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 effort 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.
Brand control is 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.
Our Emma for Teams and Emma Corporate plans were created specifically with the needs of organizations like universities, nonprofits, and franchises in mind. This post is part of a blog series that explores the unique challenges these industries face and the solutions Emma presents.
The challenge of having one brand distributed across many locations or departments
For businesses with multiple locations, it can be really difficult to keep branding consistent and updated across many users and accounts. For example, if a franchise updates their logo, they naturally have to make sure that every individual location stays on brand. In the past, they’d have to manually send the proper assets to each email sender, and ensure they update it in all of their email templates. This process becomes time-consuming very quickly, and the amount of coordination involved creates a high risk for brand inconsistency.
How Emma helps maximize brand control across all of your locations
Enter Emma’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.
Create consistency with Emma’s tiered account structure
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 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 stop 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 cuts down on communication errors between departments and locations so you can get back to what you do best.
How Liberty Tax uses Emma to preserve brand recognition
A perfect case study subject for Emma, 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.”
Streamline your team’s workflow
Any multi-location business, from universities to restaurants and franchises, can benefit from using Emma. 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 can work for you by requesting a live demo.
