Aaron Smith

CEO at Sageflo
CEO at Sageflo
18
Nov
2020

Case Study: Local Marketing at Scale

Pet Supplies Plus Boosts In-Store Sales by Enabling Franchisees to Easily Personalize and Send Their Own Marketing

Pet Supplies Plus is one of the largest specialty pet food retailers in the United States. Founded in 1988, Pet Supplies Plus is a franchisor and operator of pet specialty stores, which now serves over 30 states, with 500+ stores split across more than 100 franchisees.

THE CHALLENGE

Local Marketing at Scale

On a corporate level, Pet Supplies Plus runs a highly integrated, sophisticated email marketing program. With promotional, lifecycle, triggered, and transactional campaigns landing in customers’ inboxes on a regular basis, they have built a reliable marketing channel that’s data-driven and personalized.

However, Pet Supplies Plus’ over 100 franchisees were much more limited in terms of the types of campaigns they could send out to customers of their own local stores and the process was cumbersome. Due to the sheer number of franchisees and logistical complexities, Pet Supplies Plus giving local franchisees access to the corporate email marketing platform was not an option. After all, the corporate team would lose all control over branding and segmentation.

That meant that franchisees were stuck sending campaigns on their own, at the individual store-level, without the ability to analyze and optimize campaign performance. They also didn’t have visibility into the corporate marketing calendar, which sometimes led to instances of customers receiving conflicting offers—one corporate, one local.

THE SOLUTION

Sageflo Bridges the Gap with a Simple, Streamlined Tool

To solve this issue, Pet Supplies Plus rolled out Sageflo to franchisees from coast to coast. Built as an easy-to-use web-based platform, Sageflo gives local franchisees access to on-brand design templates, copy, images, and audience segmentation—all approved by the corporate marketing team. This tool makes it easy for busy franchise owners to quickly build, deploy, and analyze emails across all their stores.

Plus, the Sageflo plug-in allows the corporate team to share their marketing calendar, enabling franchisees to be more strategic about their cadence and content.

Sageflo took our franchise marketing to another level.

Before Sageflo, our franchisees were required to create individual emails for every store owned, making the process of sending community-focused emails incredibly inefficient. Performance reporting on those emails was limited to standard email engagement metrics and again, there was one report for each store!

Sageflo streamlined our franchisees’ marketing efforts, making it easy to communicate with their stores at multiple levels, including district and whole ownership group, and providing access to more robust reporting. At the same time, it has improved the alignment between our corporate marketing team and franchise owners through standardized templates, shared marketing calendars, and targeted segment types.

Sageflo is one of the highlights of our franchise marketing platform at Pet Supplies Plus!


Craig Clark • Director of Neighbor Relationship Marketing & Data Analytics • Pet Supplies Plus

THE RESULTS

Increased Quantity and Quality of Local Email Marketing

Over the first 12 months of using Sageflo, franchisees have sent over 2,000 campaigns, with 5,000 estimated to be sent next year. Franchisees have seen their email click-to-open rate (CTOR) increase by 19%. Average basket size has increased by 12%—likely thanks to having better access to reporting on how customers are interacting with their emails.

The benefits aren’t limited to local franchisees. Pet Supplies Plus’ corporate marketing team is also spending much less time overseeing franchisee campaigns, giving them more time to focus on other strategic objectives.

LEARN MORE

Read about how Sageflo works at sageflo.com or contact us at info@sageflo.com and we’d be happy to tell you more about Sageflo!

Posted by Aaron Smith
14
Oct
2020
A Marketing Win-Win

A Marketing Win-Win

Sageflo has partnered with MessageGears to deliver a joint solution that helps enterprise marketing organizations take distributed marketing, through-channel marketing, and brand-to-local coordination to the next level. With Sageflo, a solution that enables distributed marketers to build highly personalized and focused messaging campaigns using corporate approved and standardized templates, and MessageGears’ direct data connection capabilities, all marketers within an organization now have the flexibility to send the right message to the right audience anytime.

Sageflo + MessageGears – a Marketing Win-Win

Imagine this: You’re the marketing manager of a large national chain of sandwich shops. Your role includes creating and implementing company-wide promotional campaigns—think rewards programs, free birthday sandwiches, and announcing seasonal offerings. About half of your stores are franchises, who sometimes want to run their own local marketing initiatives. This makes you a little nervous—will they follow the brand guidelines? Will they stick to email marketing best practices?

Now imagine this: You’re a franchise owner of one of these sandwich shops. While you appreciate all the marketing support you get from the corporate office, you know you’ll be able to increase sales if you can do some truly local marketing—think local customer of the week, a campaign to support the local youth football team, or special promos during your town’s big summer festival weekend. But you lack the tools to promote these campaigns on your own, and every time you ask corporate for support, it’s a huge bottleneck.

These are challenges faced by all kinds of companies with distributed teams—franchise models like the sandwich shop, international businesses in need of localized marketing, and multi-level marketing organizations, among others. That’s why we created Sageflo.

Sageflo is a win-win for both corporate marketing stakeholders and local owners. An easy-to-use, web-based tool, Sageflo empowers local teams to quickly and easily create professional, on-brand email marketing campaigns without needing corporate support.

Corporate stakeholders are able to set the kind of guardrails that ensure consistent, on-brand creative, like creating templates, providing approved imagery and logos, and setting brand colors and fonts. They can even pre-define segments so local teams can only send emails to their own subscribers.

Local franchise owners and distributed team members don’t need a technical background to create, proof, and send beautiful campaigns, nor do they have to wait for corporate to sign off on their creative.

Distributed team members don’t need a login to the corporate ESP, but every email built in Sageflo is sent from there—which is a benefit to corporate marketing teams interested in accurate reporting. And, sending from the ESP means that marketers can still take advantage of features like dynamic content, product recommendations, and frequency governance.

Sageflo is a powerful new tool that unlocks scalable marketing opportunities in all parts of your business. The power of combining MessageGears’ unique direct data connection with Sageflo’s ability to enable a more coordinated and streamlined distributed marketing strategy from the top allows enterprise companies to empower marketers at the local level, building better relationships with their customers, and creating higher engagement and brand loyalty.

Read more about how Sageflo + MessageGears helps to drive powerful distributed marketing campaigns for Super Senders. 

For more information on how Sageflo can work for your team, please schedule a demo.

Posted by Aaron Smith in Collaboration, Partners, Radiate
18
Feb
2020
What’s your plan for CCPA?

What’s your plan for CCPA?

Are you saving individual copies of your marketing messages?

The new CCPA law says you should.

If you’re a digital marketer, or work in compliance, operations or customer care, chances are you’ve heard a lot about the California Consumer Privacy Act that went into effect at the beginning of 2020. CCPA as it’s commonly referred to, was modeled very closely on GDPR, the European Union data privacy act that became law in 2018. The primary intention and purpose of both laws is to give consumers more visibility and control into how companies use their data.

What you may not know, is that while both laws are similar, CCPA requires companies to provide copies of all unique marketing messages (such as email, SMS and direct mail) sent to a subscriber in the preceding 12 months, upon request. This is a significant difference from GDPR, and if you’re operating under the assumption that following GDPR policies means you’re in the clear for CCPA, read on, because there are a few additional requirements your business will need to meet from an operations perspective.

How CCPA compares to GDPR.

Both laws include a right to access clause, which is meant to provide consumers with context on how a company is using their data. In the case of GDPR, the right to access clause is high-level, covering how a consumer’s data may be used.

With GDPR, you need to tell consumers:

  • The purpose of any data processing
  • The categories of data being processed
  • How long the data is expected to be stored
  • Whether the data has been used in automatic decision-making, for instance, customer scoring and profiling purposes

What you don’t need to do with GDPR is retain and provide specific copies of marketing messages sent to subscribers.

CCPA goes much further than GDPR. Here, the right to access clause has a very broad definition of Personal Information you must provide to subscribers. With CCPA, Personal information is defined as any information “capable of being associated with” a consumer or a household, whether structured, such as consumer scores in databases, or unstructured, such as emails you’ve sent, images stored in social media profiles, and other types of data.

In practical terms, it means you must be able to provide any data or content relating to a consumer that your business holds or has processed in the preceding 12 months upon request. To do this, you will need to find a way for your marketing and customer care teams to easily store, access and manage individual customer marketing messages (for instance, using a tool like Sageflo Archiver or similar).

Shoot, that doesn’t sound fun. My business doesn’t have any presence in California. Do I need to follow these requirements?

If you’re a brand marketer in the B2C or D2C space, you are almost certainly impacted by this. Any company, regardless of where they are headquartered, has to comply if they:

  • Collect personal data from California residents, and
  • Meet any one or more of the following criteria:
    • Buys, sells, or shares the personal information of 50,000 or more consumers or devices.
    • Has gross annual revenue of more than $25 million.
    • Derives at least 50% of their annual revenue from the sharing of personal information.

There is no cap on fines for CCPA (unlike GDPR which has a ceiling on penalties at 4% of a company’s revenue), and the fines can be quite steep – $7,500 per subscriber record. Ignoring the law and hoping for the best is not an option.

And CCPA is just the beginning. In 2019, over 20 states introduced and/or passed privacy laws to protect and give consumers more control over their data and how it’s used. Like it or not, this is the new norm for digital marketers and operations teams. The best thing we can do is prepare ourselves.

 

Okay, I get it. We can’t skip or ignore CCPA. In practical terms, what do I need to know and plan for with regards to right to access requirements?

  1. Establish a process to verify subscriber identity. Before you can fulfill a request from a subscriber, you’ll need to use a “reasonable” method to verify their identity and avoid requesting any additional information, unless you cannot verify their identity from the information you already maintain.
  2. Put a process and systems in place to fulfill right to access requests. This will require operations and customer care teams to retain and easily access the required subscriber data. You should also work on having a standardized format for providing copies of such data so that every request isn’t a massive drain on time and resources within your company. Implementing a solution like Archiver makes this easy.
  3. Ensure data can be provided to the customer within 45 days. Thankfully, this is an improvement over GDPR, which requires requests be fulfilled within 30 days.
  4. Check your privacy policy. If your company maintains or processes data on 4 million or more consumers, you may also be required to include the following metrics in your privacy policy: the median number of requests to access, delete and opt-out of subscriber records that you receive annually, as well as the average number of days it took to respond to such requests. This portion of the law is still in draft state.

Further reading.

With a high-level overview of the right to access portions of the law, we’ve barely touched the surface of CCPA in this article, and how it differs from GDPR. Other major differences between CCPA and GDPR include: detailed privacy notice requirements, the ability for subscribers to specifically opt-out of the sale of their data, the age definition for children (13 for CCPA, 16 for GDPR) and parental consent requirements, as well as provisions that must be included in contracts with 3rd party data processors.

We encourage you to fully explore the CCPA law and how it differs from GDPR in more detail, and be sure to include legal counsel in your decision making process when determining your approach to CCPA compliance.

Good luck!

We can help! Our Archiver solution can solve for both GDPR and CCPA “right to delete” and “right to access” requirements for marketing and operational messages. Contact us for more information.

Posted by Aaron Smith in Archiver, CCPA, Compliance, GDPR