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.
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).
These three areas for franchise development are as follows:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.