Franchisors have a dual job when it comes to marketing. On the one hand, they market to their customers. On the other hand, they market to prospective franchisees. One of the best ways to achieve this dual objective is through email marketing.
The reason behind this is simple: it’s a highly effective way of building an owned audience that ultimately gets you the results you want. With most communication today taking place via email, it’s not surprising that email marketing makes it to the top of the list of digital marketing for franchises.
If your franchise business hasn’t implemented an email marketing strategy yet and you’re unsure of where to start, then this post is for you!
Table of contents:
Why do you need to develop an email marketing strategy?
It’s worth noting that with over four billion email users worldwide, email marketing for franchises is possibly one of the most effective ways to reach a target audience. In fact, research shows that as of 2020, email generates around £29 for every pound spent.
But there are other reasons why you should consider franchise email marketing. Here are just a few of them:
- 99% of consumers check their email daily, making email the top communication channel.
- A whopping 79% of marketers consider email marketing among the top three most effective marketing channels.
- Visitors to your website who come from an email campaign are most likely to convert on forms.
- With email marketing, you have full ownership and control over the channel. This means you are not restrained (apart from compliance regulations) on when, how or why you reach out to your subscribers.
- Email remains one of the most effective ways to nurture leads and boost customer loyalty. It’s also an effective way of boosting your conversions, with a higher value on purchases made.
However, there are other reasons why you should consider email marketing for your franchise. Among these include driving traffic to your website, increasing your brand awareness and building credibility, increasing sales volume and revenue, fostering customer success, informing and educating customers, and of course, email marketing helps to facilitate smoother communication and interaction with your other online channels (including your website and social media platforms).
How to create an email marketing strategy
Now that you have a greater awareness of the importance of email marketing to your franchise business, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty. Below, we offer some of the top email marketing tips that will help you to create a strong and effective strategy and plan your next email campaign.
Step 1: Determine who your audience segments are
For this step, you’ll need to do prior research into exactly who your target audience or ideal buyer persona is. This will mean determining and defining their genders, income levels, social status, interests and desires, pain points, geographic location, etc.
Once you’re clear about your target audience – whether customers or prospective franchisees – you can take the next step to build your email marketing strategy for your franchise.
Step 2: Set out your email marketing goals
This step entails doing in-depth research about industry benchmarks and figuring out what benchmarks apply to you.
For example, if the average open rate in your industry is 20%, then this should give you an idea of what to expect when launching your email campaign. If your open rate is higher than your industry average, this usually means that your emails resonate with your audience.
Other metrics that you should pay attention to include opt-in and opt-out rates, unsubscribe rates, click-throughs, site visits, purchases and more.
Step 3: Build your email list
Although it takes time to build your email list, this list is yours and yours alone. You should treat it like gold to ensure that you make the most out of it.
Some ways to grow your email list include providing lead magnets such as access to free and valuable information from your website.
Once you build this list of subscribers, who have essentially given you their permission to receive communication from you, you’re ready to move on to the next step.
Step 4: Choose your campaign type/email types
There is an overwhelming amount of email campaign types, such as newsletters, blog post updates, product sales, company news, and automated email campaigns that follow customers throughout their franchise business journey.
Choosing the right campaign type is crucial and ultimately ties in with the goals you set out and the audience you chose to send those emails to.
Step 5: Create an email schedule
You should also predetermine how frequently you will contact your subscribers and you should also let them know when to expect communication from you.
Failure to do this can mean your email ends up in the spam folder or in the trash bin. Worse still, your unsubscribe rate can skyrocket, which is highly undesirable.
Step 6: Choose your technology type
There are multiple ways to send bulk emails to your target audience. You just need to know what the right technology for your business is.
For example, some email campaign software out there enables you to send multiple campaigns in different languages to people in different locations at the same time.
If this is not relevant for you and you have a smaller list across a smaller geographical area, then you need email technology to help you do just that.
Apart from software, your email should be designed in an optimised way to suit mobile subscribers’ needs because most email communication is received via mobile devices.
Step 7: Create a compelling copy
Copy is everything in marketing. Email text content needs to be short, catchy and to the point.
Crafting an email with the right level of personalisation and call-to-action (CTA) buttons will ensure that your subscribers will engage with your email the way you want them to.
The email starts with a subject line, and it’s the first thing your audience will see once they receive an email from you. The subject line should be catchy, relevant and informative but not feature words that will automatically be flagged as spam and end up in that folder.
Step 8: Measure your metrics and refine your efforts
Most marketers are incredibly focused on measuring performance and email marketing is no exception. You should have a set of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure at the end of each campaign, after which you need to carefully study the results and refine your efforts to outperform your previous metrics with the next campaign.
How to test and track your email marketing campaign results
And now that your first campaign is ready and has been sent out, you’re ready to monitor the results. As promised earlier, we now get to the most important email marketing metrics and KPIs that you should be monitoring, alongside other strategies you can and should implement in your email marketing campaign for your franchise.
A/B testing
It goes without saying that different people prefer different types of content and design elements in emails. Some may opt for the more subtle look and feel while others may prefer a brighter and bolder appearance.
To ensure you make the most out of your campaign, it’s critical that you do A/B testing to see which email type you sent out is most effective. It’s advisable to select one variable at a time and then test it to determine the success rate.
This essentially means creating two versions of one email – one which contains the variable and one which doesn’t.
Allow sufficient time for an adequate response rate and then it’s time to analyse your results.
Luckily, this type of testing can be performed multiple times with different variables until you reach the sweet spot.
Key metrics to monitor
Although there are several metrics you should be monitoring simultaneously, these are the most important ones to keep an eye on:
- Deliverability: this refers to the total number of emails that were successfully delivered after you hit the “send” button (to this end, it’s important to remove inactive subscribers from your list to keep it fresh and relevant).
- Bounce rate: bounce rate in email marketing refers to the total percentage of emails that couldn’t be delivered.
- Open rate: how many people open your email when it hits their inbox.
- Click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of people who click on your CTA buttons or links.
- Conversion rate: this is the number or percentage of subscribers who took the action you encouraged them to take in your email, be it a purchase of a product/service or signing up for a webinar.
- Unsubscribe rate: the number of people who unsubscribe from your email list.
In conclusion
If email marketing is a marketing strategy whose importance you appreciate but you’re unsure of where to start, don’t worry – you’re not alone! Franchise Fame specifically caters to the marketing needs of franchisors and franchisees and with this in mind, feel free to reach out to us and take advantage of our email marketing services. We’re just a phone call or a few clicks away and we are looking forward to being of service to you!
