The first part of our deep dive into Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s financial services value focused on personalization. Now let’s take a few steps back and take a look at data. 

For financial services marketers to achieve deeper personalized engagement and drive long-term value, they need data to optimize their messaging. But this customer data constantly changes and comes in from multiple channels and systems. 

According to the Salesforce Marketing Intelligence report, 43% of marketers spend a week or more every month preparing data. The reasoning behind this time suck could be that marketers are using an average of 21 marketing and advertising platforms. By using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, financial services organizations can bring these platforms together to unify data and create a single customer profile. 

Creating a unified data platform with CDP and Genie

Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) gives marketers the tools they need to deliver real-time customer engagements. Whether you’re looking to unlock cross-organization business insights or enhance marketing optimization, CDP can leverage different analytics systems to help you make smarter use of your data and evolve with your customers with a single source of truth for every individual. CDP can drive value across these four areas:

• Unification and harmonization: You can pull data from your first-party sources with out-of-the-box connectors or external third-party sources using Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, MuleSoft/Ingestion API, or Web/Mobile SDKs, and stitch together different IDs so your CDP knows they refer to the same customer
• Insights and analytics: Understand your customers’ buying propensity, likelihood to churn, or customer satisfaction to help drive successful strategies 
• Segmentation and activation: Create relevant customer segments that include explicit data from your data warehouse, service department, marketing, or commerce departments and combine it with implicit behaviors such as website visits, app, or email
• Organizational efficiency: Build a learning organization by allowing key people to access relevant unified data and create a single place to share audiences across teams 

Salesforce Genie is the new kid on the Salesforce block, and the evolution of CDP. Salesforce Genie brings the power of automation, analytics, AI, data, and integration to the entire Customer 360 to create a single view of the customer across any cloud. 

Salesforce Genie can store all your customer data, such as CRM, web, and product engagement data, and unify it into a single customer profile. Profile updates and calculated insight adjustments based on this data can be made in real time, such as updates to customer lifetime value based on a particular interaction.

Maximizing customer data with Marketing Cloud Intelligence 

Without bringing data together in a meaningful way, financial services organizations lack a unified view to inform decisions around marketing investment, performance, and results. They don’t have visibility into which programs to keep or cut in budget reductions, which campaign messages resonate, or how to optimize the ROI of every dollar spent.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence (MCI), formerly Datorama, is an analytics platform that allows you to connect and unify all your marketing data, media investments, and KPIs to simplify performance analysis and make better decisions. Its AI-powered insights make it easy to unify all your marketing data across channels and campaigns and share performance insights instantly in collaborative dashboards.

MCI makes your data accessible, interactive, and impactful through real-time data visualization, insight, and activation. You can improve your brand’s performance, business impact, and customer experience while improving the health of your data and collecting insights for the long term.

With MCI, you will benefit from: 

• Creating a marketing reporting system of record: Access over 100 prebuilt connections to marketing and media vendors to easily create a single source of truth
• Optimizing performance with AI insight: Surface insights that may be buried deep in your data sets and get actionable alerts for performance adjustments that improve ROI
• Aligning teams and stakeholders: Create a visual experience with aligned metrics, goals, and taxonomy to collaborate as one team
• Being agile and innovative: Leverage data and insight – not guesswork – to test, learn, and innovate across all your marketing

With MCI’s ability to connect and unify all of your marketing data, you are able to align your teams on one system of record, inspiring confidence in the accuracy of your data across all stakeholders. MCI helps solve for analytics use cases like tracking key campaign performance metrics, optimizing media spend, and aligning teams on business goals. With the MCI platform, marketers can easily build and share dashboards that help identify the strengths and weaknesses in the experiences they deliver.

Once you have these data insights, you can better understand your customer and where they are consuming your messaging. MCI allows you to identify inefficiencies in ad spending so marketing can double down in the areas performing well while eliminating waste. You’ll gain back time spent on data prep and be able to reinvest that time in higher-value activities. 

Make your data work for you with Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps marketers optimize their business impact, gain efficiencies, and create exceptional customer experiences. Silverline can help you customize the full breadth of the platform to meet the specific needs of your organization. Our team’s industry expertise enables them to craft solutions that respond to the evolving financial services landscape, and we can maximize the value of your Salesforce platform and reinforce your relationships with customers. Find out how we can help your organization.