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Journey-Based Communication for Banking, Investing, Loans, and Finance

INTRODUCTION Top national digital financial services company transforms communication with HubSpot.

Instrumental Group was introduced to Ally Financial through a creative agency partner looking to enhance their partnership through HubSpot expertise. This was a 12-month engagement, built with multiple phases that ultimately helped Ally provide journey-based email marketing for their commercial lending.

Ally's creative agency partner had a plan for database segmentation and the type of journey they wanted to create but needed help implementing the automation infrastructure and custom-coded email modules for personalization. 

Beyond the activities that supported journey-based email marketing, Instrumental Group also supported configuring HubSpot Ad tools, lead scoring, and reporting dashboards to measure the impact of their efforts leveraging HubSpot effectively. 

PROJECT OVERVIEW
Goal: Onboard HubSpot & Create Journey-Based Automation
Onboarding, Data Migration, Native Integration, Asset Recreation, Content Creation
HubSpot License: Marketing Enterprise
Timeline: 12 Months

CHALLENGE Lending journeys across multiple brands, borrowers, and stages.

Building and maintaining lending journeys that are effectively personalized across multiple brands with a large database often leads to significant use of resources or sacrificing personalization or design. The ability to cross-promote lending offers or trigger the right communication at just the right time can't be done with a click or two of a button. With HubSpot being the answer in growing commercial lending for Ally, the next step was engaging the technical expertise of Instrumental Group to create a lending journey that scaled without sacrificing resources or quality. 

SOLUTION Segmented data and journey-based automation.

With a phased approach, Instrumental began deep discovery on the strategies for an automated lending journey and the data structure to support it. This discovery formed the requirements and detailed plans for launching automation campaigns - growing with maturity and sophistication at each phase. Here's a high-level look at what we set out to accomplish:

Architecture Planning

Ally had multiple business units /brands and creating a personalized lending journey meant accounting for an expansive data set and integrations into other systems. This is how we planned effectively with their team.

  • Database Segmentation: We meticulously organized a series of critical data to segment that tailored to the nuances of financial services. 
  • Field Mapping & Configuration: Building off the segmentation necessary, we identified and mapped all critical data points from their database to new fields inside HubSpot. After mapping all the data, we configured HubSpot to accurately meet the mapping requirements.
  • Data Import: Leveraging HubSpot's native import tool, we imported the basic data necessary to serve initial campaigns, knowing expanding in the future would require a more efficient long-term solution. 
  • Sakari Native Integration: We investigated how Sakari served their business today to ensure that communication and automation through the native integration could be configured to meet needs. 

Journey and Content Development 

In this phase, we worked closely with Ally's creative agency partner to develop content and a tailored, automated journey. For this engagement, we worked together to develop:

  • Workflow Automation: We created multiple emails and SMS touchpoints for each journey delivered through workflows tailored to specific financial products, each designed to guide customers through their journey. This incorporated branching logic and dynamic email content. 
  • Content Development: While the workflow automation was the engine to run a journey-based strategy, Ally Financial's creative agency partner created the messaging and design of emails; meanwhile, our team brought the aesthetic vision to life by coding programmable emails and ensuring the content meets digital and HubSpot best practices.
  • Performance Reporting: We wanted to ensure that we were not only capturing the performance of every touchpoint in the journey but also able to attribute what was working and what needed improvement. This involved a monthly analysis to ensure campaigns were effective in driving business impact and carrying out the vision of customer-centric communications. 

NEXT STEPS Expand and optimize.

Within the engagement, Ally began expanding journey-based automation to account for additional scenarios, products, and brands. The opportunity to create more is abundant. As data and best practices evolve, though, optimizing the engine already running is also on the horizon. 
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