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The Best Franchise Text Strategies
SMS is one of the most effective ways for franchise systems to communicate. Here are five ideas to help you get started.
SMS is one of the most effective ways for franchise systems to communicate. Here are five ideas to help you get started.
The challenge with franchise marketing is that two layers need your attention.
For instance, Subway has to develop a plan to get franchisees on board and market the overall brand. But that’s not all. They then have to help these franchises to market themselves.
To complicate matters further, 42% of franchise professionals no longer feel traditional marketing channels are worth the investment.
It’s a challenge that requires careful consideration.
The good news is that one communication channel stands head and shoulders above the rest: SMS. Over the past decade, we’ve seen franchisees and franchisors successfully use texting to:
If you’re interested in learning more about the above use cases, we cover each one in more detail below.
Many franchises are using SMS for customer service, responding to questions, reminding customers about appointments, and alerting them of changes to a service or class.
eWeek reports that 52% of people said they’d likely text with a customer support rep if given the option.
A-1 storage text-enabled 50+ locations’ phone numbers and offers its customers the ability to contact them by text.
Customers even call out its text-based customer service as a benefit of doing business with them.
Recently we launched a new feature aimed at helping multi-location franchises called multi-number. With multi-number, you can assign individual franchises access to different phone numbers.
The best part is that you still have insight into everything happening at the individual franchisee level as an admin.
New franchisees require a significant amount of support, yet many new franchisors neglect their internal communications strategy.
A lot of that comes down to an overreliance on email. According to Gigaom, text messages have a 98% open rate. (In comparison, the average open rate for email is 20%.)
Text messaging is a personal and low-friction way of communicating with your franchisees. It gives you a direct line without asking them to download additional apps or remember complicated passwords.
You can use these texts to:
Here’s an example of how Medi-Weightloss® describes its internal text alert program.
It’s a no brainer that a franchise system’s success largely depends on their franchisees’ quality.
The starting point is getting your business in front of prospective franchise buyers and helping them make the big decision to buy.
The problem is that trying to reach anyone via email or phone calls these days is Mission Impossible.
So, how can you make your life easier? Communicate the way your prospects want you to.
Franchise Help, a company that helps franchisors with lead generation, found that SMS had a 40x higher conversion rate than email.
They also found that when a potential franchisee is given a choice between verifying their information via text message or via telephone, almost 90% of FranchiseHelp’s prospects chose text messaging.
The result was a response rate that was +209% higher than phone calls.
There’s no doubt that having an effective local marketing strategy is critical to business success for anyone in the world of franchising.
Online reviews are perhaps the single most crucial local marketing tool available to your franchises. 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Good reviews are a significant ranking factor. The impact of reviews on local search is even more dramatic, with online reviews representing roughly 15% of overall ranking factors and increasing in importance by 20% year-on-year. So the more reviews you have, the better.
How does texting help you earn more online reviews?
Simple. After you work with a customer, text them asking for a review, and include a link to your review page on the platform of your choice (Google, Facebook, Yelp, Angie’s List, etc.).
Companies that send review requests via SMS earn 600% more online reviews than those who ask via email.
Our customer Main Juice Squeeze Co, a smoothie and juice bar chain, opened 10 locations across Texas and Louisiana in two years.
One of the secrets of their success was sending promotional offers by text. In the words of its Director of Technology, texting is unparalleled at driving sales.
With franchise systems or the franchisors, they typically want to try and control and manage the communication strategies for their franchisees in the system.
In the case of Main Juice Squeeze, individual franchise owners let the marketing team know they want to do an event and what the offer includes.
Then, Jessie’s team puts together a message and schedules it to go out in SimpleTexting. This process allows them to ensure each outgoing text includes all the necessary info, like the Main Squeeze name, location address, and necessary disclaimers.
The best way to see how SimpleTexting can work for you is to request a demo or sign-up for a free trial. If you want a high-level view of why franchises choose our platform, here it is.
If you still have other questions about franchise texting, our team of experts would love to help. We’re available seven days a week. Text or call us at (866) 450-4185 or use the chat at the bottom of your screen.
Drew Wilkinson is the Head of Marketing at SimpleTexting. Drew has more than a decade of experience managing successful integrated marketing programs to build brands, raise awareness, and generate demand.
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