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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the 2x Webby Award Honoree Be A Marketer podcast! New episodes coming in July!
[0:00] Dave Charest: On today's episode, you'll hear from a global CEO who transitioned from finance to fashion and helped scale a franchise from 100 to nearly 400 locations in just 5 years, all by focusing on people, process, and passion. This is the Be a Marketer podcast.
[0:31] Dave Charest: My name is Dave Charest, director of small businesses at Constant Contact, and I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore what it really takes to market your business, even if marketing’s not your thing. No jargon, no hype, just real stories to inspire you and practical advice you can act on,.
[0:54] Dave Charest: remember, friend, you can be a marketer, and at Constant Contact, we're here to help.
[01:03] Dave Charest: Well, hello friend and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. And as you might expect, it's not a show without Kelsi Carter. And thankfully, for you and for me, she's here today. Kelsi Carter, hello.
[01:17] Kelsi Carter: Hello, I am here today and every day.
[01:21] Dave Charest: Every day, just sitting here waiting for someone to come into the studio to record something to go at a moment's notice.
[01:28] Kelsi Carter: It does make my day when I will say.
[01:31] Dave Charest: Yeah, it's like, oh, finally somebody's here. Imagine that's all you did was just sit in the studio waiting
[01:35] Kelsi Carter: and I'm just waiting in the room in the lobby. I'm like,
[01:38] Dave Charest: yeah, it'd be great
[01:39] Dave Charest: if there was like one of those like, you know, like the fish bowl, right, like
[01:39] Dave Charest: if has the glass that you can look through and then there you are just people walk by, you're like, come, come in waving them in, please talk to me.
[01:51] Dave Charest: Uh, no, uh, always a pleasure to have you here, of course. So today we're, we're talking about a little something that's a little bit different, right, when you, when you think about what we typically talk here about because I know you know, but constant contact aside from the tools that we offer small business owners and those individual accounts that people buy to market their business, we also have what we call multi-count plans and
[02:16] Dave Charest: These would be for folks, you know, think of like a franchise, for example, we'll talk more about that in a moment, or, you know, organizations that have multiple parts of the organization and so they need access to their own account because they talk to like different audiences and things like that.
[02:32] Dave Charest: And so,
[02:32] Dave Charest: We have these multi-count plans that really give you control over the account while providing that
[02:38] Dave Charest: flexibility
[02:39] Dave Charest: to individual accounts and so you can do things like lock the branding elements, for example, so nobody puts the wrong logo in when they're representing the brand as a whole.
[02:49] Dave Charest: But for example, the individual account location, so if we, if we talk about a franchise here, if you've got one place in this part of the country, one and the other will have that individual information in there, and the owners of those individual franchises can include their own content as much as you see fit as like the main brand, right?
[03:06] Dave Charest: And so it's also got tools like central send, so as the parent, you can send to all the child accounts, so those communications go to those broad audiences. Campaign approval, if somebody wants to send something, you can set up where you get a chance to review and share feedback and approve those before they go out.
[03:24] Dave Charest: And then also just a centralized dashboard, right? So this is like one place where you can manage all of the accounts that are under the parent account, you can access the reporting and and do the billing all from one place. And so, I just wanted to mention that because we've got a guest today that falls into the, the franchise space here and I think it's a very interesting conversation, not only about their business, but the way they've, you know, interacted and and used the tools that Constant Contact provides to do that.
[03:49] Dave Charest: And so Kelsi, who's joining us today? Today's
[03:52] Kelsi Carter: guest is Marcus King, the global CEO of House of Color, which was originally founded in the United Kingdom nearly 40 years ago. And as you said, Dave, House of Color is a franchise, so they're helping individuals discover the colors and styles that help them show up as their most confident selves.
[04:10] Dave Charest: They've got operations in 7 countries, right? And with rapid growth in the US. The company really sits at this, I guess I would call it an intersection of fashion, wellness and beauty, and Marcus brings both business savvy and really a deep passion for the brand's impact, not only on clients, but the franchisees alike. And so in our conversation today, you're going to hear why empathy and structure are the secret ingredients to scaling a people first business.
[04:39] Dave Charest: How House of Color empowers solo entrepreneurs with systems that reduce the mental load of marketing and why Marcus sees email as a critical channel and how House of Color uses Constant Contact to drive consistency, control, and of course, return on investment. So let's go to Marcus to hear about House of Colors expansion into the US and beyond.
[05:02] Marcus King: We have over 375 franchisees and about 5 years ago we decided to go into the US. So we now have, of those 375, 300 are in the US. Oh wow. We're growing very quickly and we're adding.
[05:18] Marcus King: Between 5 and 10 a month at the moment in the US.
[05:23] Marcus King: So we're running really fast to keep up with them.
[05:26] Dave Charest: That's amazing.
[05:27] Marcus King: Yeah, it is amazing and it's really, really exciting. It's the growth that we're getting is, you know, something that is every company wishes they could experience, I think.
[05:35] Dave Charest: Well, I was gonna say, I mean, we'll, we'll get into marketing more specifically in a bit, but I'm just curious, like, what do you think is the appeal to the US audience, right, in terms of that growth?
[05:44] Marcus King: I
[05:44] Marcus King: think a lot of it is about the American culture is a lot more about self-improvement.
[05:50] Marcus King: They're quite happy to go, I need to get better at something. I'd love to learn more about this. I'd love to do that. And I think we're certainly benefiting from that. And I think we're in this lovely sort of sweet spot between sort of wellness, fashion, and sort of beauty and cosmetics. And we sort of operate sort of in the middle of those three things.
[06:10] Marcus King: And who in the US doesn't like all of those things really at the moment. And you know we're riding that, that particular wave and, you know, we've been doing it for 40 years almost and it's showing no sign of stopping.
[06:21] Dave Charest: Well, congratulations to you on, on 40 years. That's a feat in of itself, right? So I'm curious, how did you get involved with the company?
[06:28] Marcus King: So, I'm a, a finance guy by trade, if you like. So I've been FD and CFO of probably more companies that I would care to mention. But, you know, ranging from entertainment, pre-press advertising, telephony, recruitment, so stock exchange listed companies here in London. I'm based in London in the UK. And then for 10 years, I ran my own cost reduction consultancy, and House of Color were one of my clients. So I came in and sort of did the business and reduced a whole lot of their costs.
[06:58] Marcus King: Then I had an email from them about 3 months later and they said to me, um, do you know anybody who would like to be our finance director? Just 1 day a month in brackets, can you do it?
[07:09] Marcus King: And I went, oh, I haven't been a finance director for few years. I'm not sure I want to go back to that. And I said, OK, I'll do it for, I'll do it for 1 day a month. That's fine. And then it became 2 days a month, 4 days a month, and then 1 day a week, and then, so this was 9 years ago. Where are we up to now? So about 4.5 years ago, I, um, took it on full time.
[07:30] Marcus King: And that was the time that we then launched into the states. So it was sort of on the back of
[07:34] Marcus King: that.
[07:34] Dave Charest: Obviously, I think coming from your own thing, it's a big decision to kind of make, right, in order to say like, OK, I'm gonna go back to kind of working for someone else, right, and doing that whole thing. So what is it about House of Color that makes it special to you and want to make that shift?
[07:49] Marcus King: As
[07:49] Marcus King: I said, I've worked for a lot of different companies, and when I arrived at House of Color, there were
[07:56] Marcus King: About 100 female franchisees. All of the shareholders were female, all of the board was female, all of the HQ was female.
[08:05] Marcus King: And just the different way of working.
[08:10] Marcus King: That they have compared to any other company I've been in. They're so empathetic, so supportive. It is just a very different environment that you work in. And it was that that I wanted to experience something different that I'd never experienced before in terms of, of that sort of culture, if you like. And I knew there was a huge potential for growth. I, you know, at that stage, they'd been going for, whatever it was, 32 years or 31 years. And I knew there was a, a huge potential for taking it out of the UK.
[08:38] Marcus King: And to certainly the US and, and different parts of the world. So it was that opportunity and to work with the board at that point. And it's something that I, I certainly haven't regretted. And it's been a roller coaster since then and, and it's just been an upward curve almost from, well, you know, it took us a year or two to, to get going, um, as these things always do, but it's been, and continues to be really, really exciting. And I think
[09:04] Marcus King: One of the things we did a couple of years ago was we did a, a university study, and one of the master's degree guys, you know, he was trying to do his PhD and he sort of came in and he interviewed a whole lot of our clients here in the UK. And he came back to us and said, Why do so many of them say they cry? And we said, why are they telling you that? What, what would they say? And he goes, Well, because you changed their lives. I went, wow, I mean, that, you know, how many opportunities do you get to work for companies that can do that?
[09:32] Marcus King: And, uh, I think it's just incredible what would our franchisees do, and we've now got almost 400 stylists in the business, uh, women, we're still searching for our first men. We, we've had a few applications where they weren't quite right. So, yeah, we'll, we're open to it and we're looking forward to, to attracting one soon. But it is that, just that very different environment to work in.
[09:55] Dave Charest: So, for you personally, I'm wondering, was global CEO was this always, uh, on your plan, right? Was this part of a master plan of yours to get to that level?
[10:05] Marcus King: I think
[10:06] Marcus King: as I came into House of Color, the sort of the board plan was that they wanted to step back at some point and therefore, there would be an opportunity to do that. And did I plan for it? I think that would be, that would be stretching it a bit.
[10:18] Marcus King: I'm not sure I, I planned it. I wish I could take the credit for myself to say that, but it was an opportunity about a year ago. So that's when I was appointed the, the global CEO. And they offered me the role, and I, yeah, absolutely gladly accepted and I was obviously humbled that they, they offered me that opportunity and they respected me enough to be able to, to be able to run with it. So.
[10:40] Marcus King: Yeah, and we've been going well ever since, so it's all good, touch wood.
[10:43] Dave Charest: What do you find most challenging in your role now?
[10:46] Marcus King: I think along with most franchisors, the challenge is growth, because franchisors live off growth and making sure that you provide.
[10:57] Marcus King: The right opportunities for the franchisees. Because if they are not making money, then you are not making money. So, the biggest thing we think about every day, I guess, is how can we help our franchisees and how can we help them make more of their opportunity. So we have people who are earning revenues between, right from $60,000 in America per year, right up to 3/4 of a million dollars.
[11:22] Marcus King: So there's quite a range of people, quite a range of skill sets, and people come at it from different angles, and, you know, some of them love the wellness piece, some of them love the fashion piece, some of them love the cosmetics piece that we offer. So there's a sort of a myriad of different opportunities that we offer. And I think the biggest sort of element from our point of view is that recruitment piece. We need to make sure we're adding all the time.
[11:46] Marcus King: But it is about, as with most companies, it then becomes about communication and how we communicate with our franchisees and how often and what do we tell them, and most franchisors will tell you about the stats around 70% of them, 20% of them will act immediately, 60% of them will act eventually and 20% will go, I'm never gonna do that. And it's, I'm not even sure that added up. But anyway, I'm a finance guy, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. I'll make the numbers work, it's fine.
[12:13] Marcus King: Yeah, so it is, it boils down to that communication piece. And, you know, we're going through a lot of change at the moment because we've had such significant growth in, you know, sort of 3 years, and we have to, um, we've been spending, invested a couple of million dollars in terms of our systems and processes and all of that sort of piece to make sure we can
[12:31] Marcus King: Not only cover off what we're doing now but well into the future as well. So we've got some big plans ahead of us.
[12:36] Dave Charest: Well, so help me understand, I think obviously the challenges you're talking about like communication and things like that is also gonna be, I mean, you've got two audiences in many respects, right? You've got your franchisees, right? So these are folks that you're interested in the business opportunity for themselves, but then you've also got the clients, right? So like, talk me through.
[12:56] Dave Charest: I guess, I guess how do you balance that? and what are the messages to each of those audiences? How do they differ? Like, talk me through that a little bit.
[13:03] Marcus King: Yeah, so, obviously with the franchisees, we try and be a bit more businesslike. We're trying to encourage them they're running a business. I mean, 80% of our franchisees are on their own, you know, they're one man bands, where they all operate out of studios.
[13:18] Marcus King: So we have all of that sort of business support piece that we need for them. And then we offer them bucket loads of content. So because we're talking about wellness and fashion and beauty, there is a million different bits of content that we could offer them, and that's what we do.
[13:33] Marcus King: And then they are able to sort of repackage that if we like, and present it to the clients themselves. So we, as a, an HQ, we don't communicate directly with clients. So we do have an e-commerce site and some of the clients buy directly from us, but generally they are clients already. So they're not people who haven't been through our process, and so they belong to a Stars. They belong to one of the franchisees. So we try and push them back to the franchisees as much as we can.
[14:01] Marcus King: Because they are the experts. They, they're the ones that have been trained, and we provide support where required, but they are the people on the ground, and they know better than we do. And, you know, we range from New York to North London to Glasgow, to Iowa, Des Moines, every single, and, you know, every place is just a little bit different. Franchisors love to be cookie cutter, and they go, that's how we make money. We can do stamp, stamp, stamp just anywhere in the world. But that,
[14:28] Marcus King: Ours is such a personal 1 to 1 business. All the clients are, are seeing our stylist for, you know, their first session can take a couple of hours, so they become very personally involved. And I, I suspect that's where some of the tears come from.
[14:42] Dave Charest: I
[14:42] Dave Charest: was gonna say, and, and then the crying takes up a little bit of time too.
[14:46] Marcus King: Exactly. So it's important that they have the power to be able to do that and we trust them to do that.
[14:52] Dave Charest: Well, so I want to talk a little bit about just so then from your perspective, like what are the types of things that HQ is doing to reach franchisees from a marketing perspective?
[15:03] Marcus King: Up until probably 18 months ago, I would say 90% of our new recruits for franchisees came from clients. So people who had been through the process.
[15:16] Marcus King: Yeah, oh, I would so love to do that. Oh my goodness me, that is, you make such a difference to me. I can do that, do that for other people. And that's where most of our recruits come from. So word of mouth, essentially. But as we've grown as a business, as franchisees have become more successful at it, we've started to attract those who are sort of purely business people, if you like. And so that's a different sort of audience that we're starting to work with. And that's certainly true in the US.
[15:42] Marcus King: And I think the ability to not only have a passion for the business, which is also really important, but to have a business mind as well, it's going to make you even more successful. When constant contact and, and when we do our hiring, one of the first things we look for is passion. And you know, have they got passion, and how can we translate that and train them into our way. And so that's still really, really important to us, but the business element is becoming more and more important because it's not just a
[16:08] Marcus King: As I say, um, $75,000 a year or something, it's now something significantly more than that. So we need, we need the business people on board.
[16:17] Dave Charest: What's the most challenging for you from a marketing perspective?
[16:21] Marcus King: Well, as with most marketing, it's about lead generation. So we do quite a lot of social media. As you can imagine, Instagram is one of our, our biggest tools at the moment. We have, because our, our services are generally so visual and there's so much visualization we can have in it.
[16:36] Marcus King: The outfits, the cosmetics, the color.
[16:39] Marcus King: You know, we're all about, all about the color and the style. So we use a lot of those sorts of avenues. And then we do for our franchisees, we offer them lots of different kinds of sort of templated emails that we use through, through constant contact.
[16:56] Marcus King: And we allow them to, uh, or we encourage them to send it to groups of clients that they think may be suitable for us. And obviously, some of them are a little reticent because they're going, Oh, if that client does it, they're going to be really good. So, uh, I'm not sure I want to send it to them. And they live next door, so they're in my territory, so I can't send it to them. But they've all got people who have come from afar, and America is so enormous. That works for us and it still works. So,
[17:20] Marcus King: We get a good level of inquiries every single week through the website, which is where they eventually end up. And we've got a good team working hard in, in terms of translating those into, into solid leads. But it's, I think the biggest difference for us, you know, we're dealing with lots of different territories. So, as I say, we're in now in 7 countries. So, you know, there's lots of regulation and things like that to deal with in terms of data and pieces like that as well. So there are things we can't do in some places and we can do in others.
[17:48] Marcus King: And the, the lead generation piece is becoming, we're, we're actually starting to get more involved in the franchise world. So up until quite recently, probably in the last, in fact, I've just had my first renewal for the IFA. So we've only belonged to the IFA for a year. Oh, OK.
[18:05] Marcus King: And it wasn't because I didn't think we didn't need them. We didn't need the recognition because all of our recruitment was coming from people who didn't want to buy a franchise. They wanted to have house of color, you know, and then they go, oh, it's a franchise. I didn't realize that was the second thought. They were so, so overpowered by the, the color and the style piece that that's what they wanted.
[18:26] Marcus King: And then we sort of say to them, you do know this is a franchise. Oh, I can run my own business doing this. That's fantastic. Let's, let's do that as well.
[18:33] Dave Charest: So you mentioned obviously some challenges with like data and different like regulations and things like that in terms of broadening into different markets. Have you noticed anything else that you've had
[18:42] Dave Charest: to adapt just from like a marketing perspective at all, or what else are you seeing as you've expanded.
[18:47] Marcus King: We've recently gone into the UAE again. We've had a presence there for a couple of years and we've, we've just got a couple more, and they're uh a very different culture and you have to be careful with some of the, some of the presentation of the imagery. And, you know, even though we may brand protect some of our templates and our emails,
[19:04] Marcus King: We allow them to change them because they just have to. And there are nuances around the presentation to the UK and to the US. I think style is quite different on both sides of the pond. And, you know, we are at the moment in the US most successful in the Midwest. And so that's very different to, to the edges, to the west and the east, as you guys know, and we have to adapt to all of those things. And so we do give them
[19:28] Marcus King: You know, we have a, a huge library of imagery that we use, and we give them some leeway in terms of what they should use and can use in their communications. You know, it is, color is, is quite a universal language. So everybody understands that they don't always understand what color goes with what, but they recognize it when they see it.
[19:46] Marcus King: They go, Oh, I, um, no, perhaps not. That orange shirt, Dave, I'm not sure about that, mate. I, you know, but you're lucky. I'm not a stylist, so I, I'm not empowered to comment, and I don't. I have 300 stylists looking after me, so I have no room to maneuver, but it's fine. And it's the, the color piece, as I say, is worldwide and everybody sort of gets it. And they all want to find out more. So it's, yeah, it's
[20:10] Marcus King: exciting.
[20:11] Dave Charest: I was gonna say I could definitely use some help in that area and I guess I didn't have to, apparently.
[20:16] Dave Charest: So that works out pretty good. Well, so talk to me a little bit about, I guess, how big is your marketing team, right? So I assume there's going to be some pre-work that needs to be done to understand, OK, then what are the types of images that we need to make available, right? Based on all of these changes. So like, I guess how big is that team and, and I guess what is the pre-work that's being done to set people up for success, really, right? So
[20:38] Marcus King: we've recently done a, quite a big photo shoot in the UK and we're using that imagery for all our coaches, both here and in the US.
[20:46] Marcus King: And so, yeah, we had to, to reach out not only to HQ team, and we're a relatively small team. We've got 13 staff in the US and 17 based in the UK. We are all remote workers, so we don't have an office.
[21:01] Marcus King: And that's a very different way of working for us. So the marketing team is 3 of those people. And then when we did the photo shoot, surprise, surprise, we, we go in, we had to get some stylists and we went, where do we find? Oh, no, wait, you know, we've got 100 of those. We, so that wasn't a problem. And so they startedd up all the models. They did a lot of the modeling themselves, and the hard work usually involved in, in getting the color matching right and the lighting right, that, that's just not an issue for us. So that sort of speeds up that.
[21:29] Marcus King: And so we've ended up with, I think they were saying like 2000 images or something from 2 days or, you know, 4 days or something. So, we've got a lot of that. And we always go back to the franchisees and go, what do you think you need? And it's important that we get that feedback. So we have a fairly traditional structure in terms of franchisors.
[21:47] Marcus King: We have a franchise advisory board, and then we have sort of regional manager people as well. And we use them as the conduit to the growing band of franchisees that we have. And being franchisees give us feedback every single day. It allows us to do things like the photoshoot with, you know, we had a, a, a gigantic shot lists to start with. And we knew exactly what we wanted. There wasn't, there was very little interpretation required. We knew what we needed, we knew what we wanted.
[22:13] Marcus King: And, you know, everybody understood the instructions because they are styles. So, yeah, it was hugely beneficial. So, yeah, we do provide them a lot of content. We obviously look out into the world. There is so much content being produced in our sort of sphere, if you like. You know, we don't really have competitors per se for house of color, but the whole fashion industry is out there with there's billions of imagery.
[22:36] Marcus King: And we partner up with various retailers and, and people like that, and they provide us and we can use all of their imagery and it's, it's a way of, we sort of interact with the fashion world, but we're not, we don't preach fashion, if you like. So, you know, if the season's color is, I don't know, olive, then we know that probably 75% of our clients actually won't suit olive, or certainly 50% of them won't. And when we say suit, we mean, you know, it's not your best color. It may be a color, but it's not your best one.
[23:05] Marcus King: So we talk about providing, helping them discover what their best colors are. And then we just have a sliding scale and go, I mean, you can wear these, but mm, maybe just stick to these ones. They, they, you look so much better. And most people recognize them. They, as I say, once they, they get draped and, and the drapes that we do as part of the process, and I went through the process, you know, I've been through it a couple of times now and I, as a guinea pig as well when you're doing training.
[23:30] Marcus King: And, uh, you know, I'm not a trained stylist, and you can physically see the difference. And that, as a guy that he wasn't really interested in fashion, that was always a surprise to me. Just how they would go, you know, they put the drape around you and then, and they'd say, can you, what do you see? And I said, not much. And then they go, can you, what about this one? You go, not much. 00, just go, oh.
[23:53] Marcus King: How is that possible? How does that even work? And then they spend their time explaining how it works, and
[23:58] Marcus King: it's fascinating.
[23:59] Dave Charest: So I'm curious, a good amount of challenges, right? Just in terms of when you start thinking about the different franchisees that you have under you and, and as you mentioned, they're in different locations and you know, yes, they may all have this love and eye for color and style and all of that, but then you've run into this marketing bit, right? And so there's a
[24:18] Dave Charest: The challenge, which, of course, upholding the main brand, of course, right? And then, of course, allowing them the freedom to kind of do what they need to do, but with some guardrails, I would imagine, right? So I guess leading me to and I want to get into, but I guess what brought you to Constant Contact to begin with?
[24:35] Marcus King: Well, even though I've been with House of Color 9 years, Constant Contact, we're already here. So we've been with Constant Contact. I had to look it up. I had to ask one of my colleagues and, and it's been almost 15 years.
[24:45] Marcus King: So I don't know whether that made us one of the first UK people. I'm not sure, but way back then, way back then, 15 years.
[24:51] Dave Charest: It's wild that
[24:52] Marcus King: that's still the 20, yeah, the year 2000 or something. So, mainly at that time, and we were using it as an HQ vehicle for recruitment and for sort of communicating, you know, the fairly sort of basic stuff like newsletters and, and stuff like that. And in the UK, which is obviously where we were mainly then.
[25:15] Marcus King: The franchisees started to use it themselves separately, so they were dealing directly with Constant Contact. Um, and then we made the decision to make it compulsory in the franchise agreement that they had to use Constant Contact.
[25:28] Marcus King: And then when we launched in the states, we didn't make it compulsory. So the individuals started using all sorts of weird and wonderful.
[25:38] Marcus King: Um, some of them used constant contact and some of them use all sorts of other things. And then, quite recently, we decided that we would bring constant contact on board as a sort of a full partner if you like, and we
[25:51] Marcus King: We made it our sort of choice for our franchisees in the US as well. So it is now part of, we do everything centrally, so we pay Constant Contact directly and the franchisees get it as part of their overall package of their technology suite that they get from us. So, you know, business support stuff, stock control, invoicing, you know, all of that sort of thing that helps you run a business, and they get constant contact as well now. So we've actually spent the last, we're still
[26:18] Marcus King: Nearing the end of it now, moving people from other systems into constant contact and, you know, all the feedback we've had has been positive.
[26:25] Marcus King: And that's really great, ranging from people who've used other systems quite heavily to people who have never used any system at all. And that's always part of the joy of having lots of franchisees is the, is the different knowledge that they have. So, we did quite a, an in-depth sort of process of, you know, who do we want to choose as our partner? Who is it that we should move forward with and, and raise the flag with? And, and we looked around and, you know, we looked at a number of different systems.
[26:52] Marcus King: And we were looking for a franchisor supportive system. So it had to have this sort of traditional bits of if we template an email, and we want to give it to all the franchisees to send out to their own clients, and we want to protect some of that email. We want to make sure, as you describe, you know, the brand is really important to us. It needs to be consistent, it needs to be presented properly. And so there are bits of the email that we, we protect.
[27:17] Marcus King: And they're not allowed to change it, and then for their own personal benefit or because they're in Iowa rather than North Glasgow, they need to do some, you know, some local pieces around that as well. So we do that as well. And part of that decision process was around looking at what else can our potential partner offer us. And I think what swayed it for Constant Contact in the end was that we felt they were the only people who said,
[27:45] Marcus King: Whereabouts do you want to go on your journey? What do you want from your system, rather than going, here's the system, take it or leave it. And they said, what do you, what do you want to do with it? What, where do you want to, and we've already made some great, great suggestions, I think, um, and the team at constant contact of, you know, put them on the list and they've already done some of them already. And we feel like it's a bit cliche, but we feel like it is a partnership and, you know, we're sort of in this together, which is a huge benefit to anybody working with any supplier.
[28:12] Marcus King: So yeah, we're really looking forward to the years ahead and
[28:15] Marcus King: You know, by the end of this month, we'll have probably 400 stylists on there now and
[28:22] Marcus King: You know, we've got a target of having 500 franchisees within 18 months. We've got what, 130 to go, and we'll do that without too much problem. And then, you know, we're looking to double that again within 2.5 years, 3 years, so to get up to 1000. So, I think Constant Contact is certainly going to help with that process. You know, it is part of our, part of our offering to our franchisees, and
[28:48] Marcus King: You know, as I say, the feedback that we're getting from the US users and the UK users have been using it for 15 years, you know, is all positive. So we've given ourselves a little tick for making that decision.
[28:57] Marcus King: Which is always good. Well,
[28:58] Dave Charest: we're grateful to be on the journey with you, with us and just for people listening clarification wise, right, so you're part of what we would call, I guess our enterprise program, right, where it offers some advanced features to folks like yourself with orgs that have really like multiple locations, like departments, teams, all of that in terms of like users and all, and you mentioned things like locking content, right? Like it allows you to kind of say like, OK, don't change this stuff, but you could put a different image in there, you can do that type of thing.
[29:23] Dave Charest: Are there any other parts of the program that you found particularly useful in terms of the work that you're doing?
[29:29] Marcus King: What's the groupings that you can do. So we've got, as I say, 7 territories. So we can have different content for each territory if we want, and cascade those down into the, into the franchisees underneath. So at the moment, we've just got 3 groups. We've got the UK, we've got rest of world, which is honestly huge. And then, and then we've got the USA.
[29:51] Marcus King: So we generate content for each of those three groups, and then the franchisees underneath get those, and they don't get the American one, and they don't get to see the UK one or, you know, depending on where they live, where they are. Um, so that's proved really useful. And I think the other element is the reporting. So previously, with having essentially 300 separate accounts with Constant Contact, and none of them were ours, only one of them was ours because we're an HQ.
[30:19] Marcus King: Then we didn't really get to see any of that sort of what happened next, you know, how successful were they? I'm not really sure. So now we have all of that at our, at our fingertips, if you like. So we see what the interaction levels are like, we see what the clicks are like, you know, we see what's been successful. We can feed that back to the, um, franchisees who also have access to that. But, you know, if they're doing that, then they're not selling or they're not seeing clients. And, you know, so we try and do as much of that as we can for them.
[30:45] Marcus King: So that's hugely beneficial for us and it gives us a good feel for, I think, probably one of the most significant things that we haven't done very well yet, to be fair, but it is something that we're, we're doing at the moment, just started doing in the moment is testing. We tend to go, right, we've done this template, there it is. And then a month later go, right, we're going to do another one. Here's the
[31:03] Marcus King: And so we haven't really gone, let's try A and B. Let's try and see whether that one works better than that one. And maybe we'll do B next month because B was way better than A. And so we have, we only just got really started with that, and that's obviously, you know, very easy to do on, on constant contact and, and work through that.
[31:20] Marcus King: And it's, uh, it'll be a never ending supply of data and information that we're going to enjoy because we love a bit of data.
[31:27] Dave Charest: Well, so to that point, I mean, what are, what are the types of results that you're seeing, and you could, this could go either way, right? Seeing how you're engaging with your franchisees and the stuff that you're sending them, like, I guess what are you looking for there and how are you measuring success there? And then on the other side, as you mentioned, being able to dig in and see the reports from your, the franchisees themselves and what they're sending and what they're doing to reach their clients.
[31:48] Dave Charest: What results are you seeing there and, and kind of how are you measuring success in
[31:52] Dave Charest: that?
[31:53] Marcus King: Yeah, so we're looking, so our communications with our franchisees, we do a, well, it depends on the territory, but we do a fortnightly information update and that has a 80, 87%, I think it was last time, open rate, which for a franchisor, uh, we're pretty happy with.
[32:12] Marcus King: So I know we did an update on, on something else and we had 15 people from the US going, Why has that changed? And we said, have you not read the newsletter? And they went scurrying back and read the newsletter, and there it was. But that also meant that 93% of people had read it and it hadn't asked the question. So, yeah, that's all really positive for us. And that becomes a similar story for what the results we can see for clients interacting.
[32:40] Marcus King: So in the US we're seeing above average industries, so that's good for us. And generally, we're not prospecting, doing with our email marketing. So it is to existing clients, so our open rates should be higher anyway, and they are, and they enjoy our content and the challenge for us is to keep it fresh and to keep it new and to keep it interesting. And it's a good place to be. And I think one of the things that most marketeers learn quite quickly is you just have to be consistent.
[33:09] Marcus King: Actually, you don't necessarily have to send out something every single day. As long as the person knows it's coming every Wednesday morning. Then actually, in, in 7 Wednesdays' time, they'll go, Oh, it's 11 o'clock. Why haven't I got my email from House of Color? Oh, there it is. There it is. You know, so it's about being consistent. We're sort of testing, if you like, keeping our emails shorter, so they become a bit more, I mean, not, not what's it called, X-like, Twitter-like, but, you know, not that short, but certainly not long form if you like.
[33:37] Marcus King: Our poor old franchisees, they get a long form email every, every two weeks because there's an awful lot to divulge and, and to encourage and to, and that we want to share information. But clients, it's a bit different. And, yeah, I think the death of email has been predicted, well, for the last 10 years, and it's still growing, and I, and I think, I think that's only going to continue and, and we're, you know, it is one of the mainstays of, of our business going forward.
[34:00] Dave Charest: You use some other elements in there too want to focus particularly on the surveys. How are you using that as part of your process and how does the feedback you get in those surveys, how does that help inform kind of where you move forward with certain
[34:15] Dave Charest: things?
[34:16] Marcus King: Yeah, so using the survey piece in Constant Contact, we do mostly with our franchisees. So we use it around.
[34:24] Marcus King: Sort of post event stuff as traditionally, you know, so we have a huge conference every year in the states. We're in, where are we next year? West Palm Beach in February, which that would be nice because I'm staring out the window currently at a very rainy London.
[34:38] Marcus King: Not surprising your listeners will be not surprised to hear, and it's really windy as well, sorry, I'm just. So yeah, we use surveys for that and we use it on our training. So we have a lot, uh, we do a lot of training not only for our existing franchisees but obviously all our new ones.
[34:55] Marcus King: So, you know, they get days and days and weeks and weeks of training, and then we use a lot of feedback for that. In terms of surveys for clients, that's something we've not done very well at. And I'm looking forward to not only having templated communication content emails, to having templated survey emails because, you know, we can see from our data in terms of individual franchisees, how successful they are in various areas. You know, some might be really good at color, some might be really good at style in terms of revenue numbers.
[35:23] Marcus King: So creating surveys around what would encourage you to do a style class for that particular stylus would be really, would be really useful. What is it that you don't understand or, you know, from a client point of view. So we're looking forward to creating a lot of those as well, because it, it is the data that's going to drive this company forward and it helps us identify areas of, of revenue opportunity. And I think, you know, the survey piece is, is something, part of the joy of my role is that I always see so much opportunity, we still haven't done yet.
[35:52] Marcus King: And that's certainly an area that we haven't done yet properly, and I'm looking forward to really working on that as
[35:57] Dave Charest: What do you like most about Constant Contact?
[35:57] Marcus King: well.
[36:00] Marcus King: I think as a franchisor, you like to have that, you described earlier, just having not barriers, but boundaries, which they shouldn't really cross in terms of the brand control, because our biggest asset is our franchisees, but our second biggest is our brand. If people start mucking around with the brand and just adding on little bits of color or bits of this or bits of that, then it, it very quickly becomes dissipated. So it is that control that we have around our, our brand on our communications, I think.
[36:30] Marcus King: And just the ability to, because we're part of the, the sort of the franchisor structure, the enterprise piece, to be able to be much more consistent about it and to be able to see which people need encouragement, which people need that we need to learn from, because they are doing way better than we are at, at sending out their own emails from Constant Contact.
[36:48] Marcus King: So it's about that data piece for us and about how to, how to learn from that. And I think, you know, the reporting that we have and the sort of path that we're on for, for more of that is gonna be invaluable, and I'm really looking forward to, you know, moving forward on that.
[37:03] Dave Charest: What would it be like trying to run House of Color without constant contact?
[37:08] Marcus King: Well, postage is really expensive.
[37:11] Marcus King: It's going up 20% here in the UK, I think, has just gone up, or just about to. Yeah. So, we would have to try and get messages across using social media, but it depends on what genre of people and what, and what area you're trying to target. And you, you try and use the, you know, it's horses for courses, if you like, and you've got to make sure that you're using the right piece of social media or email to that group and maybe talk to that group or whatever it is. But at the end of the day, most people, even if they're 18, are still responding to emails.
[37:41] Marcus King: So what do we do without it? I don't know. I wouldn't want to think about it. I don't think. Please don't make me think about that. I don't wanna know. I don't, yeah, don't know. He's the answer?
[37:51] Dave Charest: I'll take that. That's good. So, I want to end with what would be your best piece of advice for maybe another business owner really looking to reach the same level of success that House of Color has in terms of a franchise. So I don't know why I said it like that, in terms of a franchise.
[38:07] Dave Charest: My brain broke. I'm sorry.
[38:11] Marcus King: We are, you know, relatively small and that, well, we are very small in the franchise world and especially if we look at the, the states in terms of the numbers, but it is just finding that niche.
[38:21] Marcus King: And you do see some very niche franchises out there for franchisors. Do you think, you know, we went to the exhibition here in the UK last week, and we took along some people and they go, I didn't even realize they were a franchise. So it is about identifying that niche and coming, and you do need.
[38:37] Marcus King: The structure around it. We talked earlier about the cookie cutter piece, and 80% of franchising is that. And what that means is having the systems and the processes, from my point of view, I love all of that, but from a, a lot of entrepreneurs' points of view, it can be a bit boring. And, but if you don't do that, you won't be a successful franchisor. It just won't work.
[38:59] Marcus King: You'll end up having, having to have 400 staff, and it just, yeah, it'll be a complete nightmare. So get your systems and your processes in place, get the right advisors on board and get the right suppliers. So if you're, you're dealing with raw materials, then make sure you've got those people, make sure you've got your marketing partners, you've got your email system partners, you've got your constant contact partner, you know, all of that sort of piece. You need to have all of those sort of ducks in a row, really.
[39:24] Dave Charest: Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number one, consistency and communication builds trust and growth. Marcus emphasized how sending regular emails internally and externally helps everyone stay aligned. For clients, shorter consistent messages perform better. For franchisees, the biweekly headquarter update has an 87% open rate and keeps the entire team informed.
[39:54] Dave Charest: How can you be consistent in your messaging and adapt for your audiences? Number 2, templates and boundaries equal freedom for franchisees. By providing locked templates and constant contact, House of Color empowers franchisees to focus on personalizing their messages without jeopardizing brand integrity. This approach enables both creativity and consistency.
[40:20] Dave Charest: Marcus mentioned franchisees as the most important part of the business. Number 2, the brand. Think about how you can keep control while also offering flexibility for personalization. And number 3, feedback loops drive smarter marketing. House of Color constantly reviews performance data, like which subject lines generate the most opens, and.
[40:44] Dave Charest: Shares successful tactics across the network. This peer-powered learning helps everyone improve and makes better use of the tools already at their fingertips. Remember to review what's working and make adjustments regularly. Here's your action item for today. If you're using Constant Contact, try setting up a reusable branded email template. This will save you time because you're just going to need to update the content bits that need to change from send to send.
[41:14] Dave Charest: And if you are a franchise or an organization that needs control over multiple accounts, check out the solutions Constant Contact has available for you. You'll be able to lock key content like your logo, colors, or disclaimers while giving your users room to personalize the rest.
[41:33] Dave Charest: This not only protects your brand, it saves time and helps you stay consistent, especially if you're growing your team or expanding locations. As usual, you'll find the links in the show notes.
[41:48] Dave Charest: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. Please take a moment to leave us a review. Just go to ratethispodcast.com/BAM. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. That's ratethispodcast.com/BAM.
[42:05] Dave Charest: Well friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.