1Targeting 2. 4Analysis. Introducing Marketing Automation. Best Practices for Financial Services and Insurance Organizations.

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1 Introducing Marketing Automation Best Practices for Financial Services and Insurance Organizations 5 Marketing Technology 1Targeting 2 Engagement 4Analysis 3 Conversion 1

2 Marketing Automation = Marketing Transformation And transformation is a great thing. Introducing marketing automation into your organization means initiating change. Sometimes that change is small, nothing but a natural progression in an evolution that s already underway. Other times, though, it can mean a complete shift for your sales and marketing teams. That may be welcome, or it may not: team members could be looking for new solutions with proven results, or may be rooted in past processes, caught up in the way things have always been done. In either case, in order to create a smooth transition, that change needs to be ushered in with finesse, using well-proven methodology to create true transformation success. Financial services and insurance sector organizations have their own unique challenges as they face this change continuum, often with very structured roles and processes already in place, and security and compliance needs to consider. Moving to a fully automated marketing solution, while ensuring strict compliance and aligning the sales and marketing teams, can take patience and time often more time than in other sectors. To do it successfully, financial services and insurance organizations need to rely on lessons learned from other groups that have covered the same ground before them. Financial institutions and insurance organizations have diminishing resources to rely on, as teams are cut and budgets are tightened. Streamlining your existing processes by introducing automation will help you get the results you need without the added strain. 2

3 Want That Change To Happen Smoothly? Nine Steps Will Help That Happen. 1. Understand Your Needs and What Makes Your Organization Different Change begins by realizing where your marketing team stands currently: what needs to be modified and what has to stay the same. Every company is different, with unique goals that will change how they approach marketing automation and what they hope to achieve. You could be looking to recruit new broker-dealers, or generate new leads for the sales team. Or perhaps you re trying to convert interested inquiries into customers instead. Each requires a slightly different approach. Compliance and security also govern each channel or line of business differently, affecting overall needs. But that s not all that may be unique. What roles do marketing and sales each play? How closely are they aligned? How are you using your current customer relationship management (CRM) system and how will your marketing automation technology fit into that? How will that new solution affect the other solutions along the chain? Knowing everything you can about what you want out of your marketing technology, how it will fit into your current processes, and what you expect to achieve, will help ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible. 2. Approach Security and Compliance Requirements Head On In the financial services and insurance industries, security and compliance needs are overreaching and binding, and must be considered early and often during the marketing automation change process. While security was obviously a consideration during the technology purchase itself, it can also affect project timelines and your needs going forward. Secure landing pages or blind carbon copies of sent s may be required, or more time may need to be built into the process for security reviews. What s more, the legal team may have to consider the verbiage you publish or send. Each industry and organization has different rules and processes in place, and while they may seem to slow down the implementation process, nothing can move forward without a thorough understanding of these considerations. Knowing those needs and starting to build compliance and security into your marketing automation processes early is integral, and will be key to ensuring success later on. 3. Make Marketing More Self-Reliant and Efficient Each marketing department works differently, but in many insurance and financial services organizations, marketing often finds itself reliant on other resources and departments within the company to complete their day-to-day tasks. To initiate a marketing campaign, for example, they may need to ask a web designer to create a web page; accomplishing that will mean waiting in line for corporate resources, finding time in the designer s schedule, then undergoing back-and-forth interactions with a person who isn t fully familiar with marketing s protocol and needs. In other cases, marketing may need to consult with legal on compliance concerns at every turn. With marketing automation that same marketing team can create a landing page themselves, as well as dynamic content for that page. And they ll have everything they need to ensure compliance early on without regular added input from legal. Campaign templates with approved language can be developed and then distributed to sales teams. By bringing resources like these back under the marketing umbrella, the department not only becomes more self-reliant, but can also begin to work more efficiently. 3

4 4. Start Using Digital Body Language and Progressive Profiling Digital Body Language provides insight into a potential customer as they work their way through the buying process, measuring their habits as they learn about your products and services, and interacting with the digital information you ve provided by seeking, receiving, using, and responding to it. By understanding a potential customer s Digital Body Language, marketing departments can better see what they re looking for and where they are in the buying cycle. Marketing and sales can then anticipate needs and learn when, where, and how to best approach them with relevant content. With that information, Modern Marketers can begin to put in place tools such as progressive profiling, which allows them to dynamically showcase different fields on a form based on what s known about that contact. They better educate their contact, provide them with the information they need, and bring them closer to making a sales decision. At the same time, marketing is gathering further intelligence of its own, updating their CRM system, and improving their knowledge of a potential customer. This profile information will not only assist marketing, but also inform the sales and executive teams. By learning how to optimize Digital Body Language and progressive profiling, marketers can use marketing automation to its fullest, empowering the sales teams with the knowledge they need to build each relationship fully. 5. Integrate Sales and Marketing Data integration between the sales and marketing teams, though not always possible in every financial services or insurance sector organization, can lead to better efficiency for both departments. In some cases, marketing and sales have two separate and unique systems. Marketing frequently uses an inquiry database or spreadsheets. Sales will usually use a CRM or sales force automation (SFA) solution. Rather than sharing data, the two teams may simply send it back and forth, impeding or stalling the entire sales and marketing process. Integrating the two departments means that automation of marketing campaigns and efforts will run more smoothly. Not only that, but both teams will also be better able to undertake useful relationship scoring techniques. By sharing data and scoring the relationships that emerge through each potential customer s digital interactions, they will be able to integrate their efforts, knowing when to engage, who should engage, and what to say when they do. 6. Take a Look at Your Existing Processes Introducing marketing automation doesn t mean that everything your marketing team does has to change. But it does mean new efficiencies can make those processes run smoother. By taking a look at your existing processes, you can streamline them to add those new efficiencies through marketing automation. If webinars have always been a popular marketing tool, for example, there s no need to stop using them. But by organizing them through your marketing automation solution, what may have once taken a month to organize and a third-party team to prepare is suddenly almost effortless. Invitations can be sent out with the click of a button and respondents register automatically. You can then put the necessary follow-ups in place. Streamlining processes will also allow marketing to focus on what really matters: ensuring that the message that s being released is reaching the people that it s supposed to reach. 4

5 7. Introduce New Processes and Integrated Marketing Held back by compliance concerns, some marketing departments in the financial services and insurance industries have regressed to using very basic marketing strategies, as anything more complicated has seemed impossible in the past. Change can start to take place as those teams begin to use marketing automation and Digital Body Language to form a more sophisticated view of their potential customers and the type of information they need. That way they can build the marketing strategies required to better reach them across a variety of channels. And with compliance approvals and security built into their marketing automation solution, marketers can find the freedom and confidence to create integrated marketing strategies and engage their intended audience better, allowing them to thrive, with a more sophisticated marketing plan in place. 8. Know Who Gets What and Who Doesn t Oracle Marketing Cloud technology for financial services and insurance organizations including Oracle Marketing Cloud for Asset Management and Oracle Marketing Cloud for Insurance allows you to schedule specific s to specific customer streams, so that you never send the wrong message. While there may be entire databases of potential customers and existing business relationships that your marketing department will work with, not every one of them is the same. Each has different sales requests, product requirements, and privacy concerns. All of this will dictate who gets A, for example, and who gets B or who has special requirements and needs a separate C. Each correspondence will be dictated by those client needs. To build relationships and ensure trust, and sometimes to meet compliance requirements, those differences must be taken seriously at every turn. In the past, all of those exceptions had to be approached manually, but with marketing automation technology, master exclusion functionality makes for a different process. Setting rules and introducing filters ensures that the team can be confident that a specific correspondence isn t accidentally being sent to the wrong place. 9. Understand Everyone s Roles and Training Needs As you kick off your marketing automation efforts, determine each team member s role in the change process. A team of employees made up of three to seven people will create the core group tasked with getting the technology running and overseeing the change management cycle. Thorough education and training of key team members will also be necessary, ensuring that they become marketing automation experts who can oversee the process going forward. For example, Oracle offers dozens of classes that help clients learn about its technology and best practices, including four fundamental classes designed to help kick start your project. With so much functionality built into the Oracle Marketing Cloud technology, the classes help companies make the most of their marketing efforts and get their best possible results. 5

6 Marketing Transformation and Oracle Marketing Cloud Marketing cloud technologies are designed with the needs of Modern Marketers in mind. Built around Digital Body Language, Universal Customer Profiles, and audience profiling, they give marketers the knowledge they need to anticipate when, where, and how to approach their intended audience, streamlining their marketing efforts and making them more customer-centric, all while building in failsafe compliance measures and creating efficiencies that allow marketing to do more with less. Each industry has specific needs and that s especially true for the financial services and insurance sectors. That is why Oracle has custom-designed tools for these unique industries, with tailored software and best practice blueprints that help organizations create effective strategies and make the most of their websites, all for more integrated sales and marketing efforts. Featuring SSAE16 and ISO27001 certification, these tools which include Oracle Marketing Cloud for Asset Management and Oracle Marketing Cloud for Insurance are built on best practices developed through experience with over 100 different financial services firms and insurance sector organizations. These specialized tools help marketers optimize marketing processes, branding, and customer communications and allow them to communicate to complex distribution and sales channels, for improved agent, broker, and financial advisor recruitment as well as customer engagement. They can increase revenue growth and build up recruitment, all while measuring those efforts for visible results. The outcome is more successful marketing campaigns and proven improvements measurable by return on investment (ROI). Make Change Happen Change can be difficult, especially in a sector where organizations are often founded on structure and strict regulations. But evolving needs mean that many financial services and insurance organizations are embracing marketing automation and are committing to the changes it involves. Having the right marketing automation tool is always the first stage in ensuring that any change is the right change, but knowing the steps you need to take to see that change to completion can make the difference too. Combined with proven expertise in the form of best practices and training to ensure success, these steps will assist in keeping the process running smoothly, and help everything click into place as it should. More than that, they will help ensure a solid base upon which real results can be built. The reward will be well worth it, too. A more efficient and effective marketing team with strategies that work. A better chance for stronger relationship building. And well-documented results that truly contribute to your bottom line. Those are the first steps towards success. 6

7 TAKEAWAYS 1. Marketing automation means changing your marketing techniques to better suit today s digital buyers. These Modern Marketing techniques are designed to meet the needs of today s consumers. 2. Change doesn t have to be all-encompassing. Keep your processes that work in place, but streamline them to make the most of the resources you have on hand. 3. Know what you need to accomplish, and the restrictions including regulatory compliance requirements you have to consider. Plan your change around those unique needs. 4. Whenever possible, sales and marketing need to work together. Combining resources and data reduces redundancies and makes the automation of marketing run more smoothly. 7

8 About Oracle Marketing Cloud Modern Marketers choose Oracle Marketing Cloud to build customer obsessed cultures, create and manage ideal customers, and power revenue performance. They transform marketing by truly knowing the customer, engaging with cross-channel marketing, and achieving data driven accountability. Integrated information from cross-channel, content, and social marketing with data management and activation along with hundreds of app and data partners enables them to target, engage, convert, analyze, and use award-winning marketing technology and expertise to deliver personalized customer experiences at every interaction. Visit oracle.com/marketingcloud Copyright 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 8