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Forging the Right Path for Customers in Salesforce Journey Builder

By 04.05.23
Reading time: 3 minutes

When Gartner asked their clients about the most critical priority facing marketing leaders, the overwhelming answer was customer journey orchestration. Gartner defines the customer journey as “a tool that helps marketers understand the series of connected experiences that customers desire and need — whether that be completing a desired task or traversing the end-to-end journey from prospect to customer to loyal advocate.”

But even though customer journeys are a marketing priority, many financial industry marketers don’t know how to best use journeys for their marketing initiatives. Journey Builder, part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, provides a solution that helps marketers deliver cross-channel personalized experiences at every step of the customer lifecycle with campaign management. 

Here we look at Journey Builder’s organizational and technical best practices for leading customers where they need to go to solve their specific problems, showing financial organizations where to start and how to focus on measurable value. 

What is Salesforce Journey Builder?

Journey Builder allows financial organizations to create seamless customer experiences across every touchpoint, including email, mobile, advertising, web, direct mail, sales, commerce, and service. It helps banks, lenders, and insurance companies win new customers and engage current ones with relevant, connected customer journeys.

With Journey Builder, you can:

  • Listen for customer clues: Identify the moments that define the customer journey and use them to power 1-to-1 relationships. With Journey Builder, you can understand your customers with data from any source based on attributes, browsing behaviors, and purchase history to build personalized messaging.
  • Connect the entire experience: Align your message across every financial services marketing channel. Use one voice to communicate seamlessly on email, SMS, push notifications, ads, web landing pages, and apps. Unite marketing, commerce, sales, and service in the overall customer journey to increase engagement and satisfaction.
  • Adapt with each customer: Act on your customer’s changing wants and needs in the moment. Set and maintain automated journey logic for customer engagement, decisions, random journey splits, and content tests. Leverage reporting to take action on performance and changing trends.
  • Discover distributed marketing: Equip your extended teams to efficiently market and sell while staying on brand. Create branded journeys for teams such as bank franchisees across email, mobile, and advertising in Marketing Cloud. Create on-brand, personalized content with native tools in Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Community Cloud. 

What are some tips for financial services organizations using Journey Builder?

By using Journey Builder, financial institutions will benefit from increased sales, decreased communications waste, and happier customers. Even though there are considerable benefits to be had, it is best to start small. Create a couple of steps at a time and build upon them after seeing what kind of value they are delivering. Then you’ll know whether it is worth investing the time and money into orchestrating that customer journey. 

If you’re unsure of which customer journey to start with, listen to your customers. Use survey or feedback portals created in Marketing Cloud or Google ratings to help search for customer issues. Then you can design a customer journey tailored to specific problems, such as trouble logging in to a bank’s website.

You want to ensure the journey is a value exchange between your organization and your customer. Value can be monetary, such as offering a complimentary breakfast while discussing a loan application, or it can provide convenience to the customer. For example, recommending a loan app to a customer in exchange for sharing information about the type of loan they seek.   

What are some common issues that financial organizations face with orchestrating customer journeys?

Even though CMOs are prioritizing customer journey orchestration, it takes time to start and grow your journeys and make an impact. Here are some tips to accelerate customer journeys with Journey Builder: 

  • Know your goal and what you are measuring: Don’t overcomplicate the situation by making your goal too wide, and follow the advice of ‘if you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t do it.’ Ensure accountability with Journey Builder’s Goal function – it only lets you pick one goal!
  • Avoid the HIPPO method: The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HIPPO) often points out a problem that doesn’t exist. Focus on the data to guide you in your customer journeys.
  • Don’t set it and forget it: Although journeys are automated, they still require a lot of support to make sure they’re functioning correctly. If you can’t get more support resources, build within your structure to ensure the journeys you choose are efficient. 

Begin your journey with Silverline

Silverline tailors digital transformation solutions to meet your current and future needs. Our team leverages insight acquired through 10+ years in the business, thousands of engagements, and real-world expertise gained across the Financial Services industry. From strategy and implementation to managed services, we enable success with the Salesforce platform so you can achieve continuous value in orchestrating your customer journeys. Find out how we can help your organization begin its journey with Salesforce.

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