Recently, as we’ve seen some of our customers’ small businesses grow significantly, in addition to acquiring some larger restaurant, fitness, and retail brands, we’ve identified some very unique email marketing needs that apply to brands with multiple locations or franchised business models.

When companies have multiple locations, business owners are presented with a unique challenge to maintain the marketing efforts and brand standards they’ve worked hard to establish. This creates an increased demand for more centralized control over email marketing efforts and a better process to collaborate on content and approve campaigns. As we learned more from the people behind these businesses, we also discovered a desire for the ability to share corporate-sponsored content while also allowing marketers at each location to personalize messages.

And finally, we also learned that not everyone who is tasked with email marketing at their specific location or franchise is always an experienced marketer, and the stress of sending off-brand emails is very real. It’s also not easy to report on the performance of each location.

So, in summary, we found the main problem to be that, as companies grow and scale, email was becoming unmanageable and there was no email marketing platform specifically designed to help growing brands overcome these challenges. Because we understand that marketers don’t have time to manage emails for every location, we started researching other options.

After identifying this problem facing most growing businesses, many of whom are already Emma customers, our product team set out to create a solution.

Introducing Emma HQ, the only platform of its kind to help brands manage their email marketing strategy across hundreds, or even thousands, of locations.

Emma HQ was created specifically with franchise and growing business owners in mind, allowing users to lock down a consistent brand experience across multiple locations, while also having complete visibility for every send.

Emma HQ was created specifically to help restaurants, fitness centers, universities, and other franchise businesses manage their email marketing. But how does it solve the current problems they face? We’re glad you asked.

Centrally approve emails from other locations to get emails out the door faster.

We’re pretty proud of this feature because Emma is the only email marketing platform with a mailing approvals tool like this. With the new Approvals Dashboard, you’ll not only have quick access to the tools you use most, but also, and more importantly, you’ll see a window into all communications currently scheduled, regardless of location. The Approvals Dashboard allows you to review all key details about a mailing, and if edits need to be made, you can also cancel the send or reschedule it for another time

Set and lock template styles to keep branding consistent.

One of the biggest challenges marketers face is keeping a consistent brand experience across all of their locations. We’ve made that incredibly simple with Emma HQ’s template style locking controls. Before you share an email template with your locations, you can set and lock fonts, colors, text sizes, headings and more to make sure that the look and feel of your marketing is on brand. Now, each location can build and deliver their mailing within the guidelines you’ve set in the template ensuring brand consistency across the board with every send.

See how every location is performing.

One of our favorite features unique to Emma HQ is the updated activity dashboard, which provides complete visibility into how every location or franchise is performing. You’ll be able to see all of the mailings your organization has sent over the last 30 days, as well as the individual mailing score, open rate, click rate, and subscriber count for individual location lists.

Easily share content and campaigns across your organization.

Emma HQ makes it easy to highlight and get more mileage out high performing and engaging content by saving a successful campaign from one account as a template to be redistributed back to all of your locations. The ability to not only share templates but best practices from campaigns can speed up the onboarding of new franchise owners — who may not be professional marketers — giving them a major head start in their marketing.

Wrangling all of the templates, images, content, and assets for hundreds (or even thousands) of locations can quickly become time-consuming and even unmanageable. The Assets Manager in Emma HQ has powerful organizational features to make building, organizing, and sharing content across your organization easier and faster than ever.

Orangetheory Fitness

With over 1,000 locations across the country, Orange Theory is one of the clients we had in mind when creating Emma HQ. We’re excited to announce that, since using the new platform, they report Emma HQ has reduced their time spent on email by 30%.

The approvals dashboard has really knocked it out of the park: It saves us so much time and makes it seamless to manage over 1,000 studio newsletters each month.

-Meredith Parks, Email Marketing Strategist at Orangetheory Fitness

Liberty Tax

Liberty Tax has over 4,000 locations using email marketing, and they were also one of our first clients to check out Emma HQ.

When we asked them how it was going and what they loved most about the new platform, their answer was simple: “It’s brand recognition, so when tax time comes around, the customer doesn't think twice about going somewhere else.

-Kathleen Guzman, Marketing Communications Specialist for Liberty Tax

If you’re ready to manage and scale your brand’s growing email efforts, ask us about switching to Emma HQ. We’re here to help you save time, collaborate more, and eliminate the stress of off-brand emails for good.