How to use email marketing for a franchise network?

Local or national?

Both, Captain!

In a franchise network, you may want to centralize and standardize your emails to ensure the consistency of your communication, and therefore of your brand.

But to keep your franchisees loyal and involved, nothing beats local email marketing campaigns.

Restaurant owners can use e-mail kits or templates prepared by the franchise's Marketing and Communications Department. Each franchisee can then adapt these templates to send targeted messages to their local clientele. It's an excellent complement to a more global emailing strategy.

Be careful, however, to control the frequency of emailings at national level, so as not to saturate customers' inboxes... and end up in spam! This is what we call marketing pressure.

Here are a few useful tips for optimizing the performance of your emailing campaigns :

• Work on the subject line It's the 1st thing Internet users see in their e-mail, just like the sender's name. A good e-mail subject line increases the open rate. Don't be afraid to be original and challenge your customers to open the message. 
• Personalize your message Personalization: if you can, add personalization fields in the body of the e-mail or even in the subject line. This grabs web users' attention and encourages them to click even more. 
• Keep it short and efficient When it comes to emails, there's no need to make a big deal of them. Your customers won't spend much time reading your e-mails. So don't waste time writing a novel. Keep sentences short, use line breaks, and don't hesitate to use text formatting to highlight information (headings, bold, underlined).
• Don't forget the call-to-action (CTA) Your website: invite users to interact by reading your emails to create engagement. Online booking, consultation of your online menulink to your social networks... any way you can to extend the relationship beyond your email.
• Send yourself a test e-mail Before sending the e-mail to all your customers, don't forget to test it on your own e-mail address. Check that the information is correct, that there are no problems loading images, and watch out for spelling mistakes. 
• Define the frequency of marketing contacts The more franchisees you have, the more opportunities there are to send e-mails: corporate communications, national offers, local offers, etc. We suggest you set up rules to avoid sending too many e-mails to your customers. 
• Measure and analyze your results Never miss an opportunity to learn. And with your e-mailing statistics, you'll certainly learn a lot about your customers. What type of message interests them? Has your e-mail campaign had an impact on bookings in your franchise network? Do you have a high unsubscribe rate? Take the time to analyze this valuable data for your business and that of your franchisees.
• Calculate your ROI The sinews of war! Activating your database by sending out e-mailing campaigns allows you to be present in the minds of your customers, and thus increase your chances of getting them to come back again, and thus building their loyalty. How do you calculate this Return On Investment? By using tools like Obypay, which enable you to calculate the precise sales generated by an e-mailing campaign.