If you are managing your own e-mail marketing campaign, you know how important it is to have a concise and effective subject line. Recent studies have shown that 35% of email recipients choose to open email based on the subject line alone. Here are some tips franchissees and franchisors can use to increase open rates.
Writing a strong subject line is equally important if you are a franchisor or a franchisee. With larger lists, you have a good opportunity to test different subject lines across different subscriber lists, to see which will perform the best. You can then use the subject line that obtains the best open rate in future e-mails.
Here are some important points to keep in mind when writing an effective e-mail subject line:
- If it’s not included in your “from” address, put your company (or individual name) towards the beginning of the subject line. This will allow your subscribers to pick your e-mails out from the tons of spam they receive when scanning their inbox.
- Keep your subject line to 50 characters or less (5-10 words). The exception to this is if you have a highly targeted audience, where the reader may appreciate additional information in the subject line. The maximum number of characters that can be used is 80.
- Your subject line should speak to the content of the e-mail. Stay away from splashy promotional phrases and excessive use of CAPS and/or exclamation points in your subject lines. Often, subject lines framed as questions can perform well. Avoid over-used words such as “limited time,” “free,” “opportunity,” and “only.”
- It is extremely important to avoid spam filter buzz-words (words that trigger an e-mail client to mark your message as spam). Your e-mail marketing solution should have a built-in tool that will scan your subject line and content for popular spam buzz-words. By avoiding buzz-words, you are likely to see a higher deliverability and open rate.
Managing an e-mail marketing campaign internally can be overwhelming, especially if you are sending to hundreds or thousands of subscribers on behalf of your franchisees, who may be selling different products, have different deals/specials, and have differing relationships with their customers. This is why we developed TrueMailer, our e-mail marketing solution created specifically with franchises like yours in mind.
Tags: E-mail Marketing, franchise marketing, internet marketing for franchises
As a franchisor, one of the most common requests from the field is for more leads. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is one of the best ways to drive leads and increase sales for local franchise offices. Yet, SEM can be difficult to setup for businesses with multiple locations. Here are some suggestions we’ve learned from experience.
To get started, you should create a simple program and let individual franchisees choose to participate, based on their own marketing budgets. Provide franchisees with corporate-approved ad copy, keyword lists, and landing pages – in order to maintain brand consistency. If your corporate office is running its own national SEM campaign, you may want to keep brand-related keywords out of your local campaigns, which should focus on keywords related to products and services.
Tags: driving leads, franchise marketing, internet marketing for franchises, Search Engine Marketing
With the current state of the economy, maintaining a strong brand presence is more important than ever. Online media buying (a.k.a. banner advertising) is a great way for a franchise business to stay in front of their core audience.
From experience, TruePresence can attest that this form of advertising is not going to generate leads from people looking to buy into your franchise system, nor is it a measurable way to generate leads or foot traffic for local franchise locations. There are better ways to generate leads online, which we’ll discuss in future blog posts.
But, if building a national brand is your goal, banner advertising is a highly effective tool for franchise systems.
To get started, you must develop a campaign goal and determine the metrics you will use to judge its success. Common measurements include:
- CTR (Click through Rate) – this is the number of times your ad was displayed on a user’s screen before a click was generated.
- CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) – this is the running cost of the campaign divided by the number of people that perform the desired action on your landing page.
Tags: banner advertisements, franchise marketing, internet marketing for franchises, online media buying
A recent survey conducted by TMPD Marketing revealed that your customers are now using the internet more than the yellow pages to find local businesses.
More importantly, the survey also found that a large number of users conducting local searches take some type of action – they pick up the phone, make an in-store visit, or send an email.
What does this mean? That local searchers are in the final stages of their buy cycle and are almost ready to make a purchase.
Additionally, the study revealed that “With No Distinct Winner, Marketers Need a Diverse Local Search.” The message for franchises: local offices need to get listed on the internet, and get listed in several places to ensure people looking for your local services can find you and buy your services.
Example of Local Search results
Tags: driving leads, internet marketing for franchises, Local Search, Search Engine Marketing
One of the most important things in any relationship is communication. This is especially true in franchise systems. If you represent the corporate office, it is critical to keep franchisees updated on the latest product changes, internal happenings, industry updates, and recommendations.
Many franchisors send out a weekly or monthly e-mail newsletter to their franchisees, often using Microsoft Outlook, or a similar e-mail program. This causes a problem: how does the corporate office know if franchisees are receiving their messages?
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Tags: E-mail Marketing, franchise marketing, internet marketing for franchises
Paid Search, Pay-Per-Click, Search Engine Marketing… there are many names for advertising with Google AdWords, Yahoo! Panama, and MSN Live. In today’s economy, this form of advertising is crucial to finding new customers looking for your business’ products and services.
A well-managed campaign can be difficult to run for businesses, but for franchise systems to do it effectively, it can seem impossible, for two reasons. One, because of the different marketing objectives of a franchisor vs. franchisee, and two because managing local franchisee campaigns with multiple keywords, overlapping territories, complex reporting needs, and varying expectations can be a very daunting task, indeed.
Tags: driving leads, franchise marketing, paid search, Search Engine Marketing