflow builder

1. Click Automation in the main menu.
2. Click + New Workflow (or similar).
3. Start from a template if there's a relevant one, or start blank.

2. Set the trigger

• Trigger type: Form Submitted
• Form: pick your Tour Request form

3. Add the actions

Drag actions onto the workflow canvas in order. For each:

• Send Email — write the message body, set the From name, save
• Add Tag — pick the tags to apply
• Update Opportunity Stage — find or create an opportunity in the Admissions pipeline at the Inquiry stage. If the form captured student names, create one opportunity per student.
• Send Internal Email — to your admissions team
• Wait — set a delay (1 day, 3 days, etc.)
• If/Else — branch based on whether the family has booked a tour (check for a tag or pipeline stage change)

4. Test before activating

Submit your own tour request form (use a personal email so the workflow doesn't loop). Confirm:

• You get the instant confirmation email
• Your contact record appears in Contacts
• An opportunity card appears in the Admissions pipeline
• The admissions team email lands in the right inbox

5. Activate the workflow

Once you've tested, toggle the workflow from Draft to Active.

Other inquiry workflows to add over time

• Application submission workflow — instant confirmation, move opportunity to "Application Submitted", create a task for admissions to review
• Enrollment workflow — welcome email, next-steps packet, move opportunity to "Enrolled"
• Re-enrollment workflow — sent each spring to current families with a re-enrollment link
• Cold-prospect re-engagement — sent to families who inquired but never toured, 60 days later

Tips

• Keep the first email short and warm. Long welcome emails get skimmed. A 3-sentence "we got your request, here's what's next" works better.
• Personalize with merge tags. Use {{contact.first_name}} at the start. It feels human.
• Don't fully automate everything. Some steps should still involve a human — especially the actual tour or application review.
• Watch the workflow analytics. If parents are dropping off at a specific step, that's your bottleneck. Maybe the wait is too long or the message isn't compelling.

Related articles

• Setting up your admissions pipeline
• Launching your first funnel page
• Setting up email and SMS sending