It can be difficult to know how to best approach marketing for a business, especially a franchise business. How do you know what will actually work, and what’s just a flashy idea that sounds cool but is ineffective? Using data driven marketing strategies enable you to run marketing campaigns that are more likely to convert.
Here are some data-driven marketing techniques you can use to streamline the growth of your business and increase your overall marketing ROI.
Data-driven franchise marketing strategies to maximize ROI
Best Practice 1: Automate your lead follow-up processes
Converting a prospect into a sale is all about the follow up. Only a small percentage will purchase immediately after the first touch point, whereas the majority of sales will come through after a series of interactions. Automating your follow up process to stay in touch with your leads is a great way to increase your ROI.
Some research shows that almost half of all leads are never contacted by the franchise, and even those that do you get contacted usually only receive a handful of interactions with the business.
Get the most out of every lead by making your follow process automatic. This works for both short term follow ups as well as long-term “checking in” messages.
Best Practice 2: Follow-up fast
What’s the average amount of time it takes your franchise business to contact a lead once you receive their information? An hour? A day? A week?
Data shows that follow-up emails sent within 15 minutes had an 82% higher open rate than follow-up emails sent later.
Since you’ve already automated your follow up process from the previous step, now it’s a simple matter to adjust the timeline to make sure your follow-ups go out sooner rather than later.
Best Practice 3: Follow up more times
How many times do you follow up with your leads before letting them go? Sales research has shown that it takes an average of eight touch points to fully engage a lead. Although for many people it can feel weird and annoying to constantly follow up with people over and over, in reality a large chunk of leads will thank you for following up with them several times.
A good policy is to follow up with leads every week until the lead either converts or requests to be removed from the list. Again this can be configured to go out automatically, so it actually takes almost no work to do if set up properly.
Best Practice 4: Optimize advertising campaigns for maximum ROI (not CPC or CPL)
It’s tempting for many franchises to default into focusing on marketing channels that offer the cheapest cost per click or cost per lead. The smart way to optimize campaigns is for ROI – basically getting the most profit for every dollar spent on advertising.
Here’s an example to illustrate the point: maybe you’re in person, US-based franchise business can run advertising campaigns with one cent cost per click by only targeting Facebook users in India. Well, that’s great In terms of economical leads, but it’s a relevant because there will be a 0% conversion rate.
Cheaper leads are not always better.
Practice 5: Google search ads have higher ROI over Bing ads
Leads generated by Google search ads delivered 86% more revenue than leads generated by Bing search ads.
Instead of trying to run page search campaigns across multiple platforms, it’s probably best to double down on Google adwords for your franchise.
As an added benefit, Google also accounts for 68% of all search traffic.
Best Practice 6: establish a customer retention marketing strategy
Conventional sales wisdom indicates that it costs five times as much to sell to a new customer as it does to sell to an existing customer. Put another way, the sales success rates of selling to existing customers is about 65%, whereas the success rate of selling to new customers is about 5-10%.
That’s why it’s important to create a standardized customer retention marketing ecosystem will help to insure the investment made on aquiring new customers actually translates into unit profitability.
A solid customer retention strategy uses more than one channel, such as:
- Email follow up
- Phone call
- Snail mail (flyer, promo, birthday card, etc)
- Promotions
- Referral campaigns
- Asking for Testimonials
Best Practice 7: Filter your prospects
Not every lead warrants the same amount of time, energy, and resources. Some are super high value, others are a complete waste of time, and a lot for somewhere in the middle.
As you get better at filtering prospects and investing sales and marketing resources towards the highest value leads, you’ll find your conversion rate and ROI increasing in parallel.
Experienced marketers know that not every prospect is worth the chase. Another reason why data-driven marketing is so important is that it simplifies the process of identifying what leads are more valuable for the company and also which are most likely to buy.
You can use this as a good place to start with simple lead to categorization, By separating them into:
- High value leads: the most profitable prospects who have already expressed their desire to make a purchase.
- Medium level leads: These prospects have shown some level of active interest in your product but haven’t quite arrived yet at the final stages of their buyer’s journey.
- Low value/no value leads: prospects that do not have sufficient interest to make a purchase currently. Also includes leads that are interested but don’t have the ability to pay.
Different types of franchise businesses might categorize leads using different criteria, so you’ll have to figure out how to best differentiate between high value and low value leads for your particular franchise business. Criteria can be based on: location, age, gender, income level, education level, expressing interest vs. not, etc.
Best Practice 8: Personalize your email campaigns
The highest converting marketing emails are the ones that look like an individual email personally sent to the recipient, as opposed to a clearly mass marketing email/newsletter.
There are primarily two things you need to do to configure your email marketing to send emails like this.
Number one: use email marketing software that enables you to send mass marketing emails that are personalized and appear as if manually written.
Software that can help you:
- Mailshake
- Woodpecker
- Gmass
- Yesware
- Reply.io
- Outreach.io
Number two: personalize the emails that you send out using the software from number one. Tools like Mailshake allow you to add variables to your emails to customize them in endless ways. Of course this includes their name, but you can also use it to customize the email subject line, reference their location or job title or recent interaction with your business.
Best Practice 9: Set up website analytics
There’s a good chance that right now do you have a website for your business, and that website isn’t set up to track analytics properly. This means you’re losing valuable data and insights into your customers journey. Properly configured analytics can provide invaluable data to help you make smarter, more strategic decisions based on objective information.
In particular some key metrics to make sure that you include:
- Form fills
- Click through rate
- Balance rate
- Time spent on page/engagement
- Relative performance of different types of Content (blogs, videos, white papers, etc.)
For example, let’s say you find that your engagement metrics are poor. The bounce rate is high and no one’s clicking through or reading through the pages, so you realize that adding a chatbot to your website will improve these metrics by better guiding prospects through your website and products.
Whereas if you had not set up analytics, you would only be able to have a vague notion that your website isn’t converting or making enough sales, without having clear insight as to why or how to solve the problem. Then you try random stuff and cross your fingers that it solves the problem, or at least (hopefully) doesn’t make things worse!
Finding the right balance between the different marketing channels can take a bit of time and more than a little bit of work, but apply these core strategies and you’ll be well on your way to increased ROI!
Schedule a free call to discuss marketing opportunities with our team here.
You can also learn more about our Franchise Marketing services.
