Massage Envy Manages Business Information and Streamlines Workflows with Yext

Massage Envy, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, is a national franchisor, and through its franchised locations, is the leading provider of therapeutic massage and skincare services, and the proprietary assisted stretching service, Total Body Stretch. The Massage Envy franchise system is, collectively, the largest employer of massage therapists and estheticians, with more than 35,000 dedicated wellness professionals who provide best-in-class service to over 1.65 million members. Founded in 2002, Massage Envy has more than 1,170 franchised locations across the United States that have together delivered more than 135 million massages and facials.

When Jeanna Corley came to Massage Envy as Vice President of Consumer Marketing, the spa chain was already working with Yext, but the digital marketing strategy was siloed by region. "Each region managed their own information for their locations," says Corley. "The website was hosted externally. It was a very manual process, every location page was updated one by one. We were already working to bring the website in house. I knew at that point there was no way we would be able to manage it the same way it had been built originally."

"At the same time, we had another challenge. It was very difficult to get information about any other locations and provide answers to customer questions about our brand. Business facts like operating hours and services provided existed in different systems and weren't always consistent or correct on third-party listings. So there was no real reliable source to know what services our franchisees were offering."

A third challenge was review response. At the time, the majority of Massage Envy's customer reviews on sites like Yelp, Google My Business, and others were going unanswered. Reviews were increasing in volume and visibility, and "their importance is just skyrocketing," explains Corley. "We wanted to leverage that peak and we hadn't been able to do it."

"Our customer journey begins with television ads and word-of-mouth, which is key for awareness for us," she says. "Then we see customers signal intent in the digital realm, where reviews play a big role. We monitor clicks, and we definitely see our customers engage heavily off our website, directly on listings like Google, as they gather information and learn about us. We are increasingly targeted in our marketing to an audience mix, based on our own insights, which has lead us to some really effective strategies to drive customers through that digital channel."

Having worked with Yext before, Corley says it was an easy decision to expand Massage Envy's existing work with Yext to centralise its brand information and digital marketing efforts. Yext allows Corley to centrally manage the digital brand of Massage Envy, while empowering franchisees to flag location specifics for updates and corrections.

"We wanted to centralise review management, social media management, as well as a lot of other paid services," she says. "Yext is a single platform I can leverage to do what was previously done by hand across all our regions. Now, all of our consumer-facing information can be managed on a single platform, which we use to manage the website and mobile apps, and to update individual franchise hours of operation, contact information and services everywhere that information appears."

Yext doesn't just help Massage Envy manage its third-party listings – it serves as a central source of truth and helps drive internal efficiencies. "Two people are able to manage review response and social engagement across almost 1,200 locations because of the tools we have in place now across the network. Yext is a key element of our marketing stack. We leverage Yext to manage information on the back end, as well. We use custom fields in the platform that drive functionality in our mobile apps and our online booking application. We use Yext to feed information into other systems across the network. It's become our internal source about our locations, and the operations team will come to us for answers about business hours and service offerings. We're using it right now to launch a chatbot in Facebook Messenger, where we're going to be supporting our business information from Yext directly into the chatbot with an API."

Since launch, Massage Envy has driven over 36 million clicks to its listings while experiencing a year-over-year growth rate of 32%. This includes 33% year-over-year growth in direction clicks, 53% year-over-year growth in website clicks, and 23% year-over-year growth in phone call clicks. With local pages, Massage Envy has driven over 10.2M clicks, growing at 21% year-over-year and captured from over 110K different queries.

Yext has become much more than a marketing tool for Corley and the Massage Envy team. "Our operations team dives into it to understand what's going on," she explains. "Our franchise development team is starting to use it to track locations that are for sale."

The analytics available in Massage Envy's Yext dashboard also provide essential, actionable insights to central operations and franchisees. Corley says, "Yext helps our franchisees understand how their location shows up in online listings, what kind of traffic is coming to their local website, and more importantly, the quality of traffic their sites are getting via Google and other platforms." To better support franchisees in interpreting their data, Corley helped Massage Envy launch with Yext's White Glove service, "to help with our education strategy for franchisees, and help walk them through and understand the data — how they compare with their competition, and so forth."

Sentiment Analysis, which helps businesses extract insights from their customer reviews, is also a valuable tool for Massage Envy. "Our creative agency loves that piece. They dive into that for insights on what customers are saying. We can help a franchisee understand why they might be struggling in an area of their business, to be able to look there and say, 'Well, here's what your customers are saying and here's how the pieces fit together.'"