5 Franchise email templates to set you up for success

Franchise owners may often rely on their marketing teams to create the best email templates when it comes to marketing their franchise. Unlike many small businesses or family-owned brands, franchise owners must cater to multiple locations and many different markets depending on each franchise location. 

While it’s simpler that each franchise hires its own marketing team to handle its own location, that isn’t the wisest decision. Doing so could lead to several different issues, such as lack of brand cohesiveness, which then leads to a lack of overall brand awareness and lost revenue.

Having a cohesive marketing strategy across your entire franchise is vital, especially when it comes to your digital marketing strategies.

Why your franchise needs an email marketing strategy

If email is tricky for franchise owns, then is an email marketing strategy really that important? The answer is, yes. However, it just takes a few additional steps to make sure your franchises are all aligned, and having the right tools can and will make all the difference. 

With so many different marketing channels available to franchise owners, 59% of marketers say that they see the most ROI from email. With an average return of $38 for every $1 spent, email marketing provides more than double the ROI than that of other digital channels, making it the most crucial tool available to your franchise team. 

As for customer preferences? Consumers consistently state that they prefer to hear from their favorite brands via email over other channels, including social media. 

Tips for your franchise: Email marketing best practices

For those who already implement email marketing or even those just starting out, several best practices should be cemented in your planning to ensure you are getting most out of this channel.

Segment your email list

One essential tip franchises should keep in mind is to keep their email lists properly segmented. For franchises with location nationwide or even worldwide, segmenting your lists becomes vital. 

Email list segmentation allows marketing teams to send relevant material to subscribers that fall into different categories. Marketers can segment their email lists in hundreds of different ways, including:

• Geographical location

• Purchase history

• Search history

• Age 

• Gender and more

Segmented email campaigns perform much better than blanket, one-size-fits-all, campaigns because they target a more concise audience that is more likely to engage and convert. For example, sending an email for a local event to someone across the country is not only irrelevant to the reader but a waste of time and resources. 

Uniform franchise email templates are a must

As a franchise, you have a brand name to convey to your audience. If you’re allowing your team to design their own campaigns without approval, then you have no way of knowing if they are using the correct branding that unites your brand amongst audience members. 

Therefore, using uniform franchise email templates is non-negotiable. Making email templates available to your various franchisees not only simplifies their marketing to-do list but gives you the power to control your branding. 

Depending on the tools you are using, you can approve all emails before your franchisees send them out, as you can with our Emma HQ services. 

Source: Emma

Always monitor your brand’s campaign success

Carefully monitoring each of your franchisees’ email campaigns is vital to your brand’s email marketing success. Even if you have multiple location-specific campaigns happening at once, if one location is performing poorly, that can influence your brand. 

The best way to monitor your brand’s email campaigns is by using an analytics tool that gives you access to key email benchmarks. These benchmarks should include:

• Open rates

• Click-through rates

• Click-to-open rates

• Bounce rates

• Unsubscribe rates

• Spam rates 

• Engagement rates and more

Monitoring each campaign will show you patterns worth noting. For example, if you notice a decrease in open rates and an increase in unsubscribe rates, then you know your readers were likely unhappy with that campaign. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to panic each time you see a dip in essential figures; it just means your team needs to revisit that campaign and improve on it. 

Remember, this can be avoided by putting your campaigns through an A/B test prior to sending. 

Don’t be afraid of utilizing local campaigns

While brand consistency is everything for a franchise, that doesn’t mean you should be neglecting local campaigns. Once you’ve taken the necessary time to segment your lists via geographical locations properly, your franchisees can then utilize local campaigns to help spread brand awareness. This is especially important in regions where you may be trying to build more brand awareness or if you have recently opened a new location. 

Retargeting tools are your franchise’s friend

Finally, franchise owners would be wise to make use of various retargeting tools to help them better engage with their audience members. Retargeting tools allow you to get to know how your audience members are interacting with your email campaigns, which allows you to build emails based on specific behaviors. 

Retargeting is especially important when building and getting to know a brand’s local audience and can help your franchisees build and share content that pays off in the long run for the brand. 

5 Franchise email templates to get you started

Coming up with franchise email templates for your entire brand may seem like a daunting task but fret not! We’ve gone ahead and collected several of our favorite franchise email templates to help spark your team’s creative side. 

The newsletter

Newsletters are one of the most popular emails sent out to brand subscribers. They are excellent because they provide a one-stop-shop for sharing all your brand’s news, as well as updated and original content to help establish yourself as an expert in your given industry. 

Newsletter templates come in several forms; however, some of the most effective templates have a similar design layout (like the one below). It uses imagery to grab your audience’s attention while providing short blurbs about the content that you link to. 

Source: Emma

The product email

Your franchise has something to offer your audience, meaning you’ll have to share that product or service with them. Having a product template ready and available helps to ensure that your franchisees can send relevant product information while still maintaining brand consistency. 

McDonald's does a wonderful job of providing its franchisees with a template that can be sent out year-round by simply altering a photo. 

Source: Really Good Emails

The welcome email

The welcome email, or welcome series, is vital to building a connection with your audience members. These messages are intended to not only welcome your new subscribers but get them familiar with your brand and everything you have to offer them. 

Maintaining brand awareness at this level is essential, so having a welcome email template at the ready is crucial. 

Source: Emma

The holiday email

Holidays happen year-round, and having a cohesive franchise email template that is sent out to all your subscribers is essential to creating a sense of togetherness. No matter what the holiday, your brand can customize products or services that reflect your audiences’ needs.

This example from Starbucks is great because it can be quickly customized to any holiday in any area with a simple swap of a product and a bit of copywriting. 

Source: Really Good Emails

The countdown

Countdown email messages are great for driving urgency for your franchise. Having a countdown franchise email template that is customized for local and brand-wide events is a great way to not only build anticipation, but get your readers to act on your desired call-to-action. 

Source: Emma

Wrap up

Having an email marketing strategy is vital for any franchise owners; however, that requires you to keep your franchisees in the marketing loop as well. Having ready-made franchise email templates is a great way to cut down on everyone’s stress levels while still helping you to maintain brand consistency.

A few franchise email template ideas to get you started, including:

• The welcome email

• Product emails

• The newsletter

• Holiday emails

• Countdown emails 

Are you a franchise owner or manager looking for a marketing tool to monitor multiple locations all from a single command center? Emma HQ is designed specifically for franchise businesses. Request a demo today to see how we can help your franchise.