Introducing Emma HQ

Miles: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our customer webinar for Emma HQ. We’re coming to you live from rainy and kind of cold Nashville. As we get a little bit closer to Thanksgiving, it’s getting pretty chilly here. Hope you’re doing well. It’s kind of been a minute since we’ve done our customer-only webinar. So we’re excited to get back in the swing of things. Thank you so much for joining us. So, first, I’ll just kind of walk you through. Get this slide going here. So, I’m your host. My name is Miles Price. I’m on the product marketing team here at Emma. And I’m joined by Tyler Sutton.

Tyler: Hey, Miles.

Miles: How’s it going?

Tyler: Is going pretty well, man. I’m part of the professional services team here at Emma.

Miles: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining. And just kind of give everybody a little bit of a background, what we’re gonna be going over. We’re gonna highlight kind of where we saw the market going as far as email marketing and businesses growing and some of the new problems we’ve seen, what led us to build Emma HQ. And then Tyler is going to run you through a product deep dive and actually get into an Emma account and show you some of the new features. Then we’ll go over some customer showcases, and then have some time at the end for a Q&A. Hang on one second. I think we’re having a technical issue. Hit reset. Sorry about that, everybody. All right. I think everybody can see the screen now. So, before we get into all the good stuff, we wanted to take a few minutes to provide a little bit of background, a little bit of Emma’s history and walk through what we’ve been seeing in the market and ultimately why we decided to build Emma HQ.

Over the course of the past 10 years, here at Emma, we’ve supported businesses of all shapes and sizes, small businesses that are just getting started with email all the way up through larger teams that are doing more sophisticated and automated programs. And within some of the last few years, our smaller customers’ businesses have grown significantly, which is really incredible. And we’ve also acquired some larger restaurant and fitness and retail brands. And in both of these cases, we quickly started to see some of the patterns emerging. We noticed that brands with multiple locations or franchise business models, kind of like what I was talking about with the restaurants and fitness studios, they have a really unique set of needs from an email marketing platform like Emma. Number one, there’s an increased demand for more control over branding across all the communications going out. They wanna have a better process to collaborate on content and approve campaigns. They need to have the ability to share down corporate sponsored content and also be able to let marketers at each location create their own. And finally, not everyone who’s test with email marketing at these locations are the most experienced marketers, and that’s okay.

So we found out, to wrap all that up, as your business is growing and scaling to locations in the dozens or hundreds or even thousands of locations like some of our customers, email can quickly become completely unmanageable. And another thing we found as we were doing our research. It didn’t take us very long to find out that there were literally no other email platforms on the market that were addressing these problems. So, it made it really easy for our product team to get right to work. And that’s where Emma HQ comes in. Emma HQ is the only platform of its kind to help brands manage their email marketing strategy across hundreds or even thousands of locations.

And just to kind of go through some of the big points of Emma HQ. One of my favorite features is the brand new approvals dashboard. Throughout all this research, we found out that marketers at these larger locations, they were running out of time. They didn’t have the bandwidth to manage the email programs that would come across their desk. So we spent a lot of time researching and we found out that what they really needed was an easy place to get approved mailings out the door faster. So the approvals dashboard lets someone at a sub account submit a mailing all the way back up so that you can easily review, and comment, and ultimately approve each mailing that goes out. This also gives you a good centralized view of all the campaigns that are going out from every location, and it really highlights the key performance metrics so that you can showcase the performance of your brand’s entire program.

And just to kind of give a look into what that approvals process looks like. When you get an email in the approvals dashboard, you’re actually able to get a quick and easy view of the content of that campaign. So that’s the copy, the subject lines, header images, everything. You can even get a look at how it looks in the inbox. So, that makes it really easy so you can collaborate with your editors at each location and even send them quick and easy feedback for mailings that aren’t quite right. Another really, really awesome feature in Emma HQ is template style locking. This is something that we’ve heard from customers for a long time. Being able to set and lock font styles, header images, or header styles, colors, all at the template level, so that when you share that template down to your sub account, it’s already set and locked so that you can kind of control how the branding goes out from all your emails. The stress of having an off-brand email going out is very real. We’ve heard from customers that maybe an email goes out where their brand colors are red and yellow and something goes out with blue. So, yeah, that’s real.

And in addition to template style locking, we also have a brand new asset manager experience. If you’re a current enterprise or now HQ customer, you’re familiar with being able to organize all of those images, and templates, and campaigns. We’ve actually improved this experience a ton, giving you image labeling so that you can actually group images together and share that group down with your sub accounts. You can actually take a campaign, let’s say the campaign that was sent out by a sub account that does really, really well. I’ll use a Black Friday email example. Let’s say it goes out, has a killer open rate. Someone at corporate can actually copy that campaign back up and then set it as its own template and share it back down to other sub accounts. So effectively, you’re being able to celebrate the success of a mailing and share that with the rest of the organization.

And, ultimately, we wanted to make it easier for you to see the entire email program across the whole business. So, the new activity dashboard makes it easy to track each locations’ email performance based on engagement metrics. So you got your mailing score, open rate, click rate, all that good stuff. And also be able to quickly drill down to each mailing and also see which sub account sent it. So, we’re really excited about Emma HQ. It’s an incredible new platform and it’s gonna make your life easier from a marketing standpoint so that you can approve every send that goes out, deliver that consistent brand experience that your customers are expecting, and be able to have visibility into the whole program so that you can continuously work, improve, and optimize your emails’ performance. So, with that, I’m gonna hand it over to Tyler and we’re going to actually hop into a real Emma account and get a deep dive in some of these features.

Tyler: Yeah. Thanks, Miles. What we’re gonna start out with is, let me kind of set the stage here. So, I’m going to walk you through each of those four features that Miles has pointed out, you get to see how they function in-app, and kind of where everything is so that if you’re a current Emma HQ user, you can jump right in. So, we’re gonna start out with probably what’s the diamond of all of these Emma HQ updates and that’s the approvals process for Emma HQ.

So, one of the privileges that I have working on the professional services team is actually being on the ground day to day with some of the Emma’s top customers, brands like Express Employment Professionals, Little Gym Europe, [inaudible 00:09:14], Liberty Tax. So I actually get to see the challenges that they face from day to day. I’ll tell you this, that the challenge of bringing on these new sub accounts and expanding the business, and being able to kind of help those sub accounts get started. That was a real challenge for a lot of these brands. As far as the approvals process goes, we actually work with the brand called Liberty Tax, to give you a little bit of context, and we’ll hear more about that a little bit later on. But they work with over 4,000 locations. So you can imagine managing 4,000 sub accounts to be no easy feat. And so let’s just take a quarter of that and just say, you know, let’s just say that a thousand sub accounts may need a little extra help maybe approving some content, a little bit of guidance as far as the brand standards. So you can imagine, even if you scale it down to just a thousand accounts, still really difficult to manage that. And so, what the approvals dashboard did for Liberty Tax, it actually cut right through that and really was a game changer for them.

So, right here on the new Emma HQ activity dashboard, we’re gonna come back to this in a little bit. But there’s a tab up here called Upcoming. So we’re gonna flip over there. You’ll see two different statuses for this schedule, which basically means just a mailing has been scheduled to send out of a sub account, just gives you a good picture of the general activity going on in that sub account. And then you’ll have the pending approval status, which our mailings that have been submitted by the sub account users that have author or editor permissions. That’s pretty key there, author or editor permissions. And they’re asking for review and approval. So, from here, you can check out what sub account requested that, the mailing name, and then some key send details over here. So, these look to be a little bit past due, so we’re gonna jump right in and review it. So, from here, we have a full preview of the content. And on the right-hand side, we do have key send details, such as targeted audience up here, sender information, subject line, and then also that desired send time. So, from here, we can really judge, you know, make a decision on whether to approve or deny this mailing. You have both options there. Either option you select, you also have an option to identify that sub account user directly, and then drop any comments to them, kind of justifying that decision, letting them know why you may have approved that mailing or denied it. So, really, the approvals process is going to make it incredibly easy for you to communicate with your sub accounts.

So, we’re gonna actually back out and get directly into a sub account as we explore some of the new features available in the Emma HQ assets manager. So we’re in a particular sub account here, and we’re gonna take a look at a campaign, and we’ll select our Cyber Monday campaign here. So, over the last year, we’ve heard a lot of requests from customers to have a little bit more granular control over font styles, and colors available to their end users, so all managing that from the assets manager from the HQ level. So, for example, I have brands like Orangetheory Fitness, and Aqua-Tots Swim Schools. They’ve experienced some of their sub accounts sending out some content that’s not necessarily on-brand, and that happens, we understand that. But what we’ve done with the new template style locking controls in Emma HQ has actually made that a lot easier so that you can establish that crucially important brand consistency across the board. So, by adding new locking tags from the template builder, you can preset all of your preferred heading styles. You can lock down the bold, italics, underline, even things like alignment, as well as font family, you can lock that down as well. And then also, more importantly, your brand colors, so that you’re not gonna have to worry about any non-branded, or misbranded emails going out from your sub accounts.

Miles: I think this is really helpful here, because there’s a good chance that we’ve all seen an email go out that may have had like Comic Sans in it, or maybe had a neon green text color, or something that wasn’t quite on-brand. That stuff happens. This gives you a little bit more control when you’re building those templates at the code level to say, our font style is Helvetica. We’re gonna lock in the bold. We want everything to be these three certain colors, everything’s set and is affected from that template level all the way down to each sub account user.

Tyler: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s really just gonna streamline that process and make things a little bit easier for you from that HQ level. So, from here, what we wanna do is actually move into the assets manager. So, as I mentioned before, with these template style locking controls, you’ll find those in the brand new assets manager at the HQ level. And before we jump into there, I did wanna start by talking about our updated abilities to share campaigns actually between sub accounts. We’ve all had that situation where, potentially, one of your sub accounts is really crushing it as far as branding, and also content. Maybe they’ve come up with some creative content on their own, or perhaps they’re just laying it out in their mailings in ways that you approve of, and you perhaps wanna share that with your other sub accounts. I just have a [inaudible 00:15:22] Sutton, lead by example. And so it kind of still haunts me to this day. And so, now, with the new assets manager, you can actually allow your sub accounts to lead by example and share that with your other subs. So, from here, if we have a mailing that’s a high-performing mailing from the sent tab, or perhaps one that is currently being worked on, looking over to the right hand side, and select the drop down, and you can see now we can add to the agency’s assets level. So, from here, it’ll give you direct access to actually edit that campaign if you need to make any changes, and then we can come back to the new assets level, over to campaigns, and there’s our Cyber Monday campaign ready to share down to our sub accounts.

Miles: And just to clarify there, the drop-down is only available for managers and primary account owners.

Tyler: Correct, yeah.

Miles: All of your users wouldn’t see that drop-down.

Tyler: Correct. So we’ve also made it easier for you, as Miles mentioned before, to share images. So we’ve all had that situation as well, especially if you’re planning to expand your business, bringing on new sub accounts. That process typically does take a little bit of time. With the previous enterprise platform, there was this image sharing capability where there was a way to do that. But it wasn’t typically as organized as we would liked to have seen it. And so now, with new image labels, you can do exactly that. You can tag any of your images with specific labels and categorize these labels. And so, let’s say we’re bringing on a new sub account. We wanna share with them all of our approved logos. We can click Select Logos here, and then for this purposes, we’re gonna select all of them and we have an option to share to any specific subs, or potentially globally if we want. So, really excited for you guys to handle the new assets manager with template style locking, with being able to share campaigns between your sub accounts, and also add image labels. It’s really gonna help streamline a lot of those communication issues that we were hearing so much about.

Miles: One other thing that’s really neat about the image labeling. So, this is a way for you to group them at the top level, at the corporate level in your main account, but that labeling system also goes down to each sub account. So they actually get the same label experience that you do. So, for example, let’s say you have all new photography made for the Black Friday campaign, and you’ve labelled that “Black Friday photos.” That label is now accessible from the sub account as well.

Tyler: Yeah. Excellent point. So we’re gonna move in to the fourth and final feature that we’ll cover here. And this is where we’re gonna go back to the activity dashboard as we mentioned before. So, it’s important to give some context as well. This goes for that first feature we talked about, which was the approvals process, and also the activity dashboard. This view is going to be available to primary account owners and managers. So, there’s no access for specific sub account team members here. So this is only for primary account owners and managers. So, in marketing a large business, whether that be a franchise-based business, or perhaps a distributed organization, there comes a lot of challenges, and it doesn’t take that long to figure out that you need to be able to measure success. So you can be able to establish concrete KPIs, and take that measurement, take those results and share those with your team, your boss, whomever. Measurement is such a vital part of growing your business, especially in marketing. And so with that, with the new Emma HQ activity dashboard, we’ve made it a lot easier for you to deliver consistent reporting overall. So, from the activity dashboard here, we can see the sub account, the mailing name, as well as some key metrics for opens, clicks, and the audience there.

Miles: Awesome. Tyler, thank you so much. This is great walk through. And then go back here and get back into the deck. Okay. So, we had a walk through of all the features within Emma HQ. We did wanna highlight a couple of customers that have been using Emma HQ and how it’s really helped their programs. First rule, we’ll go over Orangetheory Fitness. They’re one of our customers. They’re a nationwide fitness brand. They have over 1,000 studio locations across the country. That is quite a feat for an email marketer to manage. So, the approvals dashboard was actually something that, it was an idea that had kind of come to life through conversations with them, and we really built it to help save them time so that they could manage all of these different newsletters that are going out to each studio. And in addition to that, it helps them keep each email on-brand. They’re able to build those templates and kind of lock in those styles so that each location has corporate-approved assets already built right in.

And we did an interview with them recently and they let us know that Emma HQ has actually helped them reduce the time they spend on email by 30%. So, if you’re an email marketer managing a lot of these programs, imagine getting 30% of your day back not having to worry about email. It’s pretty cool. And we’ve mentioned Liberty Tax a couple of times in this webinar. They are a franchised income tax preparation brands. They have over 4,000 locations across North America. For them, it’s a numbers game where they have so many different email programs. And I’m pretty sure they just have one person managing it all. So, with Kathleen, her job is really just making sure that she can get all these emails out the door and approve all the content. So, this is huge for them. It helps save them a ton of time, and helps keep their marketing machine rolling.

So let’s do a quick recap. With Emma HQ, it’s our new platform for larger distributed businesses to help get those approved mailings out the door faster to help you guys send more accurate and on-brand emails company-wide, and it’ll help remove the stress of any offer any emails going out. And the asset manager helps you build and organize and keep all that content shared with the whole business, and obviously being able to easily report into the performance of each campaign and optimize and improve over time. So, with that, I think we’re gonna open it up for some questions. We’ve got a couple here that have been submitted. Tyler, you wanna take this first one?

Tyler: Yeah. Absolutely. This question is coming from Sam, and Sam asks, “Can a manager users use the approvals process?” So, we referenced earlier that the activity dashboard and the approvals process view would be available for primary account owners and managers. But, to Sam’s point, yes, managers will actually have the ability to approve or deny mailings that are coming in through that approvals process.

Miles: Awesome. Okay. We have another question from Stephanie. “How do tests appear?” So, I think this is in reference to test mailings. So test mailings actually don’t appear on the dashboard. Test mailings is kind of up to the author and editor to determine who should receive that test email when they select their audience for the send. And you can send as many tests as you want. Those are unlimited within each sub account. So, in other words, we don’t really have a baked-in test workflow that goes upstream to the admin account.

Tyler: Another question coming in from Jason, and says, “How often is the info for the sub accounts on page refresh?” So, probably asking more so for the mailing results and then also the overall analytics for the last 30 days. So this is actually real time, so you don’t have to waste any time waiting around for those to populate, we’ll get that to you pretty quickly.

Miles: Yeah. It’s also a really good place to take screenshots to add into a presentation whenever you’re having to update the email marketing stats for your larger team. Okay. Let’s see. “How do we turn the approvals process off and on?” And that’s from Elizabeth. The approvals process is enabled, it’s all based on user permissions. So, if the user is set up as an author or editor, they’ll send through the approvals process. So, they go in, they build the mailing, they set their audience, write their subject line. And then, as they go to send it, it goes right up to the approvals dashboard. A second user who’s set up as a full user in the same sub account would actually be able to send directly. So, that full user has complete send access, kind of think of them as like a power user, so, author and editor, that enables the approval process. Full user does not.

Tyler: Question from Andrew, says, “In the instance that the reason behind denying the mailing is a simple edit. Are you available as a manager to make that correction without canceling the mailing or going back into the sub?” Well, it needs to be denied, and you have that option to notify the direct sub account user and comment on why. After you deny the mailing, we actually do give you a link to edit the campaign. So, if you are a primary account or a manager, you should have access to that sub depending on a couple different permissions. But we do give you a link to jump directly to that, but not way to just edit it before approval.

Miles: All right. Here’s a question from Phillip. “How do the color and font styling locking options work? Will users only have access to those exact fonts and colors or do they have the ability to adjust as needed, like bolding the font or changing the size?” Awesome question. Any attributes in the text toolbar, so, as you’re making those stylistic changes. So that’s font family, bold, italicize, center alignment, anything like that. You can hard code those into your template. So basically, you’ll have the ability to say, let’s say Helvetica only for an H1 heading that’s bold and that’s black. So, that stuff will be locked in, not editable by the user. Anything that’s not designated in the code is actually still editable by the user.

Let’s see. We’ve got a couple more questions. “Can I share contacts with different sub accounts from the parent level?” That is a really great question. At the moment, contact sharing is not available for Emma HQ. If you think about sub accounts, those are their own subscription lists. So, they don’t affect other sub accounts. So, technically, a person could be subscribed to all sub accounts. Those subscription lists are unique to that sub account. So, if you think about it like locations for a brand, let’s say you’ve got a Nashville location, a Portland location, and an Austin, Texas location. Those are all independently managed subscription lists. So, you cannot share contacts across.

Tyler: We have another question coming from Beth, and she asks, “We have sub brands with slightly different color palettes. Can one be applied more than one standard palette? So, essentially, in the same template per sub account can preset those colors separately?” So, any of the templates style locking, that was actually a really good question. Any of the template style locking features, they’re gonna be per template. We’ve actually made it easier, we didn’t cover it specifically on this, but you do have an avenue to duplicate templates now. So, from the assets manager, what I recommend there is just to create two of the same template and then you can share those accordingly with that or with that particular sub account.

Miles: And I think that may have answered Adam’s question here, that you can lock styles on templates from the admin level. Let’s see here. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. You can lock those template styles from the asset level.

Tyler: All right. I’m just going through some of the questions here. There are a lot of really great questions. This is actually a good clarification question too. So Alisa asks, “Does every mailing have to be approved or only if they select to do so?” So as Miles mentioned earlier, the approvals process is going to be centered around sub account users that have editor or author access. Any additional sub account users, perhaps they have an administrator permission, or full user. Those actually do have access by definition to be able to send mailings. So it’s only gonna apply to, the approvals process will only apply to sub account users with editor or author permissions.

Miles: Very cool. All right. I think that is it for the Q&A. We’re gonna wrap up. The slides and recording of the deck will be sent around to everybody in the next few days, so, keep an eye on your inbox. If you have any additional questions, or if you would like to see if Emma HQ would be a good fit for your company, send us an email [email protected].

Tyler: I’ll also just note that if you are a former enterprise user, you’ve automatically been upgraded to Emma HQ. So, if you are looking for a little bit of additional training, maybe a one-on-one training, contact us at the Services team. So you can go to myemma.com/services. Send an email at [email protected]. We’d love to help you out there with some one-on-one training. And we also do take care of design work too. So a lot of you know we’re concentrated on building out some holiday templates, specific email creation, so, all things that we’d be happy to talk with you about at services.

Miles: It’s getting that time of the year. It’s a really crucial time for marketing teams all over. So, if you wanna really take advantage of the holidays and get a fresh new template made, or even just talk strategy, Tyler seems the group to do that with.

All right, everybody, thank you so much for joining. We’ll be sending the deck around. And take care.