Franchise Email Marketing Best Practices

Posted on September 4, 2024 in Blog

You won’t find a more effective marketing tactic than putting great content in customers’ inboxes. For franchise systems, the trick isn’t gathering subscribers or creating content, it’s balancing national and local email marketing for franchisors and franchisees without overlapping campaigns. From the basics to hard-learned tips, here’s how to handle franchise email marketing at the local and national levels.

Email Marketing for Franchises: Local vs. National

Email marketing delivers exceptional return on investment. Winning the inbox generates 40 times more conversions than social media, and 70% of consumers say they (almost) always open emails from their favorite companies.

But managing national and local lists isn’t easy. Many franchisors invest considerable time and effort managing email content for franchises at the enterprise level without delivering personalized, localized content to support franchisees.

The key to supporting national and local email marketing is to gather, organize and stratify data. Whether you’re looking to get it done in-house or need a helping hand, here’s what success looks like.

Our 6 Top Franchise Email Marketing Tips

If your national franchise organization can check these 6 boxes, expect big results …

1. Choose the right email marketing platform for franchises

Today’s email marketing software options are nearly endless. From Mailchimp to Constant Contact, there are dozens of quality platforms.

Franchise systems should limit their search to software options that allow location-specific access, such as Emma. This enables franchisors to give each owner access to a localized audience segment, brand-approved email templates and brand assets, and system-wide data to improve email automation for things like open rate, click rate and send time. Here’s an email jargon cheat sheet!

2. Put quality first

Put strict quality assurance guardrails in place whenever possible. Emma and other tools have adjustable settings that allow national marketing managers to review, adjust and approve local campaigns before they’re sent. This protects brand standards and provides built-in opportunities to improve results using information gleaned from dozens, even hundreds, of local and national campaigns over time.

For example, marketers can optimize email send time-based on open rates nationwide or adjust subject lines based on similar historical campaigns.

3. Always be automating

Create, test and optimize email content. For franchises, email marketing’s automation potential is a game-changer. Use relevant email automation at the national and local levels to amplify your marketing efforts and guide customers down the sales funnel.

Create system-wide email automation for key customer actions, including:

Welcome email
Review email
Abandoned cart (or abandoned service inquiry) email
Rekindle email (returning customer)

Email automations are especially useful for categorizing subscribers who joined at the national level. Most lists require some degree of geographic information by asking for a zip code or address at sign-up. After an immediate welcome email, consider sending another follow-up to qualify and segment your new subscriber with a short survey asking things like:

Have you been a customer before?
What product or service are you interested in?
Are you likely to purchase a product or service in the next 30 days?

This information is incredibly valuable to local owners, who can then offer relevant content, a special promotion or solicit a review.

Email marketing for franchisees is easier and more accessible when they know exactly what their prospective customers need to hear; sign-up forms set the tone for success!

4. Build your list

First, don’t buy email lists. They hurt overall email performance and muddy your data, causing long-term harm. Instead, grow your list by adding sign-up forms to your website’s footer, introducing pop-ups on key pages and by allowing customers to opt-in to marketing emails during the transaction process.

Encourage on-the-ground employees to ask for emails, too. In-person prompts are especially valuable because they come from customers who made it through the door or requested an estimate or service – that’s the type of person who will want to hear more from you!

5. Don’t overdo it

While most consumers want to hear from your brand, it’s easy to crowd the inbox. Especially if you send national and local emails. To prevent sending too many emails to the same subscribers too often, create guardrails. Klaviyo and other platforms have built-in tools that automatically restrict the number of emails sent to users, temporarily removing them from newsletters or automated email campaigns.

Some systems even use a calendar to let franchisees know when national emails are set to send to avoid too many emails hitting customer inboxes at the same time.

6. Make the call to action (CTA) clear

Perhaps marketers’ biggest mistake isn’t writing bad subject lines or sending emails at the wrong time, but sending emails that lack a clear call to action. What do you want users to do with this information? Before hitting “send,” check your email for a strong CTA for each content block.

Use expressive language that reflects what will happen next, such as:

Register now
Shop the Collection
Sign up Today
Get the Whitepaper

Whether the campaign is national or local, email marketing for franchises boils down to turning subscribers into customers. Gut-check every email to ensure it puts readers in a position to convert!

Email Marketing for Franchises Made Easy

From email marketing for home service franchisees to a winning fran-dev campaign, email marketing delivers the clicks and conversions your team is looking for. With nearly 30 years of experience in franchise marketing, we’ve learned how to balance national and local interests to support system-wide growth.

See what exceptional customer service and industry expertise can do for your franchise brand; get in touch or call (231) 922-9977 today to get started!