Taking Control: How Centralized and Data-Driven Marketing Pay Off for Franchises

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Want to make your good franchise program a great one? Launch a centralized and data-driven approach to email marketing.

By Dan Forootan

National brands and marketers face a major challenge: how to increase sales at the local level w

In some cases, your franchisees might turn to email to communicate with customers. But unless they’re skilled email marketers, they could do more harm than good, damaging your brand with inconsistent messaging. 

How can you balance the need to maintain brand integrity with increasing sales at the local level? By moving to centralized marketing that uses automated, data-driven email marketing to localize national marketing strategies. This approach provides the best of both worlds: You maintain control over the brand and marketing/advertising strategies and have the ability to accomplish more with less by sending centrally branded automated campaigns built around dynamically personalized, geo-targeted content. This benefits the franchise as a whole as well as the individual franchisees.

Data drives targeted marketing automation

With centralized marketing, you can deliver automated campaigns on behalf of your franchisees with a consistent brand image that capitalizes on customer behavior, preference, and demographic data to create highly personalized and effective email campaigns.

Synching individual point-of-sale, web and customer data with a central email marketing database gives you valuable data that you or your marketing agency can turn into actionable campaigns based on customer behavior. 

By segmenting your email marketing database into sub-accounts, one for each franchisee, you are able to pull multi-level reporting that shows the big picture across the entire franchise spectrum and also zooms in on individual locations. 

How Franchisors Will Benefit

By centralizing your email marketing, you can roll out targeted and localized campaigns on behalf of all franchisees. A franchise master account with sub-accounts for franchisees has many benefits:

A central marketer can roll out data-driven, geo-targeted campaigns on behalf of franchisees. 

Franchisees are empowered to send out promotions themselves using your approved email marketing templates to ensure they maintain brand integrity and provide a consistent voice and experience.  

Franchisors can report on and monitor everything that’s being done.

POS and Customer Data Create More Intelligent, Engaging Email

Centralizing your franchise email marketing also puts the power of data to work to create valuable email messages for your franchisees’ customers. Emails with meaningful personalization get opened and acted on more frequently. 

Studies vary from one industry to the next, but in general, personalized promotional emails can generate 15 percent to 50 percent higher unique open rates and 25 percent to 50 percent higher unique click rates than generic mailings lacking any kind of customization. 

For example, consider an email from “Vandelay Subs” that has a 10 percent generic discount on any submarine sandwich. Then compare it to another email from “Joe’s Subs” that greets you by name, offers a 10 percent discount on your favorite sub and gives you a map and directions to the store nearest you. That email does everything but drive you there, and it’s all due to the data that “Joe’s Subs” collects, saves and leverages for a more useful customer experience.

What kinds of customer data should you collect? First and foremost is the email address itself. Once you capture customers’ email addresses, these three data points are the most useful:

• Customers’ names,

• Where they live (full street address or city and ZIP code) and,

• Purchases (items they buy most often, order values, frequency, etc.).

These allow you to create highly targeted emails that address your customers by name, customize offers based on their interests and shopping habits and show them the closest locations. But don’t stop there. 

Where does the data come from? Data flows in from four basic sources that give you a well-rounded image of your franchisees’ customers and how they differ from one location to the next:

1. Your customer relationship management: Information such as name, address along with additional information they may have volunteered such as birthdays, etc.

2. Point of sale: Data including number and kinds of items, total order value, last visit, previous purchase history, etc.

3. Your website: Browsing behavior on your website or a version of it that has been localized with franchisee information (franchisee’s name, store photos, address, phone number, street map, unique merchandise, service or menu mix).   

4. Franchisees: Store location (street address and map), manager/franchisee name, etc. 

What to do with the information once you’ve got it

Take those rich sources of data and convert them into meaningful email messages that will encourage repeat visits and greater engagement. 

Suppose your company has a franchised line of yoga studios. Create well-thought-out emails to put data into action. Some examples:

• Welcome email sent to new members or first-time guests with educational information,

• Reactivation email sent to members who haven’t taken class lately,

• Birthday greetings, with a gift or incentive to buy a service such as personalized instruction or branded merchandise,

• Anniversary message marking a membership milestone,

• Special offers to encourage website browsing or buying,

• Cross-sell or upsell offers to encourage novice members to try a more advanced class or to buy branded merchandise,

• Class or appointment reminder,

• Offers based on user website activity, such as browsing certain products or checking out special services,

• Special events or guest instructors based on the type of classes a member attends,

• Congratulatory emails for members who master skills or achieve milestones such as weight loss or receive certification,

• Educational information, fitness, self-care, and other tips to encourage well-being and positive feelings about participating in your program.

The Bottom Line 

A centralized and data-driven approach to email marketing can take a good franchise program and make it great. It bridges the gaps among central marketers, franchisees and their local communities, enabling both global branding and local marketing while driving stronger, more profitable customer relationships.  

Dan Forootan is president of the marketing platform StreamSend. Find him at fransocial.franchise.org.

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