Hosted e-mail application helps Wild Birds Unlimited grow franchise stores

When franchiser Wild Birds Unlimited needed a way to help its small, individual stores build customer relationships and sales, it offered its franchisees a centrally hosted e-mail application. "It offers the best return on the ad dollar we’ve had," store owner Mike Williams tells InternetRetailer.com.

Wild Birds Unlimited has 309 independently owned and operated stores in its franchise network throughout the U.S. To meet the challenge of exerting some control over marketing and sales throughout the network, it has launched the Channel Connect e-mail marketing management system from ExactTarget. The system, which is hosted by ExactTarget, enables Wild Birds and each of its participating stores to customize and send e-mail marketing messages from a secure web page at ExactTarget.com.

Marty Bird, the communications director at Wild Birds Unlimited who assists franchisees in marketing efforts, says the e-mail program fills two critical needs: it helps the small independent business owners to afford the frequent marketing and informational messages necessary to support the interests of hobbyists, and it provides the franchiser and the individual stores with a central tool for sharing marketing tools and ideas.

Wild Birds Unlimited uses ExactTarget to produce e-mail marketing templates, including suggested product promotions and information that individual stores can provide its hobbyist customers, such as the latest update on the seasonal migration of hummingbirds, Bird says. "We’ll tell customers to put up their hummingbird feeder in time so as not to miss the migration," he says. "Our customers are passionate about bird-feeding and they seek our information to help them do that."

The notes about bird migrations also, of course, help Wild Birds stores sell more birdseed and feeders. At the Pleasant Hill, CA-store owned by Mike Williams, sales have steadily increased over the past few years, he says. Although he and other store owners usually send out a few printed newsletters each year, "the e-mail system has been by far our most productive advertising," he says.

Store owners are free to modify the Wild Birds Unlimited template to emphasize their own promotions, using content and images included in the ExactTarget program, or to create their own e-mail messages in the ExactTarget system from scratch. Williams says that he and some of the other store owners subscribe to one another’s e-mail newsletters and will share content by copying and pasting it into the ExactTarget application.