Transforming Community with Marketing Cloud
In 1956, seven employees from Brigham Young University established the Utah Community Credit Union (UCCU) with just $35 — and a big dream. Today, the not-for-profit and member-owned credit union serves over 230,000 individuals.
On its way to achieving that membership goal, UCCU implemented a number of software solutions; in particular, marketing automation platforms as part of an attempt to improve its marketing communications management.
There was a problem, however: These tools still left UCCU with limited marketing capabilities. “They lacked the ability to send real-time messaging to the members,” says Gaurav Pawar, CEO of JourneyBlazers. “They had a dependency on other teams and platforms to receive data via FTP file drops. They didn’t have the ability to perform segmentation, or to send targeted messages. They also lacked the ability to accurately report and quantify marketing’s impact on the business.”
The JourneyBlazers team began working with UCCU in October of 2022. And, they were certain that the community-based credit union would significantly benefit from an upgrade to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE).
“Through a value-based sales cycle and multiple demos,” Gaurav says, “we were able to convince the IT and marketing teams to make the change.”
Richard Hirst, Assistant VP of Marketing at UCCU, is proud of his organization’s ability to transition from a legacy system to an omnichannel marketing platform.
“As much as JourneyBlazers helped us stand up the product, they actually helped us figure out how to be better marketers, and how to view this technology in a whole new way that we hadn’t considered,” Hirst says. While gradually enabling MCE features, JourneyBlazers was also training UCCU staff on those capabilities. As a result, adoption of the new platform remains high. “We began with enabling marketing channels and integrating data sources,” Pawar explains, “and then we started implementing platform and data governance, building preference centers, and building marketing journeys.”
Gaurav explains that his team took a methodical and practical approach to ramping up UCCU’s ability to harness MCE.
“We started with the foundational SFMC build and with a few basic campaigns,” he says. “We implemented Email and SMS to enable omni-channel marketing. We implemented Salesforce Distributed Marketing to allow Bankers to be able to send emails directly to their clients.”
It wasn’t long before UCCU noticed an uptick in email deliverability, open rates, click rates, and overall engagement. At the same time, unsubscribe rates were noticeably down. “At the foundational level, their operations improved because they were able to send targeted real-time messages to their members, customers and leads across multiple channels,” says Gaurav.
“They went from operating as a communications team,” he says, “to a marketing team.”
The credit union’s transformative strategy is one still underway; JourneyBlazers believes that this is just the beginning of the digital transformation for UCCU. For Gaurav and his JourneyBlazers team, it’s especially rewarding to assist in boosting the signal of such a vital community resource.
“UCCU’s vision statement is to be the most loved, most trusted, and most utilized credit union in the nation,” says Gaurav. “And we are helping its stakeholders better market that mission.”
To learn more about how JourneyBlazers can help you with your Salesforce needs, contact us here.
The JourneyBlazers team will also be attending Salesforce Connections in Chicago.
