Best Use of Franchisee Email Marketing
Maintain Brand Integrity
One of the main reasons to buy a franchise instead of starting an independent business is that you benefit from the widespread brand recognition built by your franchise. The sheer number of geographically distributed franchisees in a franchise system exerts an enormous influence on consumers. When planning your email marketing campaign, it is essential to leverage your franchise’s existing brand in the graphics and messaging content of your email template.
Ask the marketing department at your corporate office if they provide content for franchisees on a regular basis. For example, High Touch High Tech (ht2) provides a fully branded template on an monthly basis that can be quickly edited by franchisees before sending.
Provide Value to Your Subscribers
Whether or not a subscriber reads your email and clicks through to your web site depends on whether the content of your campaign is helpful, informative and even entertaining to your core group of customers. If a subscriber has fun while also learning something useful—all the better. Valuable content will also allow your mailing list to grow by decreasing the likelihood that recipents will take themselves off of your list.
Ask the support team at the corporate office of your franchise if they provide content for franchisees on a regular basis. For example, ht2 writes original content on a monthly basis for all franchisees to use.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Since there are a number of low cost email campaign systems (i.e. Vertical Response, Constant Contact, and MailChimp) available on the Internet, why figure it out yourself? Vertical Response, the system used by High Touch High Tech, provides the most user-friendly interface. It also supports dynamic list management, social media, easy editing by less tech savvy users, and provides subscribe boxes to put on your web site. Dynamic list management means that you can create a mailing list and let recipients unsubscribe automatically. Also, if an email address is not valid, resulting in a ‘bounce’, it is automatically removed from the list. All of these features translate into giving you more time as a franchisee to craft a carefully considered message that is reinforced by your franchise’s influential brand.
Maximize the Power of Your Web Presence
Your email marketing campaign is an ideal opportunity to provide links to other aspects of your web presence like your social media page, YouTube channel, and franchisee web site, increasing their potential to exert an influence on your target group of customers. Unlike your other web efforts, an email campaign ‘pushes’ information to your audience—they receive your email in their inbox without having to decide to do so.
The ht2 E-News template has professionally designed graphics that emphasize our Facebook page, YouTube Channel, and web sites. Franchisees are able to add links to their sites and Facebook pages.
Following these best practices, and getting a helping hand from your corporate office, gives your email campaign the best chances of resulting in sales for your business without taking away valuable time from other marketing efforts. So what are you waiting for? Get started with your email campaign now!
High Touch High Tech is the leader in innovative hands-on science and nature experiences for children, serving over 4 million children annually with 27 franchise locations across the United States, Canada, Turkey, Singapore and South Korea.