If you've ever managed email for more than one brand, franchise location, or independent rep, you already know the headache: everyone wants their own voice, their own list, their own send, but nobody has time to build 150 versions of the same newsletter.
That was Elizabeth Roberts' reality every single month. Here's how she fixed it.
Meet the marketer
Elizabeth is Director of Marketing and Communications at Brownell, the oldest travel agency in North America. The company's been around for almost 140 years. But Brownell isn't just one brand sending one newsletter. It supports a network of more than 150 independent luxury travel advisors, each running their own business, their own client relationships, and their own brand identity under the Brownell name.
So Elizabeth's team isn't writing one newsletter a month. They're writing content that has to work for 150+ different advisors and feel personal to each one's own clients, not like a corporate blast.
The problem: great content, terrible math
Twice a month, her team put together professionally written newsletters that advisors could personalize and send to their own lists. New advisors also got a custom-branded template so they could build their own campaigns from scratch if they wanted.
Sounds good on paper. Here's where it fell apart: actually sending that content meant manually copying the campaign into each advisor's account, updating branding, and swapping links, one account at a time.
Do that math yourself: 150 advisors, twice a month. That's not a workflow, that's a part-time job just moving emails around. Most of the team's energy went into logistics, not into the writing and strategy that actually moves the needle.
What changed
Brownell started using the Central Send feature inside Constant Contact's multi-account Teams solution. Instead of rebuilding the same email 150 times, they build it once and send it out through every connected advisor account.
That one change gave the team back roughly five hours per newsletter. About 10 hours a month. But honestly, the time savings isn't even the interesting part. What's interesting is where that time went: straight back into better storytelling, instead of fighting the mechanics of getting an email out the door.
The results members will actually care about
This is the part worth sitting with if you're managing a multi-account or franchise-style setup of your own:
Open rates climbed above industry average — and stayed there. That gave the team a real number to point to when advisors were on the fence about joining the program.
Direct revenue followed. Elizabeth's team has tracked at least three big-ticket bookings in the past year that came straight from these newsletters. In one case, an advisor got a reply to a white-labeled email and closed a $230,000 cruise booking within six minutes of it landing in the client's inbox. Six minutes.
More advisors opted in, because once a few people started seeing real bookings from email, it wasn't a hard sell anymore.
What's next for Brownell
With the manual work off their plate, Elizabeth's team is now layering in click-based segmentation and automation: welcome sequences, targeted drip campaigns, things that simply didn't exist in their program before. It's early, but the team's already treating it as one of their biggest opportunities.
Takeaways for the community
If you're running email across multiple locations, advisors, franchisees, or brand reps, a few things from Brownell's playbook are worth stealing:
Centralize the build, not the voice. One email, many sends, but each recipient still gets a branded, personalized version.
Time saved on logistics is a strategy budget. Brownell didn't just bank those 10 hours a month, they reinvested them into better content.
Metrics sell the program internally. Above-average open rates became the pitch that got more advisors to participate.
Fix distribution before you automate. Brownell solved the sending headache first, then layered in segmentation and drip campaigns, worth remembering if you're tempted to automate on top of a broken process.
Have a similar multi-account or multi-brand setup? Drop a comment below. We'd love to hear how you're handling personalization at scale.
Source: Brownell Turns Travel Experiences into Connections with Constant Contact, Constant Contact Blog.
