Streamlining Global Marketing Functions by Migrating to a Single, Fully Integrated, Low-Code Platform Solution

Overview

Sky Solutions supports digital transformation for a global nonprofit organization that serves investment professionals around the world. The company has customers, members and employees in several countries and relies on timely and relevant communication to those groups to ensure sustained revenue, market relevance and mission achievement. Marketing functions and capabilities are critical to this company’s global communication efforts.

Goal

Existing marketing tools across the organization were fragmented, ungoverned and siloed within different groups. While the organization had committed to Salesforce as a primary platform and CRM, and while a few satellite offices in various countries had already started using Salesforce Marketing Cloud in a limited capacity, Marketo had been independently chosen previously by the US-based marketing team as the primary marketing tool to run campaigns and communicate with various member groups and customers. This created an environment with no single source of data, no unified global marketing function, no IT oversight, limited marketing capabilities and no ability to address global marketing demands and the unique and rapidly evolving challenges that exist across various countries and regions. Additionally, relying primarily on Marketo limited the ability of the company to fully leverage the broad platform and low-code benefits of Salesforce, which the company had committed to and invested in to support other critical functions.

As many companies experienced when the pandemic hit, this organization soon realized a significant drop in revenue and membership which forced a reevaluation of their business model, offerings and pricing structure. Being able to quickly communicate these changes to their global customers and member base soon became critical, but they realized that Marketo alone was incapable of addressing these marketing needs.

Challenge

This organization sought to consolidate all global marketing functions into one, low-code platform that would centralize all customer and member data, provide the capability to quickly and easily turn around new campaigns and update functionality without any hard-coding, and be able to easily integrate with various communication tools unique to certain countries. They hoped to fully integrate with the existing Salesforce CRM and seamlessly take advantage of benefits such as comprehensive marketing automation, multi-channel marketing, enhanced personalization, enhanced analytics and reporting, and both scalability and flexibility.

In turn, this would enable the organization to effectively communicate its refined offerings and pricing structure globally, leverage relevant customer data and automation, and maximize reach and impact to target customer and member groups to ensure both revenue and membership growth.

Solutions

Sky Solutions migrated all marketing functions from Marketo to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and trained all marketing stakeholders on how to optimally execute on the platform. This in turn enabled the client to utilize the platform migration as an opportunity to unpack and restack strategically, to reengineer existing processes and create new opportunities for process optimization, to optimize architecture and integrations, to build a solid Salesforce Marketing Cloud foundation for marketing and IT teams, and to take the platform forward with minimal reliance on the Sky team.

Sky Solutions additionally built a robust preference center that syncs global subscriber preferences across Salesforce CRM, Marketing Cloud and the client’s Data Lake, and created multiple marketing cloud journeys and automation to drive and accelerate marketing goals for subscriber nurture, awareness and conversion goals. This solution was further extended to omnichannel by adding WhatsApp as a communications channel for global audiences.

Technologies/Methodologies

  • Low code
  • Agile
  • DPA
  • Omnichannel Communications

Outcome

The client was able to achieve the following outcomes:
  • A centralized and streamlined marketing technology operations function.
  • A significant reduction in data, process, and effort duplication.
  • Faster turnaround for marketing campaign development and execution.
  • Establishment of a robust preference center to manage global subscribers in one central location.
  • Automated processes to expedite marketing initiatives and campaign measurement, minimize human error and increase speed-to-market.
  • A foundation and marketing function now capable of supporting the client’s global revenue and membership goals in the next fiscal year and beyond.