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Managing customer communication and franchisee oversight across multiple locations can be challenging. You must keep each location’s outreach and marketing distinct while maintaining corporate oversight. With Textline, you can do both. Create a single corporate account and add all your locations. This structure allows corporate offices or specific teams to oversee messaging across the board while giving franchise owners the flexibility to engage with their local customers.
If you’re a singular franchise location, Textline can handle that, too. You can text your local customers from your computer using our SMS inbox.
Texting provides a quick way to get in touch with customers, offers the highest read rate of any channel, and is growing in popularity for businesses. Let’s dive deeper into some of the top benefits of SMS for franchises.
Texting is a channel making headlines in the business world. Why? Customers want to text. Studies show that nearly two-thirds of customers want the option to text back and forth with a business, and that number is only growing as a higher percentage of younger generations crave this option.
Emails often sit unread in overflowing inboxes, and it’s easy to scroll past an advertisement on social media. Texting offers franchises a direct channel to reach customers, leads, and franchisees. With 98 percent open rates, you can almost guarantee the right audience is viewing your text messages and franchise marketing materials.
Text messages are read quickly. Most texts are opened within three minutes of receipt, making them an unparalleled tool for real-time updates. You can ensure your message is read almost instantaneously, which can’t be said about email. Communicating with your customers quickly can boost customer satisfaction and drive sales.
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With an SMS platform, franchise locations can keep texting communication and promotions separate from other franchises and corporate offices. Yet, the franchisor will have oversight to ensure consistency in messaging.
Text messaging is scalable, both from an employee productivity and a business perspective. Employees can handle multiple text conversations simultaneously, handling more customer inquiries. Franchise businesses can also scale easily by adding new phone numbers for new locations.
Textline is the ultimate texting platform for multi-location businesses and teams. Textline gives you centralized control with the flexibility each location needs. Here are some of the top features for franchise brands.
Departments represent unique phone numbers on Textline. You can add as many phone numbers as you need under a single account. Each franchise location can be set up as a separate Textline Department so all communication stays independent. For example, your Chicago location could be one department, and your Boston location could be another.
Keep tabs on messaging and performance for all of your franchise locations using the Unified Inbox feature. View conversations from every franchisee in a singular SMS inbox, allowing you to maintain oversight, offer corrections, and step in as needed.
Textline provides access controls, which allow account Admins to set unique permissions for each user and configure that account to work for their business. Additionally, our Super Admin feature enables corporate offices to manage billing for multiple Textline accounts in one central location. This is helpful for those who want more control over multiple accounts.
Do you have an existing phone number that your franchise locations already use? Textline allows you to text-enable those phone numbers without losing voice capabilities. Keep the familiarity of your voice phone number while taking advantage of texting’s sky-high open rates.
Textline offers a robust automated texting service for franchises. Set up auto-responders for when your location is closed, send welcome messages for new customers, trigger responses based on keywords, or set time-delayed messages. Textline’s automation capabilities are among the best in the industry.
Keep tabs on the performance of each franchisee. View each location’s average time to respond, number of inbound vs. outbound messages, average time to resolution, and more. Textline automatically tracks this information, making it seamless to analyze the data and make key improvements.
Also called a mass text, Announcements help franchises communicate with many people at once. Think of this feature as an email blast but for texting. Announcements are used for employee memos, promotional texts, time-sensitive alerts, and reminders.
Two-way SMS means you can send and receive messages. This feature enables franchise businesses to text back and forth with individual contacts. Use two-way SMS to answer inquiries, send surveys, or provide support.
Seamlessly communicate with leads from your website using Textline’s Webchat. Simply embed a code on your website and manage any website conversations in your Textline inbox. You can switch the website chat to SMS anytime, reducing abandoned chat rates.
Textline offers the ability to schedule messages in advance. This is especially useful for franchises who want to schedule their texts to send at a particular date and time. You can send news updates, important reminders, or confirmation texts immediately.
Called Shortcuts on Textline, SMS templates help franchise businesses meet brand guidelines. You can craft many text templates to help your franchise locations share on-brand messaging with customers.
Try Textline for free. No credit card required.
of customers and franchisees prefer text messaging over phone calls. — FranchiseHelp
of business owners say SMS is the most efficient customer service and tech support channel. — eMarketer
businesses that text say their marketing is very successful. — SimpleTexting
Franchise corporations often have strict compliance and security requirements. When you choose Textline, you can ensure those requirements are met. Textline is SOC-2, HIPAA, and TCPA compliant, with strict access controls and data encryption. Plus, Textline helps its customers gain proper SMS opt-ins with Consent Webforms and honors opt-out requests automatically for our customers. Take the hassle out of SMS compliance with Textline.
What If Syndicate, a Chicago-based restaurant group with nine restaurants and counting, needed a solution to better manage reservations. The organization received about 336,000 phone calls for reservations each year, making it difficult to serve every guest quickly. What If Syndicate turned to Textline for help.
The restaurant group picked Textline for its Unified Inbox, which enabled the group’s reservationists to manage and reply to guests for all restaurants in one location. The organization significantly cut call volume and boosted the guest experience.
“We’ve seen a decrease in phone calls because people are choosing to text. We are getting to guests sooner.” — Polly Ho, What If Syndicate.
<a href="https://www.textline.com/case-studies/what-if-syndicate" style="font-weight: 600;">Read the full case study <span><svg width="18" height="9" viewBox="0 0 18 9" fill="none" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
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<p style="text-align: center;">Franchisees and franchisors can use business texting in many different ways. Here are just a few examples, broken down by industry.</p>
Whether your franchise is focused on home health, senior care, hospice, or therapy, use Textline’s HIPAA-compliant texting service to communicate with patients. You can use SMS to schedule in-home visits, confirm therapy appointments, fill last-minute canceled appointments, or share health reminders. You can also set up a text message patient support line.
<span class="chat-bubble"><span class="chat-bubble__text">Caring for Seniors: Hi Gina! Someone on our team will stop over today between 2pm and 3pm to check in. </span>
Franchise retailers like Pet Supplies Plus, Ace Hardware, and Plato’s Closet often use SMS to boost foot traffic to their stores and increase sales. Some specific examples include sharing special offers, sending coupons, running a flash sale to encourage immediate action, or offering loyalty programs to incentivize repeat purchases. In addition to promotions, retail stores often use SMS to improve customer service by answering questions about store hours, returns, product offerings, and more.
<span class="chat-bubble"><span class="chat-bubble__text">Pet Supplies Plus Whitewater: Get 20% off a full grooming service when you book before April 15. Book today: <span style="color:#011eff;">petsuppliesplus.com/groom/whitewater </span></span>
Franchise property management businesses often use texting to communicate with tenants. SMS offers a simple way to quickly schedule tours, remind tenants about rent payments, and handle maintenance requests. Plus, corporate users can use SMS or website chat to schedule calls with prospective franchisees.
<span class="chat-bubble"><span class="chat-bubble__text">Property Management Inc.: Hi Sam. Thanks for your interest in the property at 145 Kansas St. Are you free for a tour in the afternoon on April 5?</span>
Franchise workout studios can use SMS for a wide range of communications. Individual franchise locations reach out to interested leads, re-engage members, run promotions, request reviews, or share announcements, all via text. It is a great way to boost membership numbers, increase revenue, and retain more clients for your studios.
<span class="chat-bubble"><span class="chat-bubble__text">OTF East Village: It’s time for the Transformation Challenge! Register today for just $35 and catapult into a whole new you this year!</span>
Franchised hotel businesses use text messaging to communicate with their guests. They can confirm room bookings, encourage online check-in, attempt room upgrades, share promotions, or encourage guests to text a phone number for room service. Hotel businesses also use SMS post-stay to collect reviews.
<span class="chat-bubble"><span class="chat-bubble__text">Fairmont Orchid Hawaii: We can’t wait to see you tomorrow! If interested, you can upgrade to a King Suite for just $25 more per night. Interested? Call us at 512-882-9010.</span>
Whether you’re a fast food franchise or a multi-location Michelin-Star restaurant group, texting can help your business grow and get people in the door. Franchise restaurants can use SMS to manage guest reservations, run seasonal promotions, notify customers about their orders, and more.
<span class="chat-bubble"><span class="chat-bubble__text">Hi Trish! I’m confirming your reservation for 7pm on April 3 at Ironside Fish & Oyster. Reply C to confirm.</span>
Home service companies, including cleaners, painters, and plumbers, can seamlessly keep their customers in the know with SMS. These businesses use it to reply to inbound inquiries quickly, provide quotes, schedule appointments, send payment details, and alert customers to their arrival time. All of these quick updates help improve the customer experience.
<span class="chat-bubble"><span class="chat-bubble__text">Hi Jeff! Thanks for your interest in Painting Co.’s services! Are you free for a quick consultation tomorrow so I can provide you with the most accurate quote?</span>
Professional service firms like accounting and tax firms use texting to promote their services and send clients important reminders. For example, you could remind clients about an upcoming tax deadline, ask them to confirm their upcoming appointment, or promote your new service offerings.
<span class="chat-bubble"><span class="chat-bubble__text">Hi Tim. Please remember to send your tax documents to me by next Tuesday. That way, I can review it before we meet. Thanks!</span>
Salons and spas often use texting to reduce no-shows and help promote their memberships. Many franchise massage places offer monthly memberships, and SMS is an effective promotional tool.
<span class="chat-bubble"><span class="chat-bubble__text">Hey Ria, it’s Kelly at Mellow Massage. We’re running a special this week on our monthly membership. It’s just $60 each month instead of $100. I can get you signed up for it now if you want!</span>
Many of the text examples above are for franchisee locations to send to their customers. However, franchisors can use SMS to message their franchisees. Here are a few of those use cases:
We use Textline EVERY day … The interface of Textline is absolutely amazing and incredibly simple to manage. One other benefit of Textline is the ability to set up different departments. This feature can also be used to set up alternative locations, allowing one centralized sales organization to manage multiple locations across the country.
Our agency has helped set up nine clients on the Textline platform, and it is the only SMS tool we recommend.
What we love most about Textline is its ability to centralize all customer communication in one place. It allows our team to manage conversations seamlessly across multiple channels while maintaining a personal, real-time connection with each customer. The automation features and templates also help us save time without compromising on the quality of service, making our operations smoother and more efficient.
Textline offers third-party, custom, and native integrations so franchises can add texting capabilities to their existing tools. Use our native integrations to connect your tools or automate workflows with Zapier, webhooks, or our robust API.
Franchise businesses choose Textline because it meets their needs. With Textline, you can add an unlimited number of phone numbers to a single account, keeping all locations’ messaging separate while maintaining oversight.
Ready to scale and improve your communication strategy for your franchise business? <a href="https://www.textline.com/request-demo" class="link-white">Request a demo from our franchise experts</a>, or sign up today for FREE.
