Exactly How One Woman Got from a Bing Search to a LashDip Discovery Day Using FranchiseHelp

(As of the writing of this article, the woman had scheduled her discovery day for early December. We’ll do our best keep up with her and find out if she chooses to open a franchise.)

As part of our ongoing communication with our customers here at FranchiseHelp, we always do our best to collect success stories, so we can optimize our franchise lead generation process.

Recently, we had a conversation with Hal Sklarat LashDip, who let us know of a woman who has scheduled her discovery day with them for early December. After Anna got off the phone with him, smiling from ear to ear, she shared the information with the team.

After high fives all around (we take this stuff to heart), I asked if she could tell me which lead it was, so we could figure out how she got through the lead generation funnel.

Using one of our analytics packages, we entered her email address and her entire journey popped up. It was so interesting and illustrative of how people use FranchiseHelp that we thought we’d share it with y’all.

(As a side note, if you want to know how we use analytics to track exactly what users do on our site, shoot us a note, and we can chat about it.)

All of the activity below occurred on Sunday November 9th, 2014. For the purposes of keeping the visitor's information secure, we’ll refer to her as Linda.

Step 1 – 4:37 PM – Bing Search for “new and hot franchise”

• While we don’t know what Linda was doing at the time, we know she felt compelled to search for “new and hot franchises.” It turns out that Entrepreneur Magazine has the #1 ranked result and a FranchiseHelp blog post titled “5 Hot Franchises for 2014” is ranked second.

Step 2 – 4:38 PM – Land on “5 Hot Franchises for 2014” blog post

• 5 Hot Franchises for 2014 is a blog post that was contributed to us by one of our partners, Guidant Financial Group. In exchange for a link to their website and profile page, they provided us some original content. The five franchises profiled were: Painting with a Twist, School of Rock, Liberty Tax Service, ShelfGenie, HUMAN Healthy Vending. Assumedly, Linda took a quick read of the descriptions of the franchises available. It’s a safe assumption that she wasn’t interested in any of the franchises.

Step 3 – 4:40 PM – Viewed the Guidant Financial Financing Page

• Given that the major call to action at the end of the blog post was a link to the Guidant Financial blog post, it’s not surprising that she ended up on the Guidant Financial page. Guidant is one of our franchise partners, so they have an enhanced profile page with lots of relevant details about using your retirement funds for franchise financing. However, Guidant, itself, is not a franchise, so assumedly Linda didn’t find what she was looking for yet.

Step 4 – 4:41 PM - Viewed a List of All of Our Franchise Partners

• In the FranchiseHelp header, there is always a link to our list of franchises for this very reason. At any time, we want our visitors to have the ability to see the full list of franchises that advertise with us. On this page, we have hundreds of opportunities that theoretically would be attractive to all corners of the market.

Step 5 – 4:41 PM – Viewed the Scout & Molly’s Profile Page

• Clearly, one of the franchises caught Linda’s eye as she clicked into the profile page for Scout & Molly’s. Similar to Guidant, Scout & Molly’s is one of the franchises we advertise on our site, so she was met with an enhanced profile page.

Step 6 – 4:42 PM – Viewed a List of All of Our Franchise Partners

• Turns out that Scout and Molly’s wasn’t the answer either as she hit the back button less than a minute after landing on the site. And she made her way back to the list of all our franchise partners.

Step 7 – 4:47 PM – Selected LashDip to receive more information

• In a very surprising turn of events, Linda didn’t want to read any more enhanced profile pages. She read our short description of LashDip, and was compelled to act. The description reads, “The LashDip Total Lash System is an all-encompassing eyelash brand, comprised of a professional, semi-permanent eyelash enhancement treatment as well as a lash-centric cosmetic retail line. LashDip offers high margins and recurring revenue as clientele return monthly. No salon experience is required.” It turns out that we were running an A/B test on the copy of the CTA at the time and the button she actually clicked read “+ Learn More.”

Step 8 – 4:48 PM – Entered her contact information

• After clicking the jumper to get taken to our contact form, she elected to enter her email, name, phone, zip code, and available capital to invest.

Step 9 – 4:48 PM – Answered our automated phone call and pressed 1

• As part of our lead verification process, all new potential franchisees are called automatically to assure that they are both A) A real person and B) Actually interested in opening a franchise. It turns out that both sets of criteria were met for Linda as she elected to press 1, thus signifying her intent to learn more about LashDip.

Step 10 – 4:52 PM – Lead is delivered to LashDip

• After receiving feedback from the automatic phone call, our system did one last check to make sure the rest of her information was valid. In fact it was. So at 4:52 PM, Linda’s contact information was delivered to LashDip.

We don’t have details yet on how LashDip’s sales process ended up moving her towards a Discovery Day, but we’ll do our best to get those details.

Whatever it may be, we’re currently 11 days removed from all the activity on FranchiseHelp and Linda is scheduled for Discovery Day. What a ride!