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New Study: Less Than Half of Franchises Call within 24 Hours
Just this week one of the companies under our corporate umbrella, FranFunnel, released the results of a franchise lead follow-up study we’d been working on with them this past summer.
Here’s the description of the franchise lead secret shopper study:
" Starting in June 2016, we partnered with our sister company FranchiseHelp to record data about how different franchises followed up with the leads.
Every day for 3 weeks, we went to FranchiseHelp and submitted a lead under the pseudonym Liam McAlister. We bought a phone number and opened an email account to simulate the various ways that franchises could get in touch with the leads. (It should be noted that we didn’t charge our clients for these leads.)
After submitting the leads, we would wait and track a few different metrics:
- Time to second call
- Time to first email
- Time to text
- Voicemail (Y/N)
We didn’t respond to any communication because we didn’t want franchisors to prioritize our leads any more than they would any other lead coming into their system. This way, we keep the analysis as free from bias as possible.
When the test was completed, we had submitted leads to 71 unique franchises. "
If you worked with us in the past, you know how obsessed we are with how your franchise follows up with your leads. (We have focused this entire Franchise Lead Generation Resource Center about the topic!) What we’re generally looking for is the different ways that you communicate (email, phone, texts, direct mail, etc.), how quickly you use each of these tools relative to when the leads come in, and how you vary the communication over the course of the minutes, hours, and days after the lead first expresses interest.
So when our FranFunnel team approached us and asked to run this study, we were ecstatic to finally put some numbers behind our qualitative work.
Ultimately, we couldn’t really believe what they found.
Here are the results of the study:
" As mentioned before, we tested 71 unique franchises. If you were to look at the 24 hours after our leads were submitted, you’d see:
- Only 33 franchises called us!
- Only 10 franchises texted us!
- Only 6 franchises called us back after we didn’t answer!
On a more positive note, we did receive emails from 64 franchises within the first 24 hours. "
You can find the entire dataset here.
Before we go any further, there are a few articles that we should share that represent what we think is the goal with lead follow-up:
- Optimizing Your Franchise Lead Follow-Up Process
- Call my franchise leads at 11PM? What?
- Measure Franchise Lead Response Times in Seconds Not Days
- When Should You Send Email To Potential Franchisees
- “Call Me” Has Turned to “Text Me” for Franchisees
- The Changing Realities of Phone Calls to Potential Franchisees
We generally believe that our clients have good follow-up processes, but it looks like there are others who can use some work.
Either way, there are a few things that we’re going to do to help franchises better nurture their leads:
- For those of you who are clients of FranchiseHelp, let’s talk! Our team are experts in follow-up strategies and are more than happy to help you think through what you can do better.
- We’re building FranFunnel. Essentially, FranFunnel is a new service designed to make your follow-up process easier, smarter, and far more effective.
- We’re continuing to collect both qualitative and quantitative data about what constitutes best practices. We plan on working with FranFunnel to run these studies more frequently and publish our findings.
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