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The Honey Baked Ham Company is a food retailer with over 400 locations across the United States. Here’s how Emma HQ helps them drive more foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar stores and boost overall brand engagement through email marketing.

MAKING THE DECISION TO SWITCH TO EMMA

“We’ve been using Emma HQ for about a year,” said Carl Dickerson, Digital Content Strategist at HoneyBaked. “We use it for our retail store email marketing and our My HoneyBaked Rewards program: The signup form is actually an Emma form that routes new contacts directly to our account.”

HoneyBaked has about a 50/50 split of franchised and company-owned stores, and they found that Fishbowl—their former email service provider—wasn’t right for the needs of their distributed organization.

“Ultimately, we chose Emma HQ because of the corporate and sub-account structure, the incredible customer service, and the general ease of use. Our franchisees were really limited in what they could do in Fishbowl, so they’ve really enjoyed the flexibility and ease of use of the Emma HQ email platform.”

STARTING FRESH WITH A RE-ENGAGEMENT CAMPAIGN

At the recommendation of his Client Success Manager, one of the first campaigns Carl launched after switching to Emma HQ was a re-engagement campaign.

“We were hesitant at first—everyone loves having a big list—but we ended up doing a little bit of list maintenance. Now that it’s over, I really appreciate Emma for advocating for it.”

Carl sent the campaign to contacts who had never opened an email from HoneyBaked, asking them to confirm their opt-in. After the campaign, they ended up opting out about a third of their list, but he immediately began seeing the benefits.

“Our contacts are now much more engaged, our deliverability is better, and we’re seeing more opens and stronger clicks,” he said. In fact, their open rates have increased 23% since launching the campaign!

SAVING TIME WITH THE APPROVALS DASHBOARD

Carl also mentioned he loves being able to manage all of his sub-accounts under one corporate account, giving the local stores the ability to tailor some content to what’s been happening locally while still maintaining control over the brand experience.

The HoneyBaked team set up their Emma account so that everyone at the store level has editor permissions to create emails, but they can’t send without approval from corporate.

“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.”

THE ROLE OF EMAIL IN THEIR OVERARCHING STRATEGY

For Carl, email serves two major marketing objectives: driving store traffic and increasing audience engagement.

“At the end of the day, we want feet in the door. At the same time, we’re looking to actively engage with our customers and give them the right offers at the right time.”

Their team is able to track the effectiveness of their emails by paying close attention to a few different metrics. First, they track offers that they send through email and watch redemption rates at local stores. They also look at opens and clicks and match each send to spikes in store traffic.

“We’ve definitely seen our metrics improve since switching to Emma HQ; we just have so much more control over how and when emails are sent,” Carl said.

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Interested in taking our Emma HQ platform for a spin? Get in touch today!

Learn more about The Honey Baked Ham Company (and find your closest location) by visiting their website.