Connecting with your audience and developing the franchise are extremely important for growth in the franchise industry. All successful franchises use email marketing and automation tools for franchise development.
When you think of franchise development, you don’t often think about how email marketing can influence the process.
However, a well-executed and timely franchise email marketing campaign to potential franchisees can carry a ton of weight in strengthening brand awareness. Franchise development needs to have email marketing as a part of their foundation for growth and this post will explore how you can accomplish that.
TYPES OF PROGRAMS IN FRANCHISE EMAIL MARKETING
In the Franchise world, email marketing can essentially be used for three different purposes:
- Franchise Development – Automating new franchise sales.
- The Franchisor (Zor) sending to the end customer “on behalf of” the Franchisee (Zee)
- The Zor provides the Zee with a “sub-account” with approved content to send to the end customer.
Each purpose or program has various degrees of complexity and highly differentiated key performance indicators.
This post will concentrate on using email marketing for Franchise Development because it is very fragmented and often a very hands-on manual process. (underutilized in a lot of cases).
3 AREAS FOR FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT USING EMAIL
Just like there are three different programs in franchise email marketing, there are also three areas for franchise development using email. Each area requires different journeys, using differentiated messaging and tone and unique cadence/frequency controls.
These three areas for franchise development are as follows:
- Broker Automation
- Nurture Automation
- Engagement Scoring Automation
Let’s dive into each area.
BROKER/CONSULTANT AUTOMATION
Franchise brokers and consultants can be amazing contributors to the growth of your franchise, but they are often overwhelmed with information about each franchise they would represent. Email can play a vital role in keeping your franchise top of mind with consultants and brokers by having you create a curriculum-based email journey for them.
This automation/journey will allow your franchise to nudge, nurture and nourish them with your brand promise, incentives, growth, and more, all with the purpose of being at the right relevant place and the right relevant time for them to engage a potential prospect with you. Email content can be centered around the brand’s value to the potential Zee and why the broker should consider this brand over another. In other words, it builds credibility and confidence with the broker to recommend your brand.
As you can see in the image below, the timing, the number of emails, and using engagement (clicks or site activity) can all play a part in this nurture automation. You can make the journey as complex or as simple as you want.
NURTURE AUTOMATION
People always raise their hands for information, thinking they want to explore your brand to become a zee, but the timing might not be right for you to expand into that market, or the prospective zee is too early. Regardless of the case, these people end up being long-term prospects in quite a few instances. Organizations today do not have a convenient or straightforward way to create nurture programs for those prospects who aren’t quite ready to engage in something serious. A nurture automation acts similarly to the broker/consultant automation; only the content should be slightly tweaked and personalized due to the type of prospect.
The goal of the nurture automation program is to consistently inform older prospects on growth and changes inside your franchise to “keep them warm on the bench” for the future. Nurture automations that you create can contain various cadences and types of emails with unique messaging to test conversions around your tone of voice and the content you present to them.
An example of this is below.
NEW INQUIRY – ENGAGEMENT SCORING AUTOMATION
Engagement scoring allows you, the franchisor, the ability to set up specific criteria that “score” the importance of the prospect across things like the information provided, clicks of the email, and time spent on the site after receiving the first email from you.
For example, let’s assume that your franchise is looking to add new locations in TX, FL, and LA while avoiding the west coast of the US due to strict environmental regulations. When a lead fills out a standard form around their location and other types of criteria (e.g., have a partner, have owned a business, capital, education, etc.), that data is then transferred into a system like iPost who then assigns that lead a weighted score and can then dynamically assemble an email with unique content based on that score to the recipient. Once the prospect engages with that email (open/click, visit the site, fills out more information, views a document), that weighted score can adjust, and either the 2nd email is sent to ask for a conversation or with more content to refine the interest. Essentially, engagement score automation can enable you to more effectively identify which prospects are real from those just kicking the tires. From there, you can then place the prospect into nurture automation or continue the conversation.
Below is an example of how you the franchise can customize the engagement score
EMAIL MARKETING WORKS FOR FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT
If you are not using engagement scoring/automation email as a part of your franchise development strategy, you might want to consider it. Email is the most cost-effective and highly engaged digital channel around, and despite what you may have heard, people want it. Email marketing should not be your sole strategy, but it should complement what you currently do as the possibilities and opportunities are endless. Choose your partner wisely.
Learn more about how iPost can help your franchise development team more effectively identify those new inquiries that are ready to buy and nurture those older leads and brokers to keep your brand front of mind. We’d love to talk about your brand and see if we might help.
CONCLUSION
In the Franchise world, email marketing can essentially be used for three different purposes. These purposes are Franchise Development, The Franchisor (Zor) sending to the end customer “on behalf of” the Franchisee (Zee), and The Zor provides the Zee with a “sub-account” with approved content to send to the end customer.
Each purpose or program has various degrees of complexity and highly differentiated key performance indicators.
Just like there are three different programs in franchise email marketing, there are also three areas for franchise development using email.
Each area requires different journeys, using differentiated messaging and tone and unique cadence/frequency controls.
