When used and written correctly, e-shots can be an extremely effective marketing tool for your franchise recruitment. Prospects spend a huge amount of time trying to find the right franchise for them so they may have been to a franchise exhibition, trawled countless franchise listing websites and picked up various magazines but still haven’t found what they’re looking for. That is, until your expertly written e-shot lands in their inbox!
E-shots are a great way to communicate with prospective franchisees and let them know who you are and what you do. By creating an informative and inspiring e-shot, you want to spark their interest and lead them to find out more information about you either by clicking through to your website or picking up the phone to call you.
Who are you targeting?
Before embarking on any e-shot or marketing campaign, it is important to begin by profiling your target franchisees. Who are your top performing or perfect franchisees? What kind of backgrounds do they have? Is your franchise a lifestyle choice or a serious business suitable for a serial entrepreneur? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you to set the tone of the e-shot and decide on what kind of information you want to send.
Capture prospect’s interest
Once you have established your target audience and tone of voice, you will need a short, catchy subject line to capture prospect’s interest so that they will open your e-shot to read it. Without this, your e-shot is likely to get lost in your prospect’s inbox and will not be read. Is there something unique about your franchise that you can use to draw people in? A recent e-shot for one of our clients with the subject line ‘Take Your Slice of £500m’ got 76 enquiries over just a few days and a franchisee sign up within just 3 weeks. Take time to really think about the subject line because it will determine whether or not your e-shot is read or deleted straight away.
What are the benefits of your franchise?
What is unique about your franchise? You can mention the training that you offer but we don’t recommend you have this as the sole topic of your e-shot as many franchisors do this and yours needs to stand out from the competition. Is your business model thriving? Let your prospects know how joining your network could benefit them and how it fits with their goals and lifestyle wants and needs.
Follow up
The follow up you do after sending out an e-shot is the most important part of the process. We often find that far too many good leads are wasted due to poor follow up techniques. Make sure you have a dedicated team member who has the time and training to qualify and follow up on every lead that comes through. By sending further information through promptly you ensure that prospects keep your brand in mind and you don’t lose them to your competitors.
Although e-shots are a great way to target prospective franchisees, don’t rely on just one form of marketing communication for your franchise recruitment. Research has shown that the most successful marketing campaigns use a mix of communication channels. E-shots should form part of a researched and balanced franchise marketing recruitment campaign.
To find out more about how we could help you write e-shots or provide advice for your franchise recruitment marketing, please contact us!