Scheduling Automated E-mails & Texts
Introduction to Schedules
Schedules allow you to automate communications with your franchising prospects, providing timely information and reminders via pre-defined e-mails and text messages.
This saves you time, allowing you to focus on your most promising leads whilst ensuring every lead receives consistent (and timely) communications.
Once you're sending automated schedules to your prospects, you can monitor their success including viewing which prospects opened them, how many times and which links they clicked.
Creating your first Template
To set a schedule, you'll first need to create a template.
Your template will be the content that the lead will receive, either an e-mail template or text message template.
You can apply a template to more than one schedule, but every schedule requires a template to begin sending.
To add a new Template
Navigate to the Franchise Recruitment panel:
Within Franchise Recruitment, click 'Templates':
Scroll down to 'Create a New Template' and click 'Add a New Template':
You'll now be presented with the new template form.
First, provide a title for your template. Make this something memorable that relates to the content you'll be writing for it:
Next, select whether your template should be an 'E-mail' or 'Text Message':
Finally, click 'Create Template' to create your template.
You'll then be re-directed to the Template page.
Adding Content to your Template
Adding E-mail Content
From the Template page you just created, click 'Edit' to begin adding your content:
This will then open the Template content editor.
For e-mail, you have several fields to be used to define your template:
- E-mail Subject
This is the subject line for the e-mail that will be received by the prospect. - E-mail Summary
This is the short summary that is often shown beneath the subject line in Outlook, Gmail etc. - E-mail Content
This is the main content for your e-mail. - E-mail Template Images
Any images you add here can then be used in your e-mail content. - Send Brochure with e-mail? (Checkbox)
When checked, the franchising brochure will be sent as an attachment with this e-mail template.
First, create both your e-mail subject and summary for the template:
Next, you'll be working on the main content for your e-mail.
Here are several options you have for making your e-mail more attention grabbing for your leads:
- Headings
- Lists (both numbered and bullet points)
- Horizontal Rules
- Images
- Links
Personalisation Tags
In addition to using various heading tags, lists and links, you can also use personalisation tags.
To use Personalisation Tags, simply enter {{firstname}}, {{lastname}}, {{location}} or {{postcode}} within your e-mail content.
FranchiseBase will then convert these tags into the relevant detail for each prospect, e.g. 'Hi {{firstname}}!' will be converted to 'Hi George!'
This allows you to personalise your e-mail to each individual prospect.
We've now created a basic template with some content and we're ready to save it:
Click 'Save' to finalise these changes:
The page will refresh and you'll now see your content listed under 'Template Content':
To preview what your e-mail will look like when sent, click the 'Preview' button at the top of the Template page:
This will open a window displaying your full e-mail:
If you need to go back and edit your template further, close the preview window and click the 'Edit' icon again.
Adding Text Message Content
Text message content follows the same steps as the e-mail template, albeit with slightly different options.
To create your text message content, click 'Edit' on the Template page:
The only relevant option for text messages is your message content:
It's worth noting you can also use Personalisation Tags with text messages too, which is particularly useful for grabbing your leads attention when they receive the text message.
Once you've added your text message content, click 'Save'.
Creating your first Schedule
Once you're happy with the content of your template, we need to apply it to a schedule. Let's move on to Creating a Schedule.
From the Franchise Recruitment panel, click 'Scheduling':
Scroll down to 'Create a new Scheduled Automation' and click the 'Add a New Automation' button:
This will open the New Schedule form.
First, provide a title for your schedule. Following on from the template tutorial, we'll call this 'Introductory E-mail':
Next, we need to define how long after the prospect has registered they should receive this schedule. In this case we want to send the Introductory e-mail after 3 days on the system, which is 3 days after they'll have received the franchise brochure.
Remember that prospects will immediately receive the Franchise Brochure e-mail after being added to FranchiseBase.
Under 'Wait Time', we'll enter the number 3:
And under 'Wait Schedule' we'll select 'Days':
Next, under Template we'll select the template we just created:
We now have the option to limit this schedule to a specfic group. It makes sense that this e-mail will only be sent to New Prospects, so we'll check this option and select New Prospects from the drop-down list:
Next, we have the option of starting this schedule as 'Paused', so that it doesn't immediately start sending to prospects. In this case we'll leave it blank as we're happy for it to begin sending as soon as it's created:
Finally, we have the option of only sending the schedule to prospects created after the date that this schedule was added.
This could be important if you create a schedule after you already have prospects on FranchiseBase, as otherwise all prospects within the stage you're targeting could have been registered longer than the wait time for this schedule, and will receive the e-mail immediately. We recommend checking this option, unless you're happy that all prospects within the stage you've selected will receive the e-mail:
Now that we've created our schedule, we can click 'Add Schedule' to finalise it.
With our first Template created and assigned to a schedule, we'll move on to the next section about monitoring your schedule.