If you’re about to turn your business into a franchise or you’re an existing franchise owner who would like to spice up your marketing efforts, one thing is for sure. And that is that you need effective email marketing ideas to propel your business forward.
Email marketing strategies are a highly effective form of communicating with your prospective and current franchisees. And it’s been proven that email marketing for franchises is capable of helping you boost your franchise network as well as ensure that you get quality leads.
With this in mind, we’ve prepared a list of franchise email marketing ideas to help you get started on the road to success.
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Types of marketing emails to use in your next campaign
The world of marketing is full of different types of email campaigns. And when it comes to franchise marketing, email is a highly effective way of promoting your brand, sifting out the right prospective franchise partners and overall boosting your business.
The list of different types of email marketing ideas for your franchise business below should help guide you to the right strategy for your franchise business. It’s also worth noting that some of these email types can be used together and that you don’t just need one email for your marketing strategy.
1. Welcome/Onboarding Campaigns
If you had to choose one email type for your franchise business over all the others, it should be your welcome or onboarding email. With this email, which should be sent almost immediately and automatically after a subscriber signs up for your product or service, you need to do a couple of important things.
Saying a “hello” and a “thank you” are expected and extremely important features of a welcome email. However, you should also consider providing valuable information about your brand, setting clear expectations about what your subscriber will receive from you in the coming weeks or months and even offering a freebie and a call to action.
These four elements should be accompanied by a great subject line, uncluttered design and possibly videos or access to useful resources. This way, you make your brand stand out and remain memorable and relevant for your subscribers and they won’t feel inundated with your subsequent emails.
2. Promotional Campaigns
Next up, we have promotional campaigns. Are you planning on reducing your franchise price for a limited period of time? Are you throwing in extra support and training? If so, your prospective franchisees will want to know about this. These emails, although extremely common in the world of marketing, need to be carefully thought out and presented in a clear and engaging way.
They need to grab your audience’s attention immediately through a crisp and catchy subject line. But they also need to contain a clear call to action and links or buttons that will take them through the journey that you have designed for them.
Such emails need to provoke emotion and in some cases even add humour. Leave your audience curious and encourage them to engage with your brand by offering them something they can’t resist. Make sure you use colours, images and fonts that grab attention and if anything, don’t forget to do A/B testing for these types of emails for maximum results.
3. Nurturing Campaigns
Much like the name suggests, a lead nurturing campaign is a type of email that is targeted at leads who aren’t quite sure about taking action with your brand or not. In such a case, you want to win them over again and have them continue to take an interest in your franchise.
This is done by creating informative yet gentle emails that ask the audience how they feel about something or what you can do to improve your offering or their experience.
Adding value at this stage is super important and this is where you need your email to sound highly personal, almost as if you’re talking to a friend. Also worth considering here is throwing in something extra to your subscriber for free to help loop them back in and retain their interest in your franchise for longer.
4. Educational and Informative Campaigns
Educational and informative campaigns are email campaigns that literally seek to educate and inform your audience about a particular topic.
If you’ve put out new blog articles that you’d like to share with your subscribers or your brand has won an industry award that you are proud of, don’t hesitate to make them a part of your journey.
Remember that the more value added, the more engaged and interested your subscribers will be. This is exactly what you want, especially if you are looking to nurture your leads and give them something your competitors don’t.
5. Event and Announcement Campaigns
Whether you will be hosting or attending an event and you’d like your subscribers to join or attend, an event and/or an announcement email campaign is the way to go. Bear in mind that attending events is usually a costly endeavour and this is exactly why these emails should feature what kind of value your subscribers will get from attending.
Whether it’s a trade show, a conference, an exhibition or more – make sure that your subscribers know exactly what value for their money they’re getting. Even if your event is free, your subscribers still need to take action to attend. So making sure that you make the email and the event worth their while will be crucial.
6. Survey/Review Campaigns
If you are looking to collect data and feedback from your subscribers, sending out a survey or review email will do the trick extremely well. Here, you can get both quantitative and qualitative data that can help improve your offering. Surveys are a list of questions that a participant answers about your product or service and here, you can offer them something extra for their participation such as the chance to win a prize.
Reviews, on the other hand, are email campaigns that ask your audience to review your product or service and leave their thoughts, comments and feedback. With this in hand, you can use this information to help ensure that you improve your offering based on real and actionable feedback and remain competitive in a crowded marketplace.
7. Re-engagement/Customer Retention Campaigns
All franchise organisations and other businesses that use email marketing will find that they have customers who stop engaging with their brand and emails. This could manifest itself in fewer website visits, no click-throughs on emails, etc. This could be due to your subscriber changing their email address or choosing not to interact with your brand anymore.
This is where re-engagement and customer retention campaigns come into play. They seek to discover the purpose behind the lack of action taken on the part of your subscribers and try to reestablish a positive connection with your brand. If the subscriber doesn’t respond after a series of automated drip emails, then you have not lost anything except an email address that has no use.
However, if your email campaign is effective, you may just have a new customer on your side. And as we all know, acquiring a new customer or franchisee is much harder than re-engaging an existing one to continue interacting with your brand.
In conclusion
When it comes to email marketing campaigns, it’s worth noting that these are one of the most cost-effective and powerful ways to pique the interest of your audience, retain it and turn them into paying customers or at the very least, encourage them to take steps towards purchasing your franchise opportunity.
In this article, we’ve covered a few important franchise marketing ideas related to email marketing and although it may sound easy, it is often a highly complex process. That’s why the experienced team at Franchise Fame is here to help. We have extensive experience in ensuring that your email campaigns are successful and bring in the desired results. All that you have to do now is simply reach out to us and we’ll be more than happy to help!
