Relevance has revolutionized both the franchise email marketing industry and franchise marketing systems. It has franchise marketing companies moving us away from the batch-and-blast of old and on to the path toward one-to-one email messaging.
Relevancy always matters. No one can afford not to be relevant to at least some degree. And it is the franchises that provide the most relevant, targeted email content that will most likely win and keep a customer’s business.
Relevancy has also evolved as technology has enabled gathering and analyzing ever more data about each customer. That means franchise email marketing has also evolved to provide a much better customer experience at the inbox.
For example, a restaurant franchise might send out a birthday email and there’s a relevance to that: The customer is in fact celebrating a birthday. But the email marketer can take the next step to offer a coupon for that customer’s favorite menu item or wine, plus let that customer know what reservation times are open on their birthday with a link to click to confirm that reservation.
That’s the difference between providing relevant content and providing a good experience. It’s being relevant but taken up a notch…or two.
This level of relevance gets you the inbox engagement that helps you improve email deliverability, gain a competitive edge, earn brand loyalty, and gain opportunities to cross-sell and upsell.
To conduct the analysis necessary to gain customer insights, franchise marketers require email reporting tools that facilitate this process. That means your first step is making sure you are set up to do your email analysis.
The next step is to study your customer data. Find segments and spot trends. Start to learn your customers’ behavior, what they react to and when. Then you can start to predict what to say and when.
Say you have a franchise related to the wedding industry. Through your analytics, you’ve figured out what brides typically do when (buy invitations, find the florist, order the cake, register for gifts, etc.). Maybe your email analysis shows brides look for a reception venue 9 months before the wedding, and at 3 months out, they are looking for a bakery to supply the wedding cake. That means when new brides become part of your database, you can predict what they will be thinking about when as they plan their weddings.
Go back to the brides and when they typically take on different parts of the wedding planning process. Now that you know this, you can plan the content that will be relevant for where a bride is in the wedding planning cycle. If it’s 9 months out, plan to send messages about reception venues. At 3 months out, send messages about the wedding cake, and so on.
Notable Tip: Make sure you are utilizing the correct Attribution model in your email reporting.
Creating that much content ahead of time might seem like a chore, but if you don’t, it might not get done. Many franchises struggle just to get the emails out the door. Yes, they’re doing the segmenting and analysis, but they aren’t getting to the next point which is creating relevant content for different audiences. Many lack the time and resources to create one good subject line let alone two for testing. So creating content upfront is imperative in franchise email marketing.
And once it’s created, it will in many cases be automated, meaning your time and resource investment will have a payoff.
Has your degree of relevance evolved to be about the customer experience? For the smart franchise marketers, it will.
We solve the problems franchises face of consistent branding and fragmentation when running email programs. We help you create emails that people crave, resulting in higher ROI for both the franchisor and franchisee.