Major Public Research University

How Antique Archaeology connects storytelling and retail.

Ever heard of the History Channel series “American Pickers”? Antique Archaeology is Mike Wolfe’s retail store from the show. And while the original store is located in Iowa, Wolfe just couldn’t resist opening a second location in Nashville.

“Mike had been coming down to Nashville for years, buying and selling to designers and decorators,” Content/Store Manager Lauren Wray explained. “And he really just fell in love with the city. So the natural next step was to open a shop here. All of Mike’s picks that you see on the show are sold in our two stores. It’s a retail outlet for our antiques, and we also have a pretty big merchandising business, too, being that we’re such a tourist attraction.”

And Emma has played a huge role in helping connect fans of the tv show with the store. “Email marketing helps us let our fans know about everything we have to offer at our stores. American Pickers and Antique Archaeology are really about telling a story – a story about American history, about the things that inspire us. So at the end of the day, we just want to start a conversation about the things we love, and email helps us do that more directly.”

For example, Antique Archaeology recently used email to share the story behind their new apparel line, the Two Lanes Collection. “Two Lanes is inspired by being on the road, by early moto-pioneers, by taking the road less travelled. We also wanted to represent the things we believe in, like buying American and small-town businesses. So we started this line that’s entirely made in the US and that uses the designs of artisans.”

The Challenge

A few years ago, this university faced a campus-wide communication dilemma. Faculty, staff, and other various departments were using Microsoft Outlook in silos, and distributing emails to the campus community that recipients perceived as spam. With no opt-out functionality, no list management, and no way to track engagement, the university’s email communications had become disorganized and ineffective.

The situation reached a breaking point when the university president personally intervened, asking the marketing and communications team to find a centralized email solution that would stop the misuse of Outlook and create boundaries around campus communications.

The Solution

After conducting a comprehensive RFP process, the university selected Emma as their email marketing platform. The implementation began with their primary use case: sending a weekly newsletter to all students, faculty, and staff on campus.

What started as a solution to improve communications quickly evolved into a comprehensive campus-wide email marketing system, serving diverse needs across the university’s complex structure.

The Results

Massive Scale and Adoption:

176 sub-accounts across campus departments
600+ active users managing email communications
1.4 million contacts in their database
Adding approximately one new account per week through word-of-mouth growth

Exceptional Performance Metrics:

Top-performing accounts achieving 74% average open rates (20% is considered good)
Student Experience department: 74% open rate with over 10,700 recipients

Diverse Campus Applications:

40% of sub-accounts serve internal health campus communications (hospitals, clinics, research)
Academic departments, humanities centers, and student organizations
Both email and SMS campaigns for student engagement
Communications reaching students, faculty, staff, parents, and supporters

Key Success Stories

Humanities Center Transformation

Previously struggling with another well-known email marketing platform, the humanities department at this university was sending dense, eight-page newsletter content with no clickable elements or calls-to-action. After moving to Emma and implementing best practices, the Center now benefits from the following results:

Achieved 74% open rates and 16% click rates
Events now regularly sell out
Streamlined communications drive traffic directly to their website
Successfully expanded their audience beyond internal humanities students

Student Experience Department Excellence

This department manages student social events and community building initiatives:

11,000+ subscribers (60% parents/supporters, 30% students)
74% average open rate since account inception
Events attract 5,000-6,000 students regularly
Integrated email and SMS campaigns for maximum engagement

Benefits of Implementing Emma

Improved Communication Quality – Not only did Emma help the university centralize and organize their email marketing, they’re also now able to deliver beautiful, consistently-branded messages from several campus departments to a very diverse audience.
Actionable Data and Feedback – Emma’s reporting capabilities allow the marketing teams at the university to really dig in and see what emails are performing the best, as well as what messaging is resonating with audiences via heat maps, open and click rate statistics, and more.3. Strategic Marketing Education – Emma has provided a comprehensive platform where senior marketing leaders at the university can teach up-and-coming email marketers in other departments how to be successful and take advantage of this extremely important marketing channel.

Long-term Partnership Success

The university’s confidence in Emma led them to sign a sole-source agreement to continue their relationship rather than going through another RFP process. The platform has become integral to their communications ecosystem, supporting everything from major campus news to specialized research communications.

With minimal opt-out rates and consistently strong performance metrics, Emma has transformed the university into a model of targeted, effective email marketing across a complex academic institution.

Our Case Studies

We love our customers & they love us, too!

See what they are saying

Not only did using Emma help us improve our emails – it also helped us tailor programs to better meet the needs and interests of our students.

Angie & Collin

Assistant Director of Student Activities, Student Affairs

Emma is a solid email marketing management platform that provided campaign performance insights, tracking, and a fair amount of customization. Additionally, building out an API so that it spoke to our personnel database made updating contact information and managing unsubscribes considerably easier.

Ben E.

Director of Communication, Higher Education

The fact that our store managers are able to log into Emma and feel comfortable creating emails really means a lot. That, plus the approvals process have saved us a ton of time and keep the brand on point—which is crucial.

Carl Dickerson

Digital Content Strategist

Emma has been a helpful tool for our organization. We recognize that students get inundated with emails so using Emma allows us to be more strategic and create messages that are more engaging to students.

Christian B.

Director of Housing, Higher Education

The best thing about Emma is that it is one of the most influential platforms for marketing and comes with great features. You cannot resist its impeccable ability to boost sales through the best email transactions.

James C.

Digital Marketing Manager

Emma allows you to send blast emails to different audiences. Emma’s “Segments” allow you to slice your contact list into different segments based on different criteria. Creating emails is fairly easy and it’s not too hard to make something look good. We use Emma to send ~ 300K emails at a time, which it does well.

Jeremy A.

Project Coordinator

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

Marketing Strategist

Emma enables us to design email campaigns that consistently reflect our organization’s brand, while also making it simple to switch between different templates tailored to various audiences. The insight dashboards provide valuable analytics, and the builder itself is both intuitive and user-friendly.

Katie M.

Marketing Manager

We are much happier with it in comparison to our formal software Constant Contact – the customer service is just more responsive, and the interface is so easy to use that we are able to have interns use with little direction.

Monica S.

Marketing, Marketing and Advertising

I really like the email editors and ability to create segments based on your data. The Emma team is great about helping set up external APIs in order for your data to get automatically added into their system.

Nikki R.