Driving Sales for a Major Insurance and Financial Services Brand
Bringing together marketing data from Google and Salesforce gave a holistic view of customers and built excitement across the organization.
Challenge
A major insurer wanted to better understand its customers’ journeys, personalize interactions across channels and media, and empower its elite sales team with better leads. Accomplishing this meant integrating all of the company’s marketing data in one place – combining data from multiple Google and Salesforce marketing platforms in a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) data management and analytics environment. With complex marketing programs and multiple technologies to create customer experiences across touchpoints, the team needed help to realize their vision. They turned to Merkle to make it happen.
Approach
Inegrating Data to build the journey:
- The first order of business was to ingest behavioral data from a host of channels, including programmatic media, paid social, email, website, mobile app, and webinars. From the Google Marketing Platform (GMP), data was ingested from Google Analytics, AdWords, Display & Video 360, Firebase, and more. From Salesforce, data was integrated from Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio, Salesforce DMP for programmatic media, Salesforce CRM for opportunities and sales, and more.
- Using a variety of services within GCP, all of this behavioral data was stitched together to understand behaviors and enable measuring channel performance.
Optimizing experience delivery:
- Merkle implemented a configurable scoring engine to calculate engagement scores for customers through both a line-of-business and campaign lens across all their interactions with the company. These scores were used to determine how to create experiences within communication channels, such as email. In addition, the engine allowed the organization to govern how and when leads would be provided to the company’s different sales teams. This approach ensured that specialized sales teams, which often had limited capacity and resources, were optimizing the time spent to convert leads.
Maximizing the value of technology partnerships
Results
A complete view of customers behaviors, resulted ino empowering sales teams with high-value leads
Major efficiencies gained, enabling analytics by moving from manual processes to an automated system built on a single home
A new solid foundation to optimize marketing performance.
Excitement among the entire organization, resulting from access to data in a timely manner, enabling them to make great decisions that impact the business.
Keys to success
- Faster access to data: Merkle implemented the capability to configure the frequency of retrieval of marketing platform data via APIs, such email disposition data, from Salesforce Marketing Cloud on an hourly basis.
- Segmentation: Segments could be created based on all this marketing data and pushed into the company’s activation platforms, such as the DMP, to drive smarter targeting within media.
- Program insights: With Merkle’s help, the company was able to create many reports and dashboards that help derive insights around campaign performance, mobile app adoption, and customer journeys, by visualizing data stored in Big Query within Tableau.
