Fellow Smoothie King Franchisee drives over 400 people into local stores in one day.

You’re probably asking yourself, “How did this Smoothie King franchisee drive over 400 people into his 5 stores in one day?”  I’m here to tell you, it’s not magic.  Paul McCulloch located in Nashville, TN partnered with TL Connects to enhance his current local marketing strategy back in 2014. One challenge he sought TL Connects out to solve was to build a large local customer database that he could use to engage customers he knew enjoyed his smoothies.  Once he saw the results we had in the foodservice industry, he decided to test us out in 3 stores and the results have been great.  In two years, in those three stores, we’ve signed up over 14,000 customers and have had almost 12,000 offers redeemed at our in-store kiosk. So how did we help Paul do it?

1. Simple Self-Serve Sign-Up.  It takes your customer less than 20 seconds to sign-up to receive text marketing.  All we ask for is their cell-phone number and first name.  First and foremost, our goal is to gain permission to communicate through SMS and MMS.  Once we’ve done that, we can continue to add value to the relationship and capture other pertinent information such as e-mail, birthday, or motivation to engage through social media channels.

1. Incentive at Sign-Up.  When the customer approaches the counter to order, their attention is likely to be grabbed by the moving sign-up offer on the kiosk.  It’s important to offer your customers something in exchange for permission to communicate.  Remember, SMS has a 98% open rate and 90% are opened within 90 seconds.  With that type of immediate connection with your customers, you can change their daily habits and drive more revenue to your Smoothie King in the process.
2. Automated Communication.  We understand as a Smoothie King franchise owner, you’re busy running your business, so we have a trigger-based SMS auto-responder campaign you can deploy.  By mapping out the relationship and automating the communication, they are sure to stay engaged with your business.  For instance, currently, when a customer signs up for the program at Smoothie King, our software automatically sends a text the day after they sign-up with a mini-URL asking them to download the loyalty application.  Seven days later, we send them an automated SMS asking them to reply with their e-mail which automatically drops into your store’s Fishbowl e-mail marketing list.  You also have the ability to support birthday clubs, anniversary text, surprise offers, and much more.
3. Direct, specific, and creative SMS and MMS textALERTs.  Many think it’s a disadvantage to only have 160 characters to communicate with your customers.  We disagree.  With only 160 characters, you are forced to be direct, specific, and creative.  Within seconds your customers know exactly what you’re offering and can make a decision to act upon your offer.  And with the kiosk in your store, we can track the customers who come in to redeem the offer.

So the reason Paul was able to drive in over 400 people using our platform in one day was that he has a large database of users that love Smoothie King and he can communicate via text, that has a 98% open rate, to persuade them to choose a Smoothie on any given day. Smoothies taste great and your customers LOVE them.  Unfortunately, there are so many choices consumers have when making the decision to feed their hunger.  So the question I ask you, what are you doing to entice and remind your customers about the Smoothie King option? TL Connects has been helping Smoothie King franchise with their local store marketing using our integrated kiosk solution and all-in-one communication and text marketing platform for over 2 years.  In June of 2016, Smoothie King corporate awarded us a contract as the preferred franchisee SMS vendor.  In less than 60 days, we’ve signed up over 100 locations.  If you have an interest in learning more about how our platform can help your store, please CLICK HERE to reserve a time with one of our reps to see a brief demo or visit the Smoothie King Text Program page for more information. You can also call me or CLICK HERE to reserve 15 minutes on our schedule for a quick phone call with one of our reps.