AC HQ

Defining the future of multi location business management

Following a recent acquisition, ActiveCampaign wanted to develop its market offering for multi location businesses. Franchise brick and mortar is a popular example. Things like Jiffy Lubes, Home Depots, etc. How might we build the best tools for franchise organizations to manage their marketing across all their locations?

Follow along below as I briefly describe my involvement, strategies, and methodologies in this new business opportunity.

We had no clue where to start.

I was brought into this project post acquisition. We had bought a company that essentially had one feature: the ability to piggyback off of our API and send the same email campaign via multiple accounts. A good start for a corporate entity trying to manage marketing for multiple businesses. The rest was a massive, daunting, open question.

As has happened many times in my career, the ask was simple: “help us shape the vision”.

My recommendation

After interviewing several key stakeholders and some of the few existing customers, I recommended the following:

  • Deliver value immediately with a small Reporting MVP

  • Reskin the platform to better align with our organization’s visual language and aid development speed

  • Prototype and validate our next core feature

Expand to our core features

Beyond the Reporting MVP, I wanted to enable sophisticated marketing for these new customers. Doing so would require the the ability to publish automations, which would neatly fit into the updated UI.

Explore the future

Let’s get people excited! Nothing fires up a group of executives like a long term, sparkly concept. I try to always include a “what if” style concept, even if it’s just a single page, to help stakeholders wrap their minds around the depth that we could deliver down the line.

In this mockup you can see a deep focus on predictive analytics, AI features, and a general theme of guiding the customer across their entire tech stack, not just email marketing.

Want to see more?

This is a pretty abbreviated summary of the project. To really dive into the nitty gritty, let’s chat!