Navigating CRM Gaps in Broker Capability with Marketing Cloud and Pardot

Overview

At Epic Brokers, we’re dedicated to providing top-notch insurance brokerage services to our clients nationwide. One crucial aspect of our business strategy involves optimizing our email marketing efforts to enhance customer engagement and streamline internal processes. In this blog post, we’ll take you through our journey of managing nationwide marketing strategy and the steps we took to overcome challenges and achieve greater efficiency.

A Year in Comms

I never expected my 6-month contract at EPIC Brokers to extend to a whole year from the onset. Initially, I was brought on board to help offset some knowledge gaps between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot. My role would quickly expand to include management of all QA processes, email deployments, and journey builds, in addition to ad hoc projects that pop up over the course of a working week. 

EPIC was a highly established Salesforce partner who had recently expanded their Pardot platform to include Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The initial need was just to help with the transition, however my expertise would become paramount over the course of that particular year in omnichannel marketing. Aside from email deployments, email design from creative draft, and testing, I’d also taken up SME responsibilities like helping to troubleshoot data extensions, request/set up Sender Profiles, and produce Salesforce reports on outgoing email communications. 

Managed Solutions

During my tenure with EPIC, there were some standout initiatives and campaigns that helped encompass the experience. 

Vendor Management
As Email Marketing Manager of a Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot implementation, I relied on an off-shore vendor for the most complicated tasks. I met weekly with our vendor partner to prioritize and discuss opportunities, challenges, and advanced personalization. 

Sender Profiles Management
Helped to implement new protocol for requesting Sender Profiles. Streamlined the process for Sender Profile creation and verification in an industry with multiple necessary Sender Profiles. 

Campaign Capabilities in SFMC
Transitioning from Pardot to SFMC was seamless, thanks to valuable resources and guidance available. There were some knowledge gaps to walkthrough though, one example is communicating how Marketing Cloud handles campaigns differently than almost every other marketing platform – brokers weren’t too happy about that in the tracking department. 

Litmus Tracker Implementation
Adopting Litmus Tracker provided detailed insights into email deliveries and engagement, improving tracking accuracy, but most importantly it allowed us to test across various screen resolutions. I also particularly liked the fact that I could add additional tagging to Litmus emails for advanced tracking capabilities. 

Distributed Marketing Equivalent
Leveraging SFMC’s Distributed Marketing feature ensured continuity in our email marketing efforts. Adoption wasn’t easy though. We had almost a dozen capabilities calls and meetings to ensure that SFMC and Pardot would be in alignment with what brokers could do in each platform. Ultimately, we settled on SFMC’s Distributed Marketing as it was as close to Send Engage as we could get. Brokers needed multiple calls, walkthroughs, and separate Teams messages to learn to leverage it, but once they got it we were all good. 

The Great Transition

Over the span of a year, I played a pivotal role in guiding EPIC Brokers through a significant transformation in their email marketing strategy. This involved transitioning from utilizing Pardot’s Send Engage feature to leveraging Marketing Cloud’s Distributed Marketing platform. This transition was crucial for facilitating personalized, one-to-one communication with their clients through email campaigns.

Send Engage to Distributed Marketing

In the insurance industry, empowering brokers and salespeople with the tools they need for success is paramount. Previously, our sales team had gained proficiency in utilizing Pardot Engagements, leveraging Pardot reporting within Salesforce, and harnessing Pardot’s capability to enable email customization through Salesforce Send Engage. I created and tested templates during the transition between platforms as well as set up several knowledge training sessions with territory sales managers to discuss the transition. This included discovering Sales’ pain points with the current workflow and ensuring they knew how to access everything moving forward into the new Marketing Cloud based workflow. 

I also re-coded Pardot’s email templates within Marketing Cloud, set up all AMPscript dependent fields, associated Journeys, and managed the implementation for brokers. 

Knowledge Gaps 

As a subject matter expert, I’d often receive requests for Permissions changes, access edits, etc. that I would run through my own internal process of deciding who should have access to what. Managing permissions aside, I enjoyed serving as a resource for brokers and stakeholders as we worked out the kinks within the new Marketing Cloud implementation. I’d help ensure data was available via Data Studio, manage all machine-learning initiatives in Einstein, and run reports on email metrics daily to makes sure our reputation stayed spotless across email service providers. I enjoyed my people-facing responsibilities the most though, like creating easy to follow PDFs, quarterly reports, or walkthrough videos for new processes. 

Creating Processes with Wrike

Over the course of working with EPIC, I got the opportunity to utilize Wrike as a project management tool. I must say, the Wrike team is spot-on with their platform and its got all the right bells and whistles for managing omnichannel communications projects. In my career, I’ve worked with all of the big project management tools: Asana, Workfront, the Microsoft suite, Monday, and Jira, just to name a few. Of all the options, I’d consider Wrike at the forefront due to its minimal latency in real-time collaboration and edits. I’m a stickler for being able to see real-time to determine what’s going on in a document, project, timeline, etc. Wrike does that just right! In addition, the interface is just really smooth and extremely customizable. All that being said, I helped the EPIC utilization team to standardize Wrike as our platform of choice for all interactions related to channel deployments. 

Using Wrike didn’t come first-nature to a lot of people. In the cross-functional nature of marketing ops, all apps don’t lend themselves equally to adoption. I’d often serve as communications channel traffic cop by re-routing all requests to Wrike, requesting edits in Wrike, generally helping to cement Wrike as our platform for all comms. While outside of my purview, it helps the business when we actually use and leverage apps that are being paid for to the point that there are adoption audits for each app at some companies. All marketing requests would come through Wrike with a Word based creative doc. All tests would be deployed, shared to Wrike for approval within Wrike. I was instrumental in revising EPIC’s testing plan across several renditions and process flows within Wrike until we found a process that felt right. 

Conclusion

EPIC’s proactive approach to Producer email capability, thoughtful onboarding, and omnichannel communications personalization demonstrate a commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences. These digital initiatives will no-less continue to drive business growth with targeted digital marketing efforts. 

In my career, I’ve worked other contracts for insurance companies, but none were as enriching as those during my time at EPIC. While not an agency, EPIC’s workload and month-to-month expectations kept me on my feet as they were full of surprises! I’ve helped onboard and push leads through webinar journeys as well as help support brokers as we all sought to find normalcy post-pandemic. 

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Average Deliverability
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YOY Business Growth
0 M
Emails Sent

Some data lived on Salesforce for running reports, building dashboards, or cross referencing data.

Some email builds were built directly in SFMC while others were pushed via API. Social Studio component too.

Used mainly for ad hoc email sends and relegated to a small subset of fan communications.

Adobe Experience Platforms powers everything we do from content hosting to reporting and campaign execution.

Modal creation for SMS and in-app messaging. Creating, building, and activating modals for mobile comms.

The majority of my workload is spent in Adobe Journey Optimizer building out fan journeys and filtering through data.

Adobe Experience Platforms powers everything we do from content hosting to reporting and campaign execution.

Modal creation for SMS and in-app messaging. Creating, building, and activating modals for mobile comms.

The majority of my workload is spent in Adobe Journey Optimizer building out fan journeys and filtering through data.

Optimizing CRM Lifecycle Marketing for Higher Education Clients

Background

Kaplan, a leading provider of educational services, sought to enhance its CRM lifecycle marketing strategies to effectively engage with collegiate students across various stages of their academic journey. This included prospects exploring educational opportunities, current students seeking support, graduates considering further education, and alumni looking for continued engagement.

Challenge

Kaplan faced the challenge of managing and maintaining a comprehensive CRM database encompassing the diverse needs of collegiate students. They required a solution that could streamline communications, personalize outreach efforts, and provide actionable insights to drive engagement and retention.

 

Solution

During their tenure at Kaplan, our marketing team led the charge in transforming the CRM lifecycle marketing approach for higher education clients. We implemented the following strategies to address the challenges:

Database Management
We meticulously managed and maintained a CRM lifecycle marketing database covering all collegiate students, from prospects to graduates and re-enrollments into graduate programs. This involved executing seasonal updates to ensure data accuracy and relevance.

Email Campaign Execution
Leveraging platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot (Salesforce Account Engagement), we oversaw all manual deployments of email campaigns. Our goal was to ensure seamless execution and delivery of personalized communications tailored to the specific needs of students, prospective students, and alumni.

Email Journey Optimization
We shifted our focus towards managing ongoing email journeys tailored to the unique requirements of higher education clients. This included crafting personalized recruitment emails, making HTML/CSS/AMPscript edits, and ensuring the accuracy of messaging to drive engagement and enrollment.

Reporting and Analytics
 We conducted comprehensive quarterly reporting for stakeholders, presenting key metrics such as unique click rate and unique open rate in easily digestible narratives for upper management. This provided valuable insights into campaign performance and guided strategic decision-making.

Onboarding and Engagement Initiatives
We spearheaded the onboarding of a significant number of subscribers into top-of-funnel engagements within a new Pardot instance. This involved database optimization, Winback campaigns, and Welcome Journey implementations to foster engagement and retention.

Results

Through our efforts, Kaplan achieved remarkable results in optimizing CRM lifecycle marketing for higher education clients:

  • Enhanced engagement and retention rates among collegiate students.
  • Improved accuracy and relevance of communications through personalized email journeys.
  • Actionable insights derived from comprehensive reporting and analytics, driving strategic decision-making.
  • Successful onboarding of a large number of subscribers into top-of-funnel engagements, fostering long-term relationships with higher education clients.

Conclusion

By leveraging innovative CRM lifecycle marketing strategies, Kaplan was able to effectively engage with collegiate students at every stage of their academic journey. The successful execution of personalized email campaigns, coupled with robust reporting and analytics, enabled Kaplan to drive engagement, retention, and enrollment among higher education clients.

 
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Students Reached
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University Clients

Used for managing all journeys, data extensions, ad hoc email sends, and reporting.

All top-of-funnel activities. Dynamic lists, automation rules, and notification tasks within Engagements.

Email deployments for prospective student journeys. Lead management for government campaigns.

Connected app to Pardot installation. Route all webinar subscribers to webinar campaigns.

Task and project management application for catching all assigned creative briefs.

Each team's go-to for document creation. All briefs created and shared through the Google business suite.