There’s always going to be a return on investment.
Marcus King, CEO, House of Colour International
House of Colour + Constant Contact
Year Over Year
- 322% more franchisees adopted Constant Contact
- House of Colour’s email subscribers grew by 46.3%
- More than 28 times more campaigns were sent in 2024
- Across all of House of Colour, email open rates grew by 3.5%
Marcus King never intended to become the CEO of a global style company. In fact, the career-long finance professional was initially reticent about providing his expertise to House of Colour when they approached him. But now, nearly a decade later, he has embraced — and been fully embraced by — the company he lovingly describes as empathetic, supportive, and “different to any company I’ve been in.”
Indeed, House of Colour has a history of incubating loyal supporters and fans. For nearly four decades, the London-based franchise has empowered its franchisees to launch successful careers as style and color consultants, in turn delivering personal, expert consultations and insights to their clients. Through their nearly 400 franchisees, clients around the world in seven countries get tailored advice that hits “that sweet spot between wellness, fashion, and beauty and cosmetics.”
Growing… and “showing no sign of stopping”
Founded in London in 1985 by image consultant Carolyn Miller, House of Colour’s success and growth have taken it well beyond its original borders. Five years ago, they chose to continue their expansion beyond Europe and into the U.S.
“The growth that we’re getting is something that every company wishes they could experience,” says Marcus. “We’ve been doing this for 40 years, and it’s showing no sign of stopping.”
That growth, combined with the company’s far-flung geographic coverage, has predictably presented the company both with incredible opportunities and incredible challenges. “We’re going through a lot of change at the moment because we’ve had such significant growth. We have to make sure we can not only cover off what we’re doing now, but well into the future as well.”
For House of Colour, that means maintaining brand fidelity across borders and hundreds of franchisees, helping to nurture customer relationships at a massive scale, and providing their franchisees with the tools and content they need to succeed.
Managing an expanding brand
A factor all businesses have in common regardless of size is the value and importance of their brand. Most people will encounter a brand well before they have any real, meaningful, personal interaction with a business, and so the brand being consistent, cohesive, and representative is critical. For a franchise business, however, the variables are countless as franchisees and geographies expand.
“As a franchisor, our biggest asset is our franchisees, but our second biggest is our brand,” Marcus explains. “If people start mucking around with the brand and adding on bits of this or bits of that, then it very quickly becomes dissipated.”
Brand control couldn’t come at the cost of customized messaging by franchisee and locale, however, and so Marcus and his team went searching for a solution that would allow House of Colours’ brand to shine while still empowering franchisees to send communications that honored their individual businesses and the relationships that make them successful.
Nurturing a loyal customer base
As their franchises grew, the loyal customers serviced by those franchises grew as well; helping hundreds of franchisees nurture thousands of clients consistently and effectively seemed like an impossible task.
For a company like House of Colour, however, a strong bond between stylist and client isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s a defining factor.
“Ours is such a personal one-to-one business,” Marcus shares. When a PhD student interviewed House of Colour clients in the UK several years ago, he shared with Marcus and the House of Colour team that many of the clients became emotional when discussing their experience. “We asked why they were telling him that? What were they saying? And he said, ‘Because you changed their lives. How many opportunities do you get to work for companies that can do that?!”
Ultimately, this meant House of Colour needed a tool that would allow them to provide the right amount of corporate guidance while still supporting and encouraging meaningful, custom, one-to-one communication. “Even though we may protect some of our templates, we allow franchisees to change them because they just have to. There are nuances around the presentation.”
Stocking the franchisee toolbox
A franchise’s success is dependent on the success of its franchisees, and as House of Colour began to look at their franchisees’ marketing efforts across the globe, they realized they needed to do several things to help their franchisees flourish, like communicate regularly, share content and imagery for their own campaigns, and help them track their performance.
“The biggest thing we think about every day is how can we help our franchisees and how can we help them make more of their opportunity.” Describing the majority of House of Colour franchisees as “one-man bands,” Marcus says part of choosing a centralized marketing solution was about streamlining operations for their franchisees. “Running a business requires not just the selling, it requires other things, as well. So we try and provide as many systems as we can that make their life easier. ”
With these challenges in mind and franchisee growth on pace to continue at amazing rates, the team at House of Colour had an important decision to make: what tool could help them achieve all these things?
Tackling challenges with the right partner
At the corporate headquarters level, House of Colour had already been a Constant Contact customer for nearly 15 years. At the time, the company was using Constant Contact to recruit and communicate with franchisees, leading many of their UK-based stylists to begin using Constant Contact on their own to market to their clients and prospects. But as they began to expand into other geographies, they needed to determine whether Constant Contact would be the marketing tool for their global franchisees, and what Constant Contact could bring to the table.
Marcus describes the process of vetting and selecting Constant Contact as in-depth, sharing, “Who do we want to choose as our partner? Who is it that we should move forward and raise a flag with?” After evaluating a number of different systems, they identified several key things as must-haves:
- A franchisor-supportive vendor and system
- The ability to create and distribute email templates to franchisees
- Brand protection and consistency
- The ability to identify areas of templates that can be personalized by each franchisee
Constant Contact ticked all the boxes… but it was another factor that ultimately made the decision.
“What swayed it for Constant Contact in the end was that they were the only people who said ‘Whereabouts do you want to go on your journey? What do you want from your system?’” This collaborative approach, as well as Constant Contact’s commitment to thoughtfully considering and implementing feedback, made all the difference for Marcus and his team.
“It’s a bit cliche, but we feel like it is a partnership and we’re in this together, which is a huge benefit to anybody working with any supplier.”
Seeing the results in living colour
The franchisees of House of Colour had a range of email marketing experience — some had never used email marketing tools, some had used other tools, and some were already familiar with Constant Contact. One thing has been universal, however: “All the feedback we’ve had has been positive,” says Marcus. “Ranging from people who’ve used other systems quite heavily to people who’ve never used any system at all.”
At the franchisor level, Marcus and his team are also enjoying the capabilities Constant Contact offers them. “We can have different content if we want, and cascade that down into the franchisees underneath. And the other element is the reporting. Now we have all of that at our fingertips… so we see what the interaction levels are like, we see what the clicks are like, we see what’s been successful. We can feed that back to the franchisees, so that’s hugely beneficial for us.”
“That’s obviously very easy to do on Constant Contact and it’ll be a never-ending supply of data and information.”
But the best part about Constant Contact, according to Marcus, is the control it gives him to protect the House of Colour brand while still ensuring his franchisees’ success.
“[My favorite part is the] control we have around our brand, on our communications, and the ability to be much more consistent. It’s about that data piece for us and about how to learn from that.”
Marcus and his team even use their 400-strong franchisee group as a sort of expert panel, viewing the reporting to see which franchisees are seeing great results from their emails and drawing inspiration from them to teach and advise their franchisees as a whole. Powered by Constant Contact’s reporting, House of Colour is able to evaluate and improve their franchisees’ email efforts on an ongoing basis, backed by data.
Growing together
As House of Colour grows and more of its franchisees begin to use Constant Contact to grow and nurture their business, Marcus sees nothing but growth and opportunity ahead for this constant and colorful partnership.
As the franchise plans to double their current number of franchisees within the next two to three years, Marcus is confident they can hit their goals with the right tools in place. “Constant Contact is certainly going to help with that process.”
“Email is still growing and I think that’s only going to continue. It’s one of the mainstays of our business going forward,” he shares.
And what does he think House of Colour’s efforts would look like if they didn’t have Constant Contact on board?
“Please don’t make me think about that. I don’t want to know.”
