If you are a marketer inside a franchise organization, email marketing for franchise is an effective and cost-efficient way to connect with current and future customers. While most consumers love to hate email and claim that they get too much, they are addicted to it. People check email while driving, in bed, on vacation, in the bathroom, and even at the dinner table. Consumer content consumption continues to rise, but retention and patience are decreasing. Email is here to stay despite what some critics think, but email marketing is hard and gets more complex as the channel evolves.
A well-run franchise email program drives incremental value and influences revenue, and it doesn't matter if your franchise is a single location, multi-location, multi-state, or national. Companies invest in email solutions, resources, and strategies that find themselves ahead of the competitive curve.
However, franchisors such are you are faced with unique challenges such as brand consistency, maintaining guidelines, producing uniquely relevant content, and ensuring that segmentation is passed down to the local level. While daunting, these challenges are manageable through experience, adaptability, optimization, and having a technology partner who understands and solves for your business.
We created this field guide to help you explore the world of email marketing through the lens of a franchise marketer, along with addressing and offering clear guidance on your challenges.
A big question that you may have is what does great franchise email marketing look like?
It depends on who you are asking.
Email marketing is under a tremendous amount of pressure in the digital world. Despite the repetitive drums beating over its imminent death, the channel continues to thrive in many industries. However, marketing rules have changed, and there has been a shift to humanize, harmonize, and empathize with your subscriber lists. Marketing departments at all organizations are spending tens of thousands because they are now required to become more data-driven and customer-centric in their approach. You are now required to be more accountable and be able to show demonstrable results as budgets shift. As consumer privacy becomes increasingly regulated, people are more empowered and are more in control. The challenge is clear, and it's fun; embrace it.
As franchisors, you have the fantastic opportunity to create loyalty and engagement across channels, and email should be the superior force in doing so. If you run an email program, there are at least 157 things (see figure 1) to beware of. Don't let the big list scare you because iPost has taken that list and made four core areas in email marketing to focus on as a franchisor.
Let's dig in.
There are many things to do in email, but essentially you can bucket quite a few of them into four core areas. These areas should be fluid, and careful consideration around the prioritization of each of these areas is essential.
Some brands have the sign up at the bottom of their website in 4pt font, others have an interstitial that interrupts the web experience, and even worse, some brands have a six-step process capturing every piece of personal information and creating a username and password just to get access to deals or information. It is especially troublesome when none of that information gathered is ever used to "personalize" their experience.
Signing up for email should be developed through the customer's lens and not bias by web designers, site owners, or other marketers. The fundamental premise of signing up for email is intuitiveness, with the customer as the focus.
Don’t ask for information you will never use.
This email is often the most engaged email you will ever have in your program andthere are essentially four best practices for this first email.
Your first email should land in the subscriber’s inbox in near-real-time and not a minute over an hour. Commit to starting the relationship quickly and efficiently.
Every moment counts.
For example, suppose a unique differentiator of your franchise is donating profits to help others or volunteering events four times a year. In that case, this is something that should be highlighted in almost every email you send.
Email has the power to reach thousands or even millions of people, and it is your chance to spread your uniqueness over and over. Subsequently, you can be unique in your creativity, your landing pages, and even in the Use of personalization. Many organizations have data or conform to what others in their competitive space are doing, and while that isn’t necessarily wrong, it's just dull.
The first email for many franchisees is usually the last email before
“marketing” or “sales” campaigns kick into high gear. What if you as a franchisor took a unique approach and held out new subscribers to create a series of first emails explaining and educating your subscribers on ideas you are passionate about in the franchise world. Passion creates uniqueness, and it is up to you to show your franchise’s passion in the unique experience you can provide to those that interact in your email program, from the start until the end.
The first email is critical for content, but it should not contain everything about your brand and program. As marketers, we know our products and value propositions better than everyone else, but unfortunately, we cannot expect a new subscriber to realize them from just one email.
There are many components to your franchise that will take time for people to learn. Being focused can also create curiosity for what is to come next in email.
Curiosity creates desire. Desire makes a willingness to accept what is next.
The difference between a good vs. a great email program is the amount of time you spend optimizing and evolving the experience vs. just running it a day today. It would be best if you strive for a 60/30/10 dedication balance.
To illustrate the level of effort and potential impact of franchise email experience tactics, a prioritization grid has been created. This grid should help you decide on where to focus 60% of your efforts.
Later, in this whitepaper, we will be discussing the optimization process and the need for a nimbleness model for test and learn.
Adaptability is not a journey; it’s a continuous road aimed at success.
Email delivery is whether or not a receiver accepts your email and does not bounce, while email deliverability refers to where the message ends up after it has been accepted. Deliverability can be to the inbox, the spam folder, or another folder designated on the recipient's end. Email deliverability (aka “inbox placement”) is the single most important metric in your email program because all other engagement metrics tied to your plan depend on whether or not your email made it to the inbox. In 2019, Validity reported that the average deliverability rate in North America was 82%, which means 18% of the list never laid eyes on a single email. Imagine if your list had 500,000 subscribers and you were to increase your deliverability by 8% (from 82%-90%) and 40,000 more people had the the chance to see your message. By taking your current open and conversion rate, how much is it worth to monitor and optimize your reputation?
Spam filters and mailbox providers continue to add complexity to their algorithms, and long gone are the days of trying to circumvent the system to get into the inbox. To be clear, there are no special phones, no tricks to the trade, or a direct line to a postmaster to clear things up if you get in trouble. Filters and providers don’t care if you have a recognizable logo or a startup; they only care about one crucial thing; your reputation and the factors that make up that reputation.
If you don't have a plan to test regularly, your franchise might be missing out on a few critical areas for your program's optimization. Missed opportunities inhibit engagement, increase the likelihood of attrition, and, most importantly, hinder revenue growth. There is an impact on every email test performed. It starts with the organizational mentality.
If you are a franchise that subscribes to agile methodologies, then a nimbleness mentality when testing should be easily adaptable. The key to a nimbleness testing mindset is to organize your tests into one-week sprints and quickly make decisions based on statistically significant results while looking for ways to revise the plan to beat the new control fast. There are four elements in a nimbleness mentality for email testing.
First, the testing charter sets the foundation on why testing in email is vital in the program and how outcomes influence the other channels. Second, iPost has created a specific email testing calendar with an example that helps your franchise with steps three thru six. The importance of understanding the LOE vs. the impact is critical because some organizations execute tests with little to no effect on the program, which in turn causes frustration at all levels that sometimes leads to abandoning testing.
It is recommended that you start testing slowly, minimize the level of effort while maximizing impact, and limit tests to 1-2 a month to avoid burnout. The calendar plays an essential role in franchises because it allows you to localize and socialize testing among various marketers. The results should be kept separately outside of the calendar for reference and ideas for future testing.
The idea of testing in email can be daunting, but once you start and work with a partner or organization that knows your business and you see results, it can become addictive and fun.
Step 1: Create a testing charter
Step 2: Download the testing calendar from iPost.
Step 3: Create a hypothesis
Step 4: Determine the LOE (level of effort for each test)
Step 5: Prioritize impact
Step 6: Decide on KPI’s or metrics
Step 7: Find a statistical significance calculator
Step 8: Fill out the calendar (reasonably)
Step 9: Execute and track
Step 10: Keep results in a “library”
Imagine if you did this on every send and were able to get more and more complex (10/10/80 or hybrid multivariate testing) in your test and learn culture and see even greater results!
Testing works. Period.