Volvo to Build on E-Zine with Extranet

It’s hard to develop a sense of community between franchises and their parent company, and even harder to do it between the individually owned franchises.

But Volvo Rents is tightening the communications gap all around with its e-newsletter, The Rental Channel. And it hopes to do even better when it puts the same material on an extranet.

Launched three years ago, The Rental Channel is distributed to approximately 500 Volvo Rents franchise owners and their employees. Readers also include Volvo Rents management and inhouse staff.

“We saw the need for a more frequent communication mechanism between the company and the franchises,” says Nick Mavrick, vice president of global strategy and marketing for Volvo Rents, the construction equipment franchise division of the Volvo group.

Volvo uses the bi-weekly Rental Channel to keep recipients up to date on various company and department activities. But he also strives to build community and a can-do attitude between the franchises by sharing success stories.

It also sends a hard copy version, which is popular with the many franchise owners over age 50 and those who work in construction and cannot sit at a desk reading online documents.

It all makes good business sense.

“We find that the closer the franchises feel to us, the closer we make this community and the better business results we all get,” Mavrick says.

But there are challenges when dealing with entrepreneurs. For one thing, they can be overwhelmed by the number of communications they receive. And individual franchises may or may not be receptive to the same messages and/or editorial content.

“People are receptive to ads when they’re ready to buy,’ he says. “These are busy entrepreneurs and we may write about a sales or operations activity that they are prepared or not prepared to hear.”

The Volvo Extranet

To close that loop and send information only when a franchise is ready for it, Mavrick plans to create a more dynamic newsletter platform. Volvo Rents will in the near future re-publish newsletter content on the company extranet. Additionally, stories will be updated daily but all will be accessible via the archives.

This, Mavrick hopes, will draw readers to the extranet while breathing life into the community. Messages, both sales and corporate, will be available to individual franchises when they are ready to read them.

Readers will be drawn to the extranet via newsletter promotions and interactive polls where franchisers are prompted to rate satisfaction within various corporate departments. In addition, Mavrick plans to equip the extranet with rich media content and video so franchise owners will be able to hear and see their peers talk about how they achieved success.

Both the newsletter and the extranet will cover operations, finance, marketing and sales information. Then there will be the social pieces covering personal events in the reader’s lives such as marriages, births, and franchise happenings.

Mavrick also plans to facilitate new projects like SmartEquip. “This program is very important to our profitability,” he says. “It cuts ordering costs.”

Volvo will use the newsletter and the extranet to promote and educate franchises on the program. “We can talk about good ideas but continue to do business the same way, or we can start taking about Smart Equip and bang the message home.”

All aspects of newsletter production and blasts are handled in-house at Volvo Rents. However, FranConnect will be supplying the integrated software applications, that will allow the franchises to tie into the company databases to do business once on the extranet. It will also be supplying back end reports and open rates.

Mavrick estimates that Volvo’s open rate is approximately 75%.

Ultimately, Mavrick hopes that the franchises will look to the newsletter and extranet for information they need instead of calling the company.

“If we achieve that goal, it cuts our costs,” he says. “It would cost our staff a lot of time to call the franchises each time there’s a new program. So the more individual franchises take action on their own through self-service saves time and money. Ultimately, our profitability is based on increasing our productivity.”

The toughest newsletter-related job? Creating relevant content.

“We wanted to make sure it was dense information that someone could take action on, he says. Also considered was the user-friendly format of introductory paragraphs with full-story, click-on options.

What’s the next step after the Extranet? Volvo may launch an e-mail newsletter for end users next year—on projects.

“The idea is to increase communication and build creditability with our users,” says Mavrick. “To the extent that they’re happy, it’s easier for us to work with them.”