Any enterprise marketer who’s been with a brand with community-minded locations — often run by franchisees who live there with their families — understands the opportunity and challenge involved in sending digital campaigns with local-based messaging. The corporate team is too far removed from the community to craft meaningful messaging, and the local marketers don’t have the tools necessary to access data and stick to corporate branding standards.
That’s where a distributed marketing solution like Sageflo Radiate comes in, allowing the corporate marketing team to set templates for local marketers to use in their campaigns. Combine with MessageGears’ direct data access and flexible APIs, and you have a cohesive system to empower local marketers to send more relevant content to their community of customers, driving greater ROI and loyalty across the board.
Our first joint customer to put this into practice is a national quick-serve restaurant (QSR) brand. Here’s how they got the most out of the MessageGears + Sageflo integration:
What did the QSR brand want to do?
The QSR brand wanted to empower franchise owners to send their own messages with more personal and relevant content to area customers, understanding the boost that could give their local markets.
They knew that no one is as tuned in to what’s going on in their local communities as the people who live and work there. If a manager is planning a big pep rally before the big football game at the high school around the corner, it makes sense for that manager to be able to send an email to her customers. Not only is that sort of relevant content more likely to generate opens and clicks, but it creates a better bond between the customer and the local store, increasing long-term loyalty.
But their corporate marketing team was understandably concerned about either giving the local marketers too much freedom, or having to filter campaigns from their hundreds of markets up through the corporate team before it went out. They needed a more streamlined process, wherein those local marketers could come up with and quickly send community-focused campaigns while still having an easy way to adhere to corporate branding and messaging standards.
How did MessageGears and Sageflo help?
MessageGears and Sageflo provided the perfect combination for the QSR brand to execute its plan effectively. MessageGears’ direct data access is essential for making this distributed marketing strategy work, as it allows corporate marketing teams to share appropriate live audiences to the local markets, along with building multiple templates that the marketers at the local level can choose from. This makes the message feel personalized while still fitting within the overall look and feel of the company.
Meanwhile, Sageflo’s Radiate product gives those local marketers the ability to create and send a message within minutes, even if the user has little to no experience in marketing. And, because of MessageGears’ flexible APIs and easy integration, Sageflo was able to build a custom front-end for the brand on the local level. Additionally, this front-end still gave corporate marketers total yes/no control over any message going out — ensuring that each email is relevant and on brand for their users.
“That control is so important for enterprise brands,” Sageflo Head of Growth Bernice Fung said. “That’s why we built Sageflo Radiate to ensure that balance of control and autonomy they need in order to execute distributed marketing at scale.”
One of the best features of this tool is the flexible audience creator — enabled by MessageGears’ direct data connection — allowing corporate users to update a single audience with launch variables on the fly, making it easy to tailor messages to the most relevant segment of any audience.
What were the results?
Putting the MessageGears + Sageflo combination to work, the QSR brand was able to create endless segments of audiences, saving significant time and money while allowing them to micro-target segments at the community level and drive loyalty through relevant local marketing.
Those local marketers were empowered to send their own personalized emails with templates, audiences, and images approved at the corporate level, all using flexible API integrations. Due to the execution of their distributed marketing plan, customer engagement and overall customers volume increased significantly across the country at the local level.
“It’s been amazing what working together has enabled both MessageGears and Sageflo to help make the brand-to-local strategy really work how enterprise marketers envision it,” MessageGears Senior Growth Manager India Waters said. “Sageflo has been so easy to work with, and the technology they built is a perfect fit for our direct-data-access approach.”
In addition to QSR brands, professional sports leagues, record labels, direct sales organizations, along with franchise and multi-level marketing businesses could benefit greatly from a distributed marketing strategy like this. To learn more about how the MessageGears + Sageflo combination might help your team, get in touch with us today.
Jeff Haws
As MessageGears’ Senior Marketing Manager, Jeff is focused on producing engaging and thoughtful content that resonates with enterprise marketers, helping them to better understand how MessageGears makes their jobs easier. He’s passionate about understanding the way data impacts messaging, and he’s also hopelessly obsessed with baseball.
