Coordination challenges with national strategy and local execution
Corporate-led marketing campaigns are common across franchise networks—but ensuring consistent participation from franchise partners continues to be a major hurdle for restaurant brands. Communications are often inconsistent and inefficient, relying heavily on manual outreach and form-based enrollment processes, which limit adoption and slow campaign execution. Both corporate brands and franchisees need a better solution:
For Corporate: On-platform tools are necessary to provide a consistent, coordinated approach for building and sharing new campaign opportunities with franchisees.
For Franchisees: While partnering with corporate is crucial for driving store sales and profitability, the lack of streamlined, automated tools make consistent engagement difficult.
Centralized Campaign Management for Franchise Growth
Franchise opt-in campaigns offer corporate teams a new way to manage and share Sponsored Listing or Promotion campaigns with their franchisees. Corporate teams can set up campaigns optimally according to their strategic goals. These campaigns are then reflected in a centralized view, making it easier for franchise partners to review and choose to participate in relevant campaigns directly on the DoorDash platform.
Available on both Merchant Portal and Ads Manager for participating franchisees, franchisees can easily review corporate recommended campaigns, join one or all available campaigns all with a single click. In addition to on-platform notifications, franchisees are notified via email and push notifications on new campaign opportunities.
Restaurant brands are now starting to use this on-platform solution to recommend campaigns to their franchise partners, and seeing significant increases in participation rates, with incremental growth of in-store sales and profitability for participating stores. In a beta test across nine restaurant brands, franchise opt-in campaigns delivered an average sales lift of more than 15%*, driving growth for restaurant brands at both the corporate and participating franchisee levels.
Driving better visibility and alignment on-platform
To get started, corporate owners can create new Sponsored Listing or Promotion campaigns as they normally would through Ads Manager. When selecting participating stores, select the ‘Franchise Opt-in’ tab and complete the campaign creation process. Upon creation, a link is generated for the campaign which can be shared with franchisees through any of their off-platform channels, while franchisees are also notified by DoorDash through email, push notifications and in-platform banners on this new recommended campaign.
Franchisees can simply click to join one or all available opt-in campaigns, or auto-enroll into all available and future such campaigns.
What this means for franchise restaurant advertisers
As the restaurant ecosystem is facing several headwinds with rising costs, changing consumer preferences and intense competition, it’s important for restaurants to find new ways to drive profitable growth both at the corporate and individual franchisee level. Beyond what’s driven through national marketing, corporate recommended campaigns that are funded by franchisees offer new opportunities to grow strategic business priorities.
Key Takeaways
Bring the broken, cumbersome off-platform workflows on platform, and streamline collaboration on joint campaigns to reduce operational load of coordination
Find new opportunities to grow in-store sales and long term profitability at both corporate and for participating franchisees.
Gain visibility to align national and local marketing efforts with shared marketing calendar and increase franchisee engagement.
FAQs
Who is this for?
For restaurant brands that operate a franchise business model, and are running marketing on DoorDash.
How is this measured?
Campaign reporting capabilities in Ads Manager or Merchant Portal include a filter for ‘Opt-in’ to understand performance of these campaigns.
How does it differ from other capabilities?
Franchise opt-in campaigns is a new platform tool that builds on existing Sponsored Listing and Promotion campaign capabilities, making it easier for corporate and franchise owners to collaborate on joint campaigns - all within the DoorDash platform.
Franchise opt-in campaigns are now live in Ads Manager across all markets. Check out the new experience in Ads Manager today.
*Source: Franchise opt-in Beta test results based on total sales during an eight week campaign period compared to preceding eight weeks from 1234 stores across 9 brands, representing 66% of the total opted in stores between Nov 24, 2025 and Jan 8, 2026.
