As technology and communication continue to grow more mobile, franchise service brands are increasingly turning to texting-based solutions to engage with customers, drive sales, and build lasting relationships. However, implementing a successful SMS program across a franchise network comes with a host of challenges. Many of the solutions available today fall short of meeting the unique needs of franchises. They’re either heavily focused on one-to-one messaging—lacking the scalability required for broader outreach—or they’re geared toward large-scale campaigns without the flexibility for personalized, local engagement.
Even when these solutions support texting from different phone numbers for each location, they still fall short by:
- Failing to provide the brand’s corporate headquarters with visibility into performance across all locations
- Lacking the ability to send out corporate-driven messages at the local level
- Providing insufficient access controls to ensure franchisees only have access to what they need
As the Director of Solution Engineering at Voxie, I’ve had the privilege of working closely with both existing and prospective clients to navigate these complexities. That’s why I’m writing about the common challenges faced by franchise service brands when evaluating their SMS programs. We’ll explore how a corporate-level investment in an SMS solution like Voxie, which has been purpose-built for Franchise, can overcome these hurdles by centralizing control and integration, ensuring uniform compliance and branding, and leveraging the cost efficiencies of a unified platform. By the end of this blog, you’ll understand how franchise brands can create an effective SMS marketing program that benefits both corporate teams and individual franchisees.
The Case for Corporate-Level Investment in SMS
For Service brands, effective communication with leads and customers isn’t just a convenience—it’s a necessity. As customers increasingly prefer instant, personalized interactions, adoption of text marketing solutions has emerged as in ideal means to meet consumers where they are. However, to harness its full potential, it’s crucial for franchise organizations to invest in an SMS solution at the corporate level. Here are three reasons why:
- Cost Efficiencies of a Unified Platform If you have an SMS solution in place today, you’re already aware of the considerable costs associated with texting. When each franchise location purchases separate SMS solutions, you fail to capitalize on your economies of scale. Bulk purchasing of SMS services through a centralized platform allows corporate to negotiate better rates, often reducing the cost per message sent by over half what individual franchisees would pay. By partnering with an exclusive vendor for all SMS services, you can eliminate franchisee requests to corporate IT resources to integrate with their locally-purchased technology, and focus on enabling more robust messaging capabilities through deep integration.
- Uniform Compliance and Branding Compliance with text messaging-related regulations like TCPA and ever-changing state-specific legislation is non-negotiable, and the risks of non-compliance can be severe, leading to fines or damaging your brand’s reputation. By investing at the corporate level in a single solution, you can standardize how contacts opt-in to receive messages, and confidently prevent misuse of SMS by franchisees. Additionally, a centralized SMS solution enables corporate to create and share approved message templates, ensuring that all franchisees convey the brand’s voice and values accurately. To ensure adoption, franchisees should be enabled to personalize messages to resonate with their local audience—later in this blog, we’ll explore how Voxie solves for this.
- Creating a Cohesive and Effective SMS Strategy This is where you can make the most of your investment in an SMS solution. Now that you’ve centralized integration and compliance under a single SMS solution, and realized significant cost savings through your organization’s scale, your corporate marketing team can get to work on enabling, and automating, effective messaging strategies. When it comes to the various stages of your customer journey, whether that be nurturing new leads, upselling services, or driving repeat business—your corporate marketing team can focus on using SMS to complement your omni-channel approach, and automate critical touch points on behalf of your franchisees. This serves to lessen the burden on franchisees at the local level, and enable them to focus on high-ROI activities, like personalized follow-up with customers or leads.
Voxie thinks about your customer journey just as much as you do, for some additional insights, check out our Text Message Marketing Playbook for Franchises.
Overcoming Common Challenges in Implementing Franchise SMS Programs
Integrating Leads & CRM Contacts with Your SMS Platform
A solid engagement strategy starts with the right integration. With the right data available, you can automate critical touch points of your customer journey in the high-engagement channel that SMS is. We often encounter franchisees who want to build automation into their workflows, but don’t have the ability to integrate their corporate CRM with their own SMS platform - by integrating SMS at the corporate level, you can address this issue and introduce brand-wide, standardized engagement strategies, which we’ll dive into more below.
Before you start implementing with Voxie, we help you map out critical points of integration to ensure you have the right data to back your SMS strategies.
Assigning the Correct Location’s Phone Number for Contacts
You might have millions of contacts in your CRM, and some of those contacts may have received or inquired about services at multiple locations—so how do you know which phone number to reach them from? Voxie can help you track contact-to-location relationships, and even provides the ability to set a “preferred” location so you can guarantee the right franchisee is texting each contact. Additionally, when corporate sends out national campaigns, you can be confident each customer will receive the message from their nearby location.
Transferring Existing Phone Numbers for SMS Use
If some (or all) of your franchisees text today, you probably don’t want to introduce a new phone number to your customers. Voxie allows your to migrate SMS traffic to it’s platform without interrupting Voice capabilities. If you have locations that don’t text today, we can text-enable their local phone number—ensuring all communications come from the same phone number.
Differentiated Login Access Levels for Franchisees
Most SMS solutions don’t provide you with the right set of tools for access control. For Service Brands, you often have front-line employees who are tasked with the more day-to-day responsibilities, like answering inquiries from customers and rescheduling cancelled appointments (you might also be interested in automating this with AI—Voxie can help here too!). These employees should be enabled to focus exclusively on their scope of work. Separately, management users need to be able to send out large text campaigns to their local audience, or, if they manage multiple locations, the ability to do so across locations. Voxie’s access controls for Franchise brands enable you to configure the right level of access for each user.
Saving and Sharing Message Templates
Not all text messaging should be done at the corporate level. To use SMS effectively, you must enable your franchisees to reach their local customer base. To encourage proper and effective use, Voxie allows message templates to be created at the corporate level and shared out to franchisees. If a particular template should only be shared with a subset of franchisees, we can support that too!
Not sure how to craft effective message template for your franchisees? Consult with our expert team of Customer Success Managers or read about 8 Creative SMS Marketing Ideas & Examples.
Standardizing Contact Opt-In for Compliance
The biggest risk with SMS are the hefty fines associated with violating state and federal regulations related to text marketing. To ensure compliance at all levels, we often see brands disable the ability to run contact imports at the local level. Taking this approach ensures that all contacts who enter your SMS program must come through corporate-approved sources (like your CRM or Website) and must be compliantly opted-in to receive text messages before franchisees can begin marketing to them. Additionally, Voxie helps you manage opt-outs at the Brand level, we will automatically opt a contact out of messaging from all phone numbers your locations use to message the contact - helping you prevent unwanted customer frustration and potential litigation.
Voxie serves as your trusted partner and advisor in compliance, with a platform that supports adherence at all levels of the organization.
Automating Text Messages to New Leads
We often see franchisees who use a texting solution struggle to keep up with their lead follow-up. Their busy schedules and ever-shifting priorities prevent them from maintaining a consistent presence with their leads during those critical initial hours and days after the lead shows interest.
Voxie provides your corporate team with a solution that can roll out automated lead nurture or engagement strategies—sent on behalf of your local franchisees, from their local phone number. This approach frees up franchisee’s time significantly, and enables them to focus on communication that matters, like prompt responses to inbound questions from leads. With Voxie’s mobile app, your franchisees can setup push notifications to stay on top of their customers.
Controlling and Managing Active Audiences
Cost is always a top concern of both corporate and franchisees. As you grow your text marketing list over time, you’ll want to make sure you can perform some “housecleaning” on your list to make sure you’re not wasting SMS spend on a disengaged audience. With Voxie, we equip you with tools to manage Audiences not only at the corporate level, but to apply those changes to Audiences that franchisees can reach, too. This helps curb unwanted cost increases associated with messaging disengaged, old leads, and ensures you can continue to send high-ROI campaigns to an engaged audience.
Conclusion
Implementing an effective SMS program for your franchise brand doesn’t have to be as complicated as it looks! By investing in a solution like Voxie at the corporate level, franchise brands can unlock the full potential of SMS—ensuring that both corporate and franchisees benefit from the cost savings realized when texting at scale, and an enhanced customer experience that helps your business stand out from your competitors.
Ready to transform your SMS marketing strategy and drive growth across all your franchise locations? Visit our website to learn more and schedule a meeting with our team. At Voxie, we partner with your organization to learn how we can help elevate your brand’s communication strategies & customer experience.