Email Marketing & the Leaky Funnel: How Can Franchises Close the Gap Between Awareness & Conversion?

The biggest mistake many (if not most) brands make is pouring leads into a leaky funnel.

What do we mean by “leaky funnel”? – you may ask.

It’s simple: If you are spending your entire budget on awareness building but invest no effort into nurturing your prospects and existing customers, you are likely poking holes into your marketing funnel.

We specialize in franchise marketing and see this often: both franchisors and franchisees alike are leaking prospects mid-way between awareness and consideration.

The solution?

In this article, I’ll show you how one of the most underestimated marketing channels — email marketing — can help you nurture your leads to conversion as well as grow client/customer loyalty for repeat purchases.

How Email Marketing Closes the Conversion Funnel Gaps

Email marketing is not a quick fix; it should be an essential asset in franchisors’ and franchisees’ marketing toolkits.

If you’re a franchisor, email marketing helps you nurture leads, build trust, and increase your prospects’ propensity to convert. Looking beyond conversions, email marketing can even help you improve the franchisee experience by facilitating direct communication at scale and supplying your network with valuable insights and information.

If you’re a franchisee, email marketing offers benefits throughout the customer journey. At the top and mid-funnel, it helps create brand bias, making sure your brand consistently stays top-of-mind with your prospects and increasing the likelihood of conversions. As we slide down the funnel, email marketing seamlessly transitions to nurturing loyalty and growing customer lifetime value (CVL).

In both cases, email marketing allows franchisors and franchisees to reach two audience segments:

1. Top to mid-funnel prospects who’ve shown interest in your product, service, or license but haven’t committed to a purchase yet
2. Existing clients or customers who would appreciate special support or privileges. Why should this matter? Reactivating previous clients or customers can be 5 to 25 times more cost-effective than acquiring new ones, making this often-overlooked strategy a highly lucrative one and email marketing the perfect channel for it.

Experience and research prove time and again that email marketing works.

Whether you aim to reduce cart abandonment, increase overall conversions, or reinforce customer loyalty, this channel deserves a place in your marketing toolbox.

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How Email Marketing Helps Franchisees Grow Conversion Rates & Customer Lifetime Value

Having skimmed the surface of email marketing’s impact in B2B and B2C settings, let’s focus on franchisees.

Here, we’ll dig into how franchisees use email marketing to keep prospects interested, build trust in their brand, and turn more leads into loyal customers.

1. Stay Top-of-Mind

The marketing rule of 7 is a widely adopted theory that suggests that an average prospect needs about 7 interactions with your brand to even remember it.

With everyone competing for attention in this crowded marketplace, how does our brand stick in people’s minds?

This is where consistent, targeted email campaigns come into play. First off, you will want to provide your prospects with an incentive to subscribe to your email notifications by:

1. Prominently featuring a subscription call to action (CTA) on your website landing pages and, if possible, other marketing channels.
2. Offering clear value whether it be a special discount or exclusive information.

The better you segment your subscribers, the easier it becomes to plan and deliver content that resonates with them. This is the key step in keeping your audiences engaged and staying top-of-mind: Identifying and delivering content that they are interested in.

Here are a few examples of email marketing campaigns that can help your brand stay top-of-mind:

• Newsletters: Newsletters serve as digital updates often delivered via email, offering a mix of news, insights, and engaging content. For instance, IKEA’s newsletters offer design inspiration and practical space organization tips.
• Announcements: Through announcements, we efficiently create anticipation and excitement among our subscribers. To illustrate, Apple often leverages email campaigns to announce new product launches. These campaigns are crafted with teasers and exclusive insights that engage the audience and leave them eagerly awaiting updates.

2. Create Brand Bias

A buyer’s journey is rarely linear; days and months can pass from the moment a prospect is introduced to a brand to the moment a need for the brand’s offering arises.

The question is: How do you position yourself as a preferred option when they become ready to purchase?

The answer? Cultivate brand bias through email campaigns that share invaluable insights, craft engaging stories, and consistently reinforce your brand’s distinctive identity.

Here are a few best practices and email campaign types that can help reinforce brand bias:

• Personalized Content: Crafted specifically for each recipient, these tailored emails showcase content that is aligned with customers’ unique interests and preferences — think Spotify’s curated playlists or Netflix’s show recommendations. Though often labor-intensive to set up and automate, these types of campaigns tend to reinforce brands’ relationships with audiences.
• Personalization: Personalization doesn’t have to be as complex as automating personalized recommendations and dashboards — you can add elements of personalization to any email campaign simply by using the recipient’s name (first name tag) and creating targeted campaigns for carefully segmented audiences.
• Exclusive Offers, Insights, and Flash Sales: Accessing exclusive deals, early releases, and flash sales, much like Amazon Prime’s exclusive discounts, Sephora’s VIP sales, or Look Fantastic’s secret sales, not only makes audiences feel like they are receiving special privileges, but also keeps their eyes peeled on their inbox for new notifications.

3. Reduce Cart Abandonment

According to Baymard Institute’s research, the average e-store cart abandonment rate is a staggering 70%.

Among the main culprits are high additional costs (ex. Shipping and taxes), reluctance to open an account, a complicated checkout process, and doubts about the site’s trustworthiness with credit card details.

While email marketing cannot remedy complex eCommerce digital or fulfillment challenges, it can invite a portion of the prospects to reconsider their decision and return to the cart.

As such, email marketing is one of the top tools, apart from remedying structural eCommerce issues, to leverage if you are looking to lower your cart abandonment rates.

Here are a few campaign ideas, all of which can (and should!) be automated:

• Abandoned Cart Reminders: These reminders serve as gentle prompts (e.g. ‘Hey, you forgot something!’) encouraging customers to finalize their purchases.
• Personalized Picks: Supposing the prospect had doubts about their choice, some brands provide tailored recommendations listing similar products in that category.
• Sealing the Deal with Exclusive Discount: If the abandoned cart reminder doesn’t do the trick, some brands follow up with a special discount to reinforce the prospect’s purchasing decision. Crafted for those on the verge of purchase, these go beyond discounts—they’re our way of showing appreciation for their interest.

4. Grow Conversions and Customer Lifetime Value

Building new audiences and generating leads is expensive. Some companies spend as much as 20% of their gross revenue on generating new business, which can easily translate to tens of thousands of dollars per month, while behemoths (read billion-dollar companies) can easily spend millions on attracting new prospects to their sales pipeline every month.

Aware that it costs significantly less to retain a customer and extend their lifetime value (CVL) than to attract a new one, smart businesses spread their marketing investment strategically across the funnel.

According to Semrush, the likelihood of selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70%.

Additionally, a survey conducted by RJ Metric involving 176 eCommerce retailers and a staggering 18 million customers revealed that after placing an initial order, customers exhibited a 32% probability of returning to the same store for another purchase. The data didn’t stop there. For those customers who did return to make a second purchase, the probability of them placing yet another order grew to 53%.

How does email marketing fit into this?

Email marketing provides direct, one-on-one access to your customer base at scale. Using customer behavior insights, email marketing is an effective vehicle for exclusive deals, insights, and personalized offers.

Let’s illustrate!

Say you run an electronics store and a customer buys a laptop from you online. If you just leave it at that, it’s a one-off transaction. But, if you follow up with a relevant upsell email suggesting related accessories like a mouse, a protective case, or even software upgrades, and you offer them an exclusive deal on this bundle, that one-time buyer is more likely to purchase from you again.

Your spend on re-engaging this customer and increasing their CVL?

Minute!

And can be as low as a couple of dollars provided you’ve automated your campaign and have a sensible email marketing platform subscription.

5. Incentivize Loyalty and Advocacy

You know what’s even cheaper than driving repeat sales?

Having your customers grow brand awareness and attract prospects into your funnel themselves.

Nielsen’s Trust in Advertising 2021 study, conducted across 56 countries and surveying 40,000 people, highlights that as many as 88% of respondents prioritize recommendations from people they know over any other form of marketing communication.

Email marketing can be a powerful catalyst that propels customers to proactively endorse the brand among their networks. While focused on sale objectives, email campaigns hold the potential to create a devoted community of advocates.

Here are a few email campaign ideas that can help you transform satisfied customers into loyal advocates:

Exclusive Loyalty Rewards: Reward loyal customers with exclusive offers, discounts, or perks. Here’s how:

• Special Anniversary Discounts: Send personalized discounts or freebies to customers on their anniversary with your brand.
• Early Access Sales: Provide loyal customers with early access to sales or the latest product launches.
• Points or Rewards Programs: Create a points-based rewards program that allows customers to earn points from purchases and redeem them for exclusive discounts or items.

Interactive Surveys and Feedback: These campaigns foster engagement and gather feedback from recipients. Examples are:

• Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Send surveys to gather feedback on recent purchases or experiences.
• Product Feedback Requests: Ask customers to review a recently purchased product or service.
• Interactive Polls or Quizzes: These engage subscribers with personalized content, providing you with insights into customer preferences and opinions.

How Email Marketing Helps Franchisors Nurture Leads, Improve Media Relationships & Enhance Franchisee Experience

We’ve explored the potential of email marketing for franchisees. Now, let’s explore how email marketing can help franchisors:

• Nurture Leads
• Improve PR Performance
• Enhance Franchisee Experience

1. Nurture Leads

B2B sales cycles tend to be lengthy. The greater the investment, the longer the lead time between the initial engagement and closing the deal.

Email marketing is a direct avenue through which you can reach prospective franchisees, expanding their exposure to the brand and growing their interests with valuable content such as:

• Newsletters with Industry Insights: Keep prospects in the loop with industry know-how, trends, insights to stay top-of-mind and build trust.
• Webinar Invitations: Your webinars, already a powerful marketing tool, can greatly harness the potential of email marketing, especially in driving attendance. When you craft personalized invites and compelling teasers, you can considerably increase your webinar’s turnout.
• Case Studies & Expert Articles: Sharing your latest case studies and articles is an excellent way to establish regular frequency of communication. We recommend sending these emails weekly, once or twice a month, depending on your website content calendar.
• Newsletters with Reports: Whether your proprietary data or industry research conducted by authoritative institutions, sharing reports provides unique and valuable industry insights, and email marketing is an excellent vehicle to bring them to your prospects’ attention.

2. Improve PR Performance

PR distribution platforms and agencies come at a high cost, ranging from $300 for a single press release distribution to monthly retainers reaching tens of thousands of dollars, excluding (!) premium packages.

Assuming you have your own media database, email marketing can be a highly cost-effective channel for media engagement, including press release distribution and relationship building/nurturing.

Here are a few email campaign ideas to improve your PR performance:

• Spreading the Word: Distribute press releases, bitesize announcements, and proprietary reports or expert insights directly to your relevant media audience segment.
• Event Invitation: Invite the media to attend and cover your events, whether you are launching new products or services, opening new branches, or hosting digital events.
• Story Pitches: Pitch exclusive stories directly to a relevant media audience segment.

3. Enhance the Franchisee Experience

Whether you’re in the business of selling gum or multi-million-dollar franchises, retaining (and upselling) your existing clients remains more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.

Every franchisor aspires to nurture their franchisee network, but only a few manage to do so effectively.

Franchisees require support—education, ongoing training, access to the latest industry and corporate insights, and above all, a strong sense of connection.

Email marketing stands out as an ideal channel for direct communication with franchisees at scale, allowing franchisors to reach their network directly, regularly, and efficiently.

Regular dispatches of corporate updates, invitations, and follow-ups to training sessions, industry insights, and other resources keep franchisees in the know and touch with the diverse opportunities available within your franchise umbrella.

Here are a few email marketing content ideas to consider:

• Training Invitations: Invite your franchisees to pre-recorded or live training sessions and send follow-up recordings and transcripts to those who couldn’t attend.
• Corporate News: From board messages to policy updates and other memos, keep your network informed of all the latest news within the corporation.
• Reports, Industry Insights, and Guides: Support your network with data and educational content. Consider sending weekly industry news roundups, monthly corporate reports, and regular content alerts for the resources you develop and publish for this target audience.

A Quick Overview of What It Takes to Run a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Finally, let’s get into the core essentials of running a thriving email marketing campaign.

• Build & Segment Your List: Split your audience into categories and tailor messages to their preferences and behavior.
• Keep Your List Healthy: Maintain a healthy list by removing inactive or uninterested subscribers.
• Plan Your Calendar: Send emails in regular intervals to maintain momentum without overwhelming your audience.
• Mind Your Timing: Analyze historical campaign performance data and industry best practices to time your email deliveries when your audience is most likely to open and engage with them.
• Share Content That’s Valuable: Deliver content that truly matters to your audience segments. Sending irrelevant campaigns is the direct line to Unsubscribe Town.
• Make it Personal: Personalize your campaigns. This can be as subtle as using the first name tags to address the recipient directly or as complex as automating campaigns based on user behaviors.
• Embrace Automation: Create email workflows to save time on automation-friendly campaigns such as welcome email series, cart abandonment, and upsell emails.
• Analyze and Test Results: Report on campaign performance regularly and conduct monthly analysis to draw actionable conclusions that will help you increase open and engagement rates.

Exploring effective email marketing platforms that enhance campaign performance and simplify processes, we spotlight two powerful options.

• HubSpot‘s email campaign software empowers users to independently design and send professional emails while optimizing them for improved performance. Leveraging data from your HubSpot CRM ensures accurate customization of emails, enhancing their relevance and impact. Their prices go from 800$ a month to 3,600$ dollars a month.
• Mailchimp simplifies email marketing with intuitive drag-and-drop editors, robust automation, and developer APIs, empowering businesses to create professional, engaging emails and boost sales effortlessly. Packages range from 13$ a month to 350$ a month.

Ready for Email Marketing?

At Digital Spice, we specialize in franchise marketing, including email marketing and automation.

Whether you are a franchisor or franchisee, contact us to request a free consultation and proposal for your project at hello@thedigitalspice.com.

Let’s get digital!