Communicating with franchise leads

Introduction

Planning your timeline of communications with prospective franchisees can be a challenge, particularly when you’re recruiting from multiple sources and most of your leads sit at the top of the funnel.

You don’t want to bombard your leads, but you do want to engage effectively and with encouragement.

In this article, we’ll look at how you can nurture your leads by sending timely communications that don’t overwhelm them, and instead offer snippets of insight into your franchise opportunity – ultimately nudging them towards engaging with you and reaching the next stage of the recruitment process.

Understanding your Prospects

People who are interested in investing in a franchise often have varied motivations to do so, from a career change in an industry they’re passionate about, the prospect of establishing a lifestyle business and quite often for financial goals.

Depending on your industry or niche, the types of individuals you’ll look to engage with will have different motivations. A franchise that’s predominately lifestyle based (think service-based franchises) will have a different franchisee profile to one that’s more investment based, like a property investment franchise.

The key differentiator may well be how your franchise starts their journey – will they deliver services from day one, with a long-term view to expanding into management, or will they hit the ground by building a team to deliver services?

All of these factors play into the way you’ll communicate with your leads, the tone you’ll use and how you’ll devise the content that will pique their interest in your opportunity.

Devising your welcome e-mail

More often than not, as a franchise you’ll look towards multiple sources to find suitable leads. With FranchiseBase, we cover key franchise portals as well as your own website and landing pages as the typical sources of your leads.

You might request that users complete a short form on your website to receive a PDF of your brochure. Your brochure should provide enough detail for your prospective franchisee to understand the business model, scale of the opportunity, your reputation and any financial information. 

Beyond this, your brochure/welcome e-mail is your first opportunity to speak directly to a lead. It’s a short window of opportunity to hold their attention and provide the information that will encourage them to engage with you.

Make sure your welcome e-mail is personable, with an introduction that encourages a lead to respond and get in touch directly to discuss the opportunity further. 

Also provide further reading material (in addition to your brochure) in the form of links, ideally to a blog section on the franchising section of your website. That way you’ll both rank organically for the content you’re offering, as well as providing further insight that might not otherwise have a suitable place in your franchising brochure or prospectus.

Finally, provide an absolutely clear route to the next stage. You’ll likely want to gather some additional information about your lead to gauge their suitability, so consider a Questionnaire form that isn’t too onerous to complete, but provides you with the detail you need.

With FranchiseBase, your initial welcome e-mail is sent automatically to all new leads, with your franchising brochure/prospectus provided as an e-mail attachment.

Scheduling your next lead communications

With your franchise brochure in the hands of your new lead, it’s time to start thinking about planning the next step to keep them interested and engaged.

Consider a follow-up shortly after the welcome e-mail

Spam filters are a frustration for any business using e-mail marketing, and for franchise recruitment the situation is no different. While most e-mail services use best practices to improve deliverability, there’s always the potential for an e-mail to go astray – the last thing you want that to be is your initial e-mail!

Consider scheduling an automated text message an hour or so after your first e-mail, along the lines of:

Thanks for your interest in [franchise opportunity]. We’ve just sent a brochure with more information to your e-mail address. If you haven’t received it, or would like to discuss further please contact us on [e-mail], or call [telephone]. 

Send timely follow-up e-mails with new content 

When you’ve pre-written and designed your follow-up e-mails, there can be a temptation to get everything out there at once, risking annoying them into unsubscribing at an early stage. 

While there’s no hard and fast rule for how often you should e-mail your leads, consider scheduling a maximum of 2 e-mails per week to new leads, moving down to a single e-mail after a fortnight or so.

Ultimately, how often you e-mail depends on your audience, your content schedule and what receives the best response from your leads.

Don’t be afraid to re-iterate, alter your e-mails and their timings to find what provides the best engagement.

Don’t give up on old leads

Individuals considering a move into a franchise will likely have complexities to their situation, they may still be working full-time for instance. 

Just because a lead hasn’t yet engaged with you, they may still have an interest in your opportunity next month, or in 6 months’ time.

Consider moving these leads into a separate group to receive a ‘newsletter’ style e-mail with a longer frequency between e-mails, every month or quarter depending on your content schedule.

This could contain a variety of content such as good news stories from franchisees, new recruits and general market information, challenges and opportunities for your sector.

With FranchiseBase you can define Smart Rules, for instance after 6 weeks you could set a ‘New Prospect’ to move to the ‘Newsletter’ group.

Recognise that sometimes there’s no substitute for picking up the phone

In an article focused on communications, we can’t avoid mentioning that sometimes your best opportunity to learn about your lead is by picking up the phone.

Whether you opt to do this with every lead depends on your resource available, but you could work a call into your recruitment process at a specific stage to gauge the interest of your lead.

When you consider that a lead might have engaged with several other franchises in addition to yours, getting in touch with them directly could be the difference between not progressing or becoming a new franchisee.

With FranchiseBase, you can create Smart Actions – quick pre-defined ‘prompts’ to complete a task (such as making a call) after a set period of time and dependant on the stage of the prospect.

A checklist for every lead e-mail

To wrap-up, here are several key factors we think every e-mail should cover:

Personalise e-mails to your lead

Make your e-mail personal by communicating with your lead by name, and ideally the location they’re interested in.

As well as helping capture your leads attention, personalised e-mails help to avoid spam filters. 

With FranchiseBase, you can personalise your e-mails with a range of tags such as {{firstname}], {{location}} and {{postcode}}.

Personalise e-mails for your brand

Set yourself apart by using your company branding by incorporating images and photography into your scheduled e-mails.

Focus on the content

The value of your marketing is entirely based on content – ensure it’s engaging and provides new information to a prospective franchisee in order to avoid repeating yourself over the course of your e-mail schedule.

Provide a call-to-action

Ensure that every e-mail you send incorporates a single action that you want a lead to take, such as completing a questionnaire or scheduling a call.