If your role involves email marketing for a multi-team, multi-department, or multi-location business, you know that task comes with its own unique set of challenges.
Maybe you work for a university, or perhaps you’re part of a team that does marketing for a restaurant franchise with locations across the country. To do your job effectively, you have to address the needs of different end users with different skill sets, yet somehow maintain control of your content and brand image. You need to empower everyone—from central admin to individual contributors—to collaborate and use email effectively, but still provide a cohesive experience to every subscriber.
Thankfully, these challenges can be solved with the right email platform… and yes, to be completely transparent, we offer all of these things here at Emma. But regardless of which platform you use to power your emails, here are five things to look for to ensure you’re ready to take on your toughest marketing challenges.
Challenge 1: Keeping everything in one place
Being able to manage the email marketing for all of your different departments or locations in a central account is an absolute must have for distributed businesses of all kinds. For one thing, it means every department, location, or team’s contact info can live in a single system. Secondly, it allows you to set up sub-accounts—each with its own set of user permissions—and give users as much freedom as you would like, without ever losing your central authority. More control and more efficiency means better results across the board.
With over 2000 locations across North America (and growing), Liberty Tax requires an email platform with a centralized model to make managing all those locations a breeze. Emma HQ gives Kathleen Guzman, Marketing Communications Specialist at Liberty Tax, the power and flexibility she needs to easily set up new accounts for recently opened Liberty Tax locations, control user permissions for each location, and see how they’re all performing right from her admin dashboard.
Tip for success:
When you have lots of cooks in the kitchen (or in this case, your email platform), it’s critically important that everyone understand their role and responsibilities. From initial planning to actually pressing send, take stock of every person involved in your email marketing. Make sure they understand their responsibilities, then build those permissions into your account to ensure everyone has the right access to the right tools.
Challenge 2: Staying true to your brand
Another huge need in the world of distributed marketing? Maintaining your brand identity and creating a seamless customer experience. So be sure to find an ESP that allows you to share creative assets—like logos, images, and templates—with one, 50, or all of your sub-accounts to ensure a consistent experience across the board. Bonus points if the ESP lets you lock down certain parts of the design to give you total control over what end users can and can’t edit, making it easy for them to stay true to your brand.
Orangetheory Fitness is one of the fastest growing franchises in the world, with over 1000 locations currently operating. With that many locations and individuals sending email campaigns, they rely on Emma’s Asset Sharing feature to keep their branding consistent in email campaigns from location to location. Kevin Keith, Orangetheory Fitness’ Chief Brand Officer, says, “We love Emma because it gives us the sophisticated suite of tools we need to provide the right content to our member base and prospective members.”
Tip for success:
To create a cohesive experience from your website to the inbox and beyond, invest in branded, mobile-friendly email templates your team can utilize for different needs as they arise.
Challenge 3: Empowering your users
Having control is nice, but that doesn’t mean you should (or even have the bandwidth to) manage every element of every email for every location, department, or team. Empower all of your end users—even those without a technical background—with a feature set that makes it easy for them to create and send email campaigns that look great and get great results.
Managing communications for multiple departments at a university the size of Texas A&M means spending a lot of time getting new users up to speed. Scot Walker, Director of Communications at the Association of Former Students, relies on the simplicity and the ease of use of Emma’s drag-and-drop email builder to save time when training and onboarding new users. “Emma is so elegant, and the drag-and-drop features are so intuitive,” said Scot. “I can teach someone how to create an email in Emma in 20 minutes or less, no matter their experience level.”
Tip for success:
As roles shift and new team members come on board, remember to invest time onboarding new users to your ESP. Whether it’s training developed in-house or a service purchased through your provider, it will be well worth the investment.
Challenge 4: Knowing what’s going on across the board
It’s not necessarily a must, but it’s definitely a “nice-to-have.” A homepage dashboard allows you to see what’s happening across all sub-accounts and drill into individual sends with ease. The at-a-glance view of most recent activity and results lets you quickly identify which teams are nailing it and uncover the ones that could use a little help.
With over 60 fine dining restaurants around the United States, Patina Restaurant Group’s email marketing is a team effort, and they use Emma HQ platform and admin dashboard to get a 30,000-foot view of the impact their emails are making. “We have a lot of different restaurants that want to send emails to the same list of people,” said Rachel Insler, Patina’s Director of Marketing. “Thanks to Emma’s intuitive reporting tools, I can quickly see which communications are getting more clicks, make changes, and optimize for the next send.”
Tip for success:
Remember to pay attention to your response results. With email, it can be easy to get in a rhythm of “compile, send, repeat.” But if you aren’t regularly analyzing your results and using them to adjust course, you’re missing out on the opportunity to improve your results over time.
Challenge 5: When you can’t do it all
Even the savviest marketers sometimes need an extra hand or some strategic advice. Finding an ESP that goes beyond basic customer support and offers strategic, design, or technical services can help you and your distributed teams hit your goals that much faster.
With nine locations and several more opening this year, The Escape Game needed a little help along the way to help scale their email program. Soon after getting started with Emma in 2017, Marketing Manager Max Magura began to work one-on-one with Elizabeth Duffey, Senior Email Specialist at Emma, to fine-tune their email strategy. “It’s so nice to have access to a full team of strategists, designers, & coders that help make our bigger dreams a reality,” said Max.
Tip for success:
Every quarter, choose an element of your email strategy to test (send times, copy, signup forms, etc.) Whether you do it on your own or get some help from the experts, every test and every outcome means you’ll continually get smarter about your email marketing.
Our Emma HQ platform was built specifically with distributed teams in mind. With our…
…we have everything you need to send beautiful email campaigns that get results.
