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Throughout all of Metric Collective’s businesses, especially FranFunnel, you’ll always see A LOT of passion about email. (We send a lot…) Our fundamental belief is that e-mail is a communication platform that is fundamentally built into Americans’ lives. Because of that, cracking the nut on email marketing is really important to a successful overall marketing plan.
It shouldn’t then surprise you to know that excellent email marketing capabilities are core to what we provide for our customers on our FranFunnel platform. We truly don’t believe that there are any marketing solutions out there that provide a more powerful tool for franchises when it comes to email marketing. (If there is, you gotta tell us!)
That being said, the most common refrain we hear when we discuss our capabilities on email is something along the lines of:
“My CRM already handles email auto-responders and drips for me.”
And while I’m not someone who gets upset frequently, it’s this type of response that leads to the situation where franchises have trouble getting a hold of leads via email.
So allow me to make a few points (I’ll try to be nice) about why your CRM’s email capabilities need to be better. I’m assuming you use merge tags to personalize the greeting e.g., “Hi Eli” instead of “Hi there.” But after that, here are things that you’re probably doing that is really killing your engagement.
You send the same email regardless of where the lead came from — I’m putting this one first because it’s almost certainly the one which causes the most damage. Leads from different sources have fundamentally different experiences with your franchise. A lead that comes from a portal may only know one or two facts about your concept. Or what about the fact that they’re also waiting to hear from other franchises? A lead that comes from Facebook or Twitter is only exposed to your product through social media. And most importantly, a lead that comes from your own website is, in contrast, super educated about your concept. What you email leads from each source needs to reflect these varied experiences. Using the same email for all three is tone deaf and will certainly turn leads off of your brand no matter what source they come from.
You send the same email regardless of what contact info you have — At some point in your email, you likely include the language “We’ll be in contact shortly…” or something of the like. I really think a version of that sentence could make sense for leads that you can call or text. But what happens if all you have is an email address? What does it mean to follow up with someone shortly via email? Send another email? Seems redundant. They’re already reading this email. The fact of the matter is that your first email needs to push people toward action. So if you only have an email address, you really need that first email to be the email that you used to follow up with.
You send the same email at all times of day and week — The fact of the matter is that a large percentage of leads who make a web inquiry about your franchise want to speak right then and there. There will never be a better time for them then right now. And guess what? Leads come in 24/7/365. So that means that a high proportion of your franchise’s leads are NOT coming in during work hours. There are, we’ll say, 50 hours in a work week and 168 hours in a week. So fewer than 1/3 of the week is while you’re available to speak in real time. Yet your email is completely blind to the fact that you may not in fact be “following up shortly.” What happens to a lead that comes in at 7PM on Friday evening? When do you follow up with that lead? Monday? Tuesday? Either way, it’s 3 or 4 days later. So your email is a perfect place to let leads know when you’re available. That way you can redirect their energy to a time that’s mutually convenient.
And these three simply represent what’s going wrong. What about all the opportunities you have to make the emails even more compelling. Things like:
Your “email drips” from your CRM just aren’t cutting it. And you know it. You wouldn’t want to get the emails that your franchise is sending. So why would your leads want to get them?
Get FranFunnel today.
This article was written by Eli Robinson, General Manager of FranFunnel.
