Despite Escalating Franchise Lead Costs, Not All Inquiries are Responded To: Contact Attempt Rates Linger Under Sixty Percent
February 8, 2022 – In January 2022, 57.6% of inquirers to franchises reported that they were contacted by “all of the franchises they inquired to.” On the other hand, those who reported being contacted by “none of them” dropped to a recent low of 15.4%, according to results from the FranchiseInsights.com monthly Mystery Shopping survey.
What could be driving this lost opportunity?
Underscoring the importance of increasing contact efforts is the data that almost half of prospective buyers submitted an inquiry to only a single business concept and almost two thirds made inquiries to only one or two concepts as we reported in 2021. So franchise sales teams with prompt follow up can increase their chances of exclusive contact.
During the last two pandemic-dominated years, contact attempt rates dropped as low as 45.5% in June 2020, when 27.3% of those surveyed reported that none of the concepts that they requested information from followed up at all. That downtrend reversed as fall of 2020 approached, and contact attempt rates peaked at 75.4% in August 2021.
How could this be? Rather than blaming it on insufficient effort or inadequate responsiveness of sales teams, here are a few hypotheses:
- Inquiries received outside normal business hours or on weekends are more than two thirds of all inquiries and a likely factor. Sending prompt or automated email and/or text follow up as a precursor to a voice call is always a best practice, based on consistent respondent feedback from these surveys.
- Apple’s “silence unknown callers” feature introduced in 2019 likely disrupts many initial voice conversations before the caller is in the phone’s contacts. This again underscores the importance of emailing or texting before calling.
- This survey is conducted each month no sooner than seven days after franchise inquiries are made, so any initial contact efforts made after a week are not counted.
But the number of persons inquiring who are never contacted by any of the franchises that requested information is puzzling, given the scarcity of prospects, and the increasing costs of franchise lead generation.
The “Mystery Shopping” survey is conducted monthly by FranchiseInsights.com from a sample of franchise prospects that have submitted inquiries on the FranchiseVentures lead generation platform. The latest data is from January 15-22, 2022.
FranchiseVentures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.
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Published on Wednesday, February 9th, 2022.