Building Confidence in Maths and Marketing: Mathnasium’s Journey with Constant Contact Teams

When a student walks into Mathnasium, they have a goal specific to their circumstances — like getting a strong starting foundation for their maths education, catching up after falling behind, or even learning how to apply their advanced aptitude. Like those students, the dozens of Mathnasium UK franchise owners have a variety of goals, experience levels, and tenure. And just as Mathnasium helps those students meet their goals by crafting learning plans and building confidence, Mathnasium UK’s head office is helping its franchisees become more confident and successful with the right tools, education, and inspiration with Constant Contact Teams. 

In her role as Marketing Manager at Mathnasium UK head office, Clair Brewster-Kerby has the opportunity to help those individual franchise locations shine — while also getting to see the positive impact those franchises are having on their customers.

“I had one [student] say to me, ‘I love coming to Mathnasium because it’s really helped with my confidence at school. And I’m not afraid to put my hand up in maths class now and answer questions!’ That makes me feel like I’m definitely in the right place, and the right company that I want to work for.”

Connecting the dots

Maths-focused learning center Mathnasium was founded in the United States in 2002, expanding into the United Kingdom in 2018, plus locations in Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and beyond. Since then, Mathnasium UK has grown to more than 35 locations where children from the ages of 4 to 16 are assessed on a case-by-case basis and provided a tailored learning plan to their specific abilities and needs. “We teach for understanding, not memorisation,” shares Clair.

With her prior experience as part of the British Franchise Association, Clair was no stranger to the complexities facing franchise organisations. She quickly realised upon joining Mathnasium’s head office that the dozens of franchise owners under her care needed tailored guidance, education, and a confidence-booster of their own. Marketing and communication across the franchises was inconsistent and sporadic, with a wide variance of what tools were being used, and how they were adopted in each market. 

“A lot of that was down to lack of confidence in what to do,” she explains. “But that’s part of being a franchisee — you buy a franchise to have support with any of these tools.”

But one other thing Clair discovered was a powerful tool that Mathnasium already had at its disposal: Constant Contact.

“Once I got my feet under the table to see what marketing activities our different franchises were using, what tools were available to the franchisees, I noticed that we had Constant Contact, which was a fantastic platform to use for email marketing.”

Adoption through education

Mathnasium’s franchisees had Constant Contact to help support their digital marketing efforts, but as Clair soon discovered, adoption was inconsistent. Some franchisees were using it effectively, some were only using it occasionally, and others were using personal email inboxes bundled with other tools. “It was really fragmented across the network.” 

“I had meetings with all the franchisees across the network to see what they were using as part of their marketing mix. It was really apparent that they weren’t using Constant Contact either to its full ability or at all.” Seeing an opportunity to educate her franchisees with the same kind of assessment, customisation, and care Mathnasium shows its students, Clair set out to arm the network with marketing power. “One of things that I really wanted to support them with was taking them on a learning journey of how they can fully utilise the platform.”

To help drive adoption and empower franchisees, Clair and the team at Constant Contact have offered one-to-one training sessions and hosting webinars on how to use the tools, and over the last several months, adoption has skyrocketed, with 90% sending campaigns in the last six months alone. 

Setting the foundation with Constant Contact

Once Clair’s franchisees were eager to use Constant Contact, it was time to use the features and capabilities at her fingertips to set both them and their more experienced counterparts up for success. 

Consistency and confidence with branded templates

The first step was creating branded templates that the locations could all use to send their communications or campaigns shared by the head office. 

One of the biggest challenges facing Clair was the inconsistency of communications coming out from each location. “There’s nothing worse than, as a customer myself, if I get an email and it just doesn’t look great, you’re almost like, ‘What is this?!’”

As it turned out, some of Mathnasium UK’s franchisees were using email tools that didn’t allow imagery and didn’t support consistent, on-brand fonts or colours, creating a mix of styles, content, and visuals across the network of locations. By building branded email templates with consistent logos, colours, and fonts, Mathnasium was able to provide each of their locations with consistency, and franchisees could operate with the confidence that they were staying on-brand.

The Mathnasium head office implemented a number of templates with custom, topical headers to help individual locations easily send regular communications like marketing updates, education updates, systems updates, and updates from the executive team.

“One of the specific benefits of having the templates is that everything stays on brand. They don’t need to worry about, are they using the correct logo, all the correct colouring as well. They don’t need to be delving into their Google Drive or OneDrive to find the brand guidelines to make sure they’re using the right hex code,” says Clair. “Now all the emails look very similar because they’re all on brand. So that is a massive win and a massive tick for us.” 

Not only is it a massive win for brand fidelity, it’s also a massive win for franchisee enablement: this year alone, Mathnasium UK’s locations have sent out 55% more email campaigns than they sent last year in the same time frame. 

Saving time with ready-made content

In addition to creating templates for the franchise locations to use in their regular communications, Mathnasium UK’s head office took things a step further to help the franchisees do more with less. “One of the things we do is create campaigns for all the franchises in the UK,” shares Clair. “Whether that might be ‘Back to School’ or ‘Share the gift of learning,’ we create templates and email marketing campaigns for the franchisees to use. We’ve done all the hard work for them. We put our marketeer hats on, thought of the copy, photos, or images that we’ve created as well. So everything is ready for them. They just need to log into their account and change who it’s coming from.”

Clair outlined a campaign experience where franchisees were able to send an email about an upcoming special event, utilise virtual events to collect registrations and information, and then send a thank-you email after the event has passed. “It’s just nice and cohesive. And we have seen that utilisation of those has gone up as the confidence within the network has increased, which is fantastic.”

Seeing real results

So how has all the change impacted Clair, the head office, and the franchisees at Mathnasium UK?

“If the tool disappeared tomorrow, it would be a real shame. Especially with the franchisees over the last nine months that we have had them building up their confidence and their trust to be able to use it, we wouldn’t necessarily want to use another platform, especially because Constant Contact has got such a fantastic reputation,” Clair shares of how integral Constant Contact has become to their organisation. 

And among skyrocketing adoption rates, increased usage of head office content, and newfound comfort with their marketing communications, the franchisees themselves are seeing important growth in their customer relationships. 

“The ones that use Constant Contact, they do tend to have better customer relationships than the ones that don’t,” Clair says, illustrating the important end result of all the hard work from the head office — and the resilience of her franchisees.

Learning and growing with Constant Contact

Though they’ve had incredible results so far, Clair has only just gotten started with educating and empowering the franchise owners at Mathnasium UK and has big goals for the future. 

“One of our goals definitely would be having email automation integration with our CRM platform,” Clair says. “This is something that is in the pipeline, so that’s super exciting. To have the email automation that would be available when you have new customers, and email campaigns that would go out for certain milestones… to have that automation to take that weight off the franchisee’s workload would be amazing, and we’re definitely looking forward to having that.”

Ultimately, the relationship between Mathnasium UK and Constant Contact has helped the head office equip their franchisees for success, growth, and the ability to put their time and focus where it matters most: on their own customers’ learning journeys. 

“Constant Contact has been helping us to streamline our email marketing within the franchise operations here in the UK,” sums up Clair. “It’s almost like I couldn’t envision it not being part of our marketing mix.”