The Palm

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“Using Emma, we’ve discovered and acted on valuable opportunities that we had been missing before.”

sarah matista

MARKETING MANAGER

Industry: restaurant

About The Palm

Antique Archaeology is the home base of Mike Wolfe – HISTORY’s American Picker. Vintage collectibles & motorcycles.

How The Palm uses email to keep guests coming back.

The Palm’s team is entirely dedicated to treating their guests like family, serving great food, always exceeding expectations, and they’ve been doing it that way since 1926. But this restaurant enterprise nearing a century old is using new technologies in email marketing to keep their guests coming back time and time again.

Using email to amplify traditional marketing

“The Palm is such a historic brand that email is relatively new, in terms of our timeline – though we’ve been doing it for years. It allows us to get the word out about things that would have been just marketed within our four walls historically, which can only do so much when you have a guest base the size of ours. Email is really important and it takes us to the next level,” said Marketing Manager, Sarah Matista.

The key to nailing that communication? Relevant and timely email content. “Making sure people are getting the right message at the right time, and not being overloaded,” explained Sarah.

Since switching to Emma, The Palm has had great success rounding out their promotional emails with more valuable and personalized information and content.

Utilizing professional services to go further

The Palm relies on Emma’s Professional Services team for email strategy recommendations. “I’m currently working with Emily—Emma Professional Services Specialist & Copywriter—on the best ways to segment our audience. We’ve seen our open rates improve through Emily’s direction on re-engagement tactics,” detailed Sarah.

Professional Services are especially valuable to organizations that don’t have a huge marketing team — services can be an ongoing program or just as a once off.

“Given the complexity of our email organization, I don’t know if we could have been as successful as we have without the Professional Services team,” mused Sarah. The Palm utilizes ongoing franchisee training, strategic guidance, and email design creation.

Why did The Palm restaurant choose Emma? 

Their previous platform was difficult for restaurant managers to use. Users were intimidated by the technology, and became disengaged. The inability to control brand elements was a big factor. “Emma is really visually user-friendly and intuitive,” said Sarah.

The Palm has over 20 locations so ease of use ranks high on the list when choosing a new email marketing company.

The Palm has seen their overall open rate increase by 7% with their welcome campaign reaching 68% open rate and 35% click rate.

What the future looks like: 

The Palm’s 837 Club, one of the restaurant world’s oldest loyalty programs, offers exclusive benefits like beverage features, rewards, and one-of-a-kind experiences. Sarah wants to implement individualized email marketing to the members so they can more effectively communicate these benefits and keep members engaged, adding considerable value to their VIP customers.

By The Numbers 

59%

average open rate

0.12%

unsubscribe rate

TOOLKIT

With automation, reaching the right people with the right message at just the right time is a breeze.

An entire team of email specialists obsessed with driving the results you care about.

Power highly targeted campaigns using segmentation to organize and manage your subscriber data.

Our Case Studies 

We love our customers & they love us, too! 

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.

Digital Marketing Manager

The thing I like most about Emma is how easy things are to manage. The UI is laid out in a way that makes it very straightforward to get what you need to do, done.

Trevor A.

Founder, Marketing and Advertising

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Want to see how they did it?

Get a demo with an Emma expert today! Or give us a call 800.595.4401

next story Screenshot-2026-04-17-at-10.27.16-AM Learn how ThinkFoodGroup uses Emma to pair beautiful templates with relevant messages to delight their customers at every turn. Read More
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