Emma HQ: Brand control

Nobody loves and cares for your brand the way you do. While customers engage with it, recognize it, and become loyal evangelists for your brand, few know the blood, sweat, and (hopefully happy) tears you put behind its creation. On the outside, branding may seem like the combination of logos, colors, and voice, but to you, it’s the culmination of all of your hard work presented to the world. 

At Emma, we understand the importance of maintaining control over your branding. After all, it’s who you are and the way you want to be remembered. Branding helps to tell the story of how your company began, what it does today, and where it’s headed in the future.

So when we talk about control, it’s not about being a dictator ruling over your brand, unwilling to share control. It means giving your business the space to grow without losing the heart behind it. And because there wasn’t a platform helping companies manage their email marketing and branding across multiple locations, we decided to create one—Emma HQ.

Emma HQ was created specifically with the needs of organizations like restaurants, franchises, and universities in mind. This post is part of a blog series that explores the unique challenges these industries face and the solutions Emma HQ presents. 

The problem: One brand, many locations.

Something we noticed when working with businesses with multiple locations was that it can be really difficult to keep branding consistent and updated across many users and accounts. For example, franchises may update their logo, but in order to make sure that every individual location was remaining on brand, they’d have to manually send the proper assets to each email sender, as well as ensure they update it in all of their email templates.

This process becomes time-consuming very quickly and, because no one is perfect and these industries often require employees to wear multiple hats, there’s a high risk for brand inconsistency.

The solution: Emma HQ helps maximize brand control and consistency across all of your locations. 

Enter Emma HQ’s tiered account system, which allows one top-level account, usually for corporate headquarters or marketing departments, and individual subaccounts for each location. Marketers at corporate can build email templates, lock in styles like fonts, headings, colors, and then share them with each individual location. From there, each subaccount can customize their emails with their own content and location-specific information while remaining within corporate brand standards. 

What’s unique about tiered accounts

Over time, old logos, incorrect colors, and outdated messaging can really cause brand dissociation and audience confusion. It’s an identity crisis that reverses all of your hard work on a brand refresh. 

Emma HQ solves this problem without adding more to your workload. If you’re a top-level account user, you can remove and archive old templates with outdated branding and say goodbye to worrying about whether or not your franchisees or subaccount managers are using the most updated assets. And if you’re a subaccount user, the search for the latest approved and on-brand images is over because they’ll always be right there waiting for you in the image library. 

Emma HQ cuts down on communication errors between departments and locations so you can get back to what you do best. 

How Liberty Tax keeps their branding consistent 

A perfect case study subject for Emma HQ, Liberty Tax has 2,000 subaccounts; most of which are franchise owners. “I want the franchisees to understand the power of email in the inbox. It’s that brand recognition, so when tax time comes around, the customer doesn't think twice about going somewhere else,” said Liberty Tax’s Marketing Communications Specialist, Kathleen Guzman.

Thankfully, Guzman is able to enforce the importance of branding without having to have one-on-one conversations with each franchisee. 

Most of the franchisees have limited or no marketing experience, so ease of use is critical. Guzman added, “I have a full range of templates that I'm able to quickly edit and all the franchisee has to do is send it out.”

Wrap up

Any multi-location business, from universities to restaurants and franchises, can benefit from using Emma HQ. Tiered accounts cut down on internal communication and maximize brand consistency. Adding Emma to your team means you can focus less on the logistics of sending a message and more on creating a lasting relationship with your customers. See how Emma HQ can work for you by requesting a live demo.

 

About the Author

Kaitlin Wernet is a content specialist on Emma's marketing team. When she's not restraining herself from using too many exclamation points or grabbing one more La Croix from the office kitchen, she can be found working on her first book or planning her next big travel adventure.

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