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!
We recommend that every franchisor we work with develops a perfect pitch (or your elevator pitch) to let prospects know who they are and what they do. A perfect pitch will help you to quickly and efficiently tell prospects what’s involved with your franchise opportunity and how it could benefit them. The idea being that if you were stuck in a lift with someone for 30 seconds, how do you convey your most important messages in that time? It should act as the foundation for any copy that you write about your business. It includes your key messages that should be contained within all communications, whether it be in sales, through your website, networking, video, phone calls and any other introductory communications.
By developing a perfect pitch, you ensure that your whole team has a base to start from when trying to communicate about your franchise opportunity. It also means that they’re all on the same page and providing your prospects with exactly the same message.
The work we undertake in creating a perfect pitch for our clients is based on our own extensive work, NLP techniques, and the psychology of the UK franchisee decision making process. The vital factors are the four stages of engagement:
Clarity
Credibility
Relevance
Believability
The creation of a perfect pitch will allow you to ensure that all of the communications used throughout your recruitment process and marketing are consistent. ‘Create once use many times!’; your perfect pitch can be used in all of the communications you have with prospects, from press releases, newsletters and editorial to emails and phone calls. It helps to give you, your team and your prospects clarity around what you do.
As you liaise more and more with you prospects, you will identify which key messages are important to them and you should use this first-hand information to tweak your current messaging or incorporate new messages. We also highly recommend that you research your existing network and find out more about what motivated them to join your franchise and try to incorporate these messages into your perfect pitch in order to attract more of the same people to your network.
Contact us to find out more about how to create a perfect pitch for your business.
This month, Coconut Creatives is the Silver Sponsor of the bfa Annual Conference. As one of the biggest events in the franchise recruitment calendar, we’re so pleased to be involved and sponsoring for the second year in a row. We’re looking forward to seeing our clients, affiliates and new faces in the industry.
Not only are we sponsoring the event, our very own Adam Lovelock, Head of Online Marketing, will be joining the likes of Baroness Karren Brady and Iwan Thomas MBE by sharing his expertise and knowledge with attendees of the conference. As one of our technology geeks, Adam will be sharing his knowledge on ‘How to Transform your Business Through Technology’ at 3pm on the first day of the conference.
The conference is the centrepiece networking and knowledge sharing event on the bfa calendar and offers unrivalled opportunities for franchisors and professionals from the sector to make new connections, share invaluable advice and insight and be inspired.
“As our second year as Silver sponsors of the Conference, we’re looking forward to seeing new and old faces. The Conference is a great opportunity for everyone in the franchise industry to network and share their knowledge and advice with fellow franchisors and service providers. We always learn something new that we can take home and implement in our business to help us grow and develop. Coconut will also be sharing our own knowledge at the event to help others take away more information to continue building their businesses,” explains Paul Clegg, Managing Director at Coconut Creatives.
We will also be there to support our clients at the Franchisor of the Year awards. We’ve got a few in the running so we’re looking forward to hearing all about the winners and congratulating them on the evening!
To find out more about working with Coconut Creatives or attending one of our workshops in 2016, please contact us on 01725 511 673 or info@coconutcreatives.co.uk
In an age where we are constantly bombarded by adverts asking us to buy, buy, buy, there is a fine balance between overloading your franchise prospects with too much information during the recruitment process and not providing enough. If you bombard them every day with sales messages from the day they enquire with you, you’re likely to put them off pretty quickly or end up in the junk folder!
The recruitment process is based around building trust between you and your prospects until they are ready to make a decision and pick up the phone to you. Your communication with prospects should reflect this. Let prospects know what the benefits of your franchise opportunity are to them rather than telling them what you do and for what price. Your communications should operate in line with your recruitment process to help push prospects further through the process. Structure your communications around your recruitment process and you’re likely to see more franchisees coming through.
A successful recruitment process consists of lead generation, lead management and conversion. Different types of information through different channels are required at each of these stages. Yet, you must ensure that the messages you send out are consistent and provide a clear understanding of your franchise opportunity. This will draw prospects to you naturally.
Researching your target audience before undertaking any franchisee recruitment campaign will greatly increase your chances of attracting more leads. Understanding which media channels your target audience prefer to receive information through and which social activities they engage in will ensure that you allocate your resources as effectively as possible and don’t overload your prospects with too much information.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is the first step in building long-term relationships with your prospects. To achieve successful lead generation, you need to be proactive and present your company as an attractive opportunity. You can’t just sit back and hope they’ll come to you.
Lead Management
Lead management is the process of following up your leads. For prospects, this is the stage where they consider whether your franchise is an interesting opportunity or not.
Some prospects prefer to be in the driver’s seat of procuring more information about your franchise and others might want you to provide the information directly. This will often depend on their sense of urgency so you need to establish the communication channels that permit both. However, prospects are only interested for a short period of time and online-only communication channels are often slow with long response times and little consistency so it is important to bear in mind that prospects will be considering other opportunities.
At this stage, it is important to provide prospects with all the necessary information about what joining your franchise will entail. Successful lead management will lead to higher lead conversion so it is important that you get it right at this stage.
Lead conversion
Lead conversion involves transforming a lead into a franchisee. In order to achieve this, you need to provide information about anticipated timescales and support to effectively outline the course of action. This will ensure that prospects view you as a franchisor that is professional and well organised.
In order to provide the right information at the right time, you not only need to research characteristics of your perfect franchisee but also their behaviour. No prospect is exactly like another but you can identify common themes that will resonate across your target audience. It is important to bear in mind that prospects have different information needs in each stage of the recruitment process. We recommend that you create a bespoke plan outlining which information needs are to be addressed via which channels, as well as when they are to be addressed in your recruitment process.
Think you might be overloading your prospects with information? We can help you perfect your recruitment process and communications. Contact us on info@coconutcreatives.co.uk or call 01725 511 673.
