How Interim Healthcare Doubled Newsletter Engagement Across 300+ Franchise Locations

Diane Davis has left Interim Healthcare twice, and come back twice. The pull? The people and the mission: Helping franchise partners build businesses that provide in-home support for patients from post-surgery recovery all the way to hospice care.

Today, Diane leads brand consistency, templating, and creating the newsletter that connects Interim Healthcare headquarters with a network of 300+ independently-owned and operated franchise locations by veterans, women, and locally rooted across the country. It’s a job that runs almost entirely on one tool: Constant Contact Teams.

How Interim Healthcare serves several audiences across multiple newsletters

Every week, Diane sends an internal newsletter to Interim Healthcare’s franchise partners, sharing company news,  upcoming events, and increasingly, the wins happening in other locations around the country. 

On a separate track, her team builds recruiting and caregiver newsletter templates that franchise partners can personalize and send to their own local lists.

Before landing on this system, the organization briefly moved its internal newsletter to HubSpot. Diane said the platform was expensive, cumbersome, and building a single newsletter meant assembling separate content blocks and articles piece by piece. When a new CEO came on board, the company moved the newsletter back to Constant Contact, describing it as “Easy to set up. Easy to use. That’s a win in helping me on a day-to-day basis,” she says.

And the difference showed up almost immediately in the numbers.

From 30% to 52% open rates and growing

After making the switch back to Constant Contact, Diane saw open rates for her internal newsletter jump from 30% to a steady 52%, hitting 21% higher than the industry standard. Engagement followed suit, with click rates climbing to 9%, outperforming the industry benchmark by 8%.

Here are the 3 things that have set her team up for success:

Partner Highlights

Part of that lift comes down to a simple content shift: spotlighting franchise partner wins in the weekly send. 

“Everybody wants to see their name in lights,” says Diane. Each newsletter leads with a headline partner’s win — a deficiency-free survey or a strong sales quarter — and readership follows.

Multi-purpose Content

The newsletter also does double duty as a recruitment tool for Interim Healthcare’s annual franchise partner conference, keeping registration and event details in from the partners week after week.

List Segmentation

One key feature Diane relies on for both types of content is list segmentation.

“You can segment who things are going to. If they’re a caregiver, if they’re an employee, if they left the company and we want to try to recruit them back, you can use all these different lists and pinpoint who you want the newsletter to go to.”

Since Diane runs the newsletter largely on her own, queuing up several sends at once and handling list growth within Constant Contact has significantly helped her save time and effort. With more time to focus on strategy, her team achieved 66% list growth over the past 12 months, increasing their contacts from 1,650 to 2,732.

Keeping 70+ franchise offices on brand

Beyond the newsletter, Interim Healthcare’s marketing team builds branded, editable templates and pushes them out to 70+ franchise offices that are currently using Constant Contact. Some content blocks are locked to maintain brand consistency, while some are open for local customization:

• Core messaging and brand-critical copy templates stay locked
• Franchise partners can adjust designated text fields, swap approved images, and add their own sign-off
• Color palettes are standardized by service line, so every email sent stays visually consistent

The goal, Diane says, is to remove any guesswork across the entire organization: “They don’t have to worry about typos or whether a sentence makes sense. All they have to do is say who they’re sending it to, put in their URL, sign it, and send it.”

Diane also noticed a pattern among the franchise partners who lean into the organization’s marketing tools, Constant Contact included. When partners lean in, the tools pay off.

“Those are the [partners] that are using all the tools that we are telling them to use. Whether it’s our SEO program, Constant Contact, or localizing their page. If they’re listening to us, they’re getting the wins.”

What’s next?

Working to expand Constant Contact adoption across its full franchise network, Diane’s team aims to get more offices sending consistent, templated outreach to referral sources and prospective patients on a regular basis.

The corporate team’s broader goals this year include hitting a 5-star average on Google across offices and getting 75% of franchise partners to attend this year’s conference — both areas where the newsletter plays a significant role.

With hundreds of independently-run offices in its network, Interim Healthcare relies on Constant Contact as one of the few threads that tie it all together.