When a multi-location marketing platform fills its biggest gap, the results aren’t just incremental; they’re transformational.
Meet the partner
SOCi enables multi-location brands to dominate their digital marketing landscape across search, social, and reputation management. For over a decade, they’ve helped franchise organizations navigate the complex challenge of maintaining brand consistency while delivering locally relevant marketing at scale.
With their recent expansion into email marketing through ActiveCampaign HQ (ACHQ), SOCi now provides a complete digital marketing ecosystem for franchise operations.
James Morse, Vice President of Product Marketing at SOCi, leads their product marketing strategy and execution, driving the go-to-market success of the Genius Platform and its AI-powered Genius Agents.
The visibility crisis
For years, SOCi encountered the same question from prospects and clients: "What about email?" The challenge wasn't just adding another marketing channel—it was solving a fundamental visibility problem plaguing franchise organizations.
“Most franchise organizations don't have sight into what local businesses are doing for email," explains Morse. "From a headquarters perspective, they want to standardize."
The reality was stark: franchise locations were running an average of four email campaigns per year, “if you’re lucky,” with headquarters having zero visibility into local email performance. Meanwhile, the complexity of digital marketing had evolved far beyond what local franchisees could reasonably manage.
“25 years ago, franchisees didn't have to do marketing as we do today. They did print ads, and they knew who to call to get their ad into the newspaper. They own that relationship. Now it's more difficult, especially for small business owners."
Why SOCi chose to partner with ActiveCampaign
When SOCi evaluated their options for an email marketing tool, their choice was easy:
“The only email marketing partner we wanted was ActiveCampaign because everything made sense. When we see ActiveCampaign HQ, we see an opportunity for an ecosystem in a hyperlocal space.”
The partnership wasn’t just about filling a product gap, but about creating a comprehensive ecosystem. Morse notes that this strategic alignment addressed three critical needs:
- Complete digital ownership for franchise organizations
- Seamless integration with existing SOCi workflows
- And scalable automation that works across hundreds or thousands of locations
The AI-powered transformation
SOCi partnering with ActiveCampaign has driven remarkable quantitative results, but the qualitative transformation runs deeper. "When we started pushing this out, we enabled the franchise organization to go from four campaigns a year (if you're lucky) to one every couple of weeks."
The numbers tell the story: Going from four campaigns annually to 30+ campaigns a year led to a 650% increase in activating their email marketing strategy.
SOCi didn’t just see this incredible boost in time and efficiency; they began operating on the Imagine, Activate, Validate framework, where they spread their use of AI across all three pillars, creating a continuous loop that improves your campaign clarity and performance each time you deploy something new.
Imagine: Democratizing marketing strategy
ActiveCampaign’s AI Campaign Builder has revolutionized how franchisees approach email marketing.
“Asking a franchisee how to build an ad and then trying to think about that context switching in their day-to-day life is a tall order we're asking of them. Using AI Campaign Builder to use natural language, [and inputting] a quick ‘here's what I'm looking to achieve’, that’s where the opportunity is."
The AI bridge allows non-marketers to imagine sophisticated campaigns without needing deep marketing expertise.
Activate: Autonomous execution at scale
AI-Suggested Automations have transformed SOCi’s workflow complexity into accessible tools.
“When it comes to complex workflows, all the behind-the-scenes [work] makes it very difficult. You just wanna throw up your hands and give up. Having those AI-suggested recommendations on how to manage those starts to democratize that difficulty and make it so everyone's on the same playing field."
The democratization allows franchises to activate sophisticated marketing campaigns across their entire network without requiring specialized training at each location.
Validate: Intelligence-driven optimization
Active Intelligence provides the conversational data analysis that transforms raw metrics into actionable insights.
“We're all overwhelmed and inundated with dashboards, and how do we decipher the information that we need out of that? Having [Active Intelligence], you can ask the questions and get the data back in natural language. As marketers, you're forced to be data analysts; it's very difficult. Being able to input the question and get the answer back is super helpful."
This capability allows franchise organizations to validate their marketing effectiveness across diverse geographic markets with unprecedented clarity.
The agent ecosystem vision
Looking ahead, SOCi and ActiveCampaign are building something unprecedented: an integrated agent ecosystem where AI systems collaborate across platforms.
“We want to push data from our agent to your agent. If we see positive reviews at a specific location about a specific product, we want to funnel that into a specific email campaign,” Morse shares.
This vision represents the next evolution of franchise marketing—autonomous systems that learn, adapt, and execute across multiple channels while maintaining local relevance and brand consistency.
“With Active Intelligence and SOCi’s Genius Agents, we recognize that as we move into an agent-like AI space, this is how you become sticky with brands. We're super excited to make these agents work really well together. We're both leaders in our respective spaces, so it just makes sense. I think as we look [at] this next forefront of AI, we're both leading this charge for our customers and our space.”
Scaling your multi-location success
When SOCi partnered with ActiveCampaign, they solved a problem that has been holding back franchise businesses for years. By connecting SOCi’s local marketing know-how with ActiveCampaign’s email tools, they turned email marketing from something franchises barely did into a major competitive advantage.
The outcome speaks for itself: franchise locations went from sending a handful of emails per year to running sophisticated, automated campaigns that actually drive results. More importantly, business owners can now see what’s working across all their locations and focus their time on growing their business instead of wrestling with marketing technology.
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