With the introduction of their new Integrated Marketing System (IMS), ERA continue to demonstrate their commitment to helping support the growth of their franchise partners’ businesses. The strategy has been working well with franchise partners enjoying a 64% growth in revenues over the last five years.

Since

the IMS launched in October our dial web traffic has doubled, proving that companies are receiving our messaging through direct mail, email and phone and engaging with our website.

The IMS has been developed to assist franchise partners to grow their businesses by overcoming the biggest challenge any business owner faces:how do I get in front of potential clients? Through a number of proven cross-media integrated marketing campaigns, the IMS now makes this simple for ERA franchise partners.

The IMS has provided a wide range of campaigns to choose from and franchise partners simply follow a straightforward process. They select their target audience – prospects, suspects, or clients, the campaign they would like to deploy and then with a simple click of a button, the campaign is triggered. ERA’s own central marketing team then take over with sending of both printed and electronic creative messages to the selected audience at the allocated time.

The IMS also connects to a team of twelve of ERA’s front line marketing personnel who have been recruited, trained and managed by the franchisor to carry out follow-ups to warm leads that the campaign has created for the franchise partner. Once ERA’s marketing team have made their calls, they can enter any messages and appointments into the groups CRM system, allowing seamless and transparent client management process by everyone involved.

ERA first came up with the idea for the IMS in 2013, and have painstakingly developed it for over a year. Marketing Manager Dave Chapman of ERA commented, ”The system has been fully piloted and now offers our franchise partners a huge advantage. Whilst the IMS doesn’t take all the work of marketing away from the franchise partner, it should be a great help”.

“The objective was to see a 30% uplift in the number of first meetings that were generated from direct routes to market (e.g. DM , email and telemarketing) as historically 60% of all appointments came from this channel. The results have exceeded our expectations with a 43% uplift in appointments in the last two months. It is early days however the results are very positive.”

Marketing Director Chris Aston says, “Don’t take our word for it, listen to what our franchise partners think.”

“For the first time ever in ERA’s history, companies are phoning us for appointments. I have just booked an appointment with a company I have been looking at for twelve months, with a turnover of over £250m. I am delighted with the effectiveness of this system, and the speed with which appointments are being generated for both myself and my peers,” St John Rowntree

“In the past trying to send an integrated marketing campaign was really difficult. Now the new system means I can market to all of my companies in about five minutes and I can do it from my laptop, phone or tablet. It is providing a return on investment for me, as I am getting a steady stream of appointments.” Adam Matthews

Head of Recruitment Matt O’Neil says, “ERA are committed to helping our franchise partners grow their business and win more clients. The Integrated Marketing System is one more way that we do this.”