Global Financial brand drives growth, scalability, and OPEX savings with enterprise marketing automation and AI

New Revenue Ops.

New marketing team structured for revenue ops., automation, 'alwayson' campaign execution.

300% ROI Growth

Advanced marketing automation drives CRM sales pipeline acceleration, improved AOV & 24/7 digital sales reps.

20% Revenue Growth

Enhanced customer account segmentation, multi-channel personalization and ABM (account based marketing).

“Partnering with these guys was a no-brainer for improving our marketing performance. They simplified the complexities of Digital and marketing automation and bridged the gaps between our Sales, CRM and Marketing teams. We now have adoption of our tools and capabilities, deeper account engagement, and results that have my exceeded expectations. I feel confident for what the future now holds – Brian M. 

Marketing automation in financial services isn’t easy. It requires navigating complex rules like compliance and KYC (know your customer), keeping customer data secure, and meeting the unique needs of customers across different regions. A global money transfer company faced big challenges: poor collaboration between sales and marketing (especially for lead quality), siloed account data, weak campaign results, and a lack of personalized marketing for customer accounts.

RiseUp Digital stepped in with a step-by-step solution. First, we assessed leading marketing automation tools to find the perfect fit for the company’s needs and enterprise-level investment; Oracle Eloqua, Adobe Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Klaviyo, HubSpot, and Creatio.

Next, we created a full marketing automation strategy and 3-year execution roadmap. This roadmap aligned strategic goals from multiple teams—Sales, CRM, Marketing, Customer Service, Data & Analytics, and leadership—and spanned several regions. 

Finally, we supported the roadmap execution phase, which implemented the marketing automation technology for multiple regions and suers, streamlined marketing operations, enabled deep customer personalization for account-based marketing (ABM), and enabled precision “always-on” campaigns and touchpoints that orchestrated an omnichannel experience across email, digital ads, CRM accounts, social media, and sales team dashboards. AI solutions were also enabled to accelerate content and media creation, surface actionable insights and automated processes, all which lowered manual labour time and costs. 

The result? This approach drove real improvements in ROI and OPEX, customer engagement and account retention, and revenue growth, proving the power of the right strategy, tools, and execution.

Key Takeaways

  • Client: Private
  • Location: Vancouver (head office, EMEA and APAC offices
  • Industry: Finance (B2B & Consumer money transfer and FX)
  • Key Results: TBD
  • Challenge: No marketing automation, poor segmentation and lead quality, KYC data compliance concerns. 
  • Solution: Customer-centric marketing automation strategy, goal-driven use-case prioritization, MarTech (marketing automation) evaluation and implementation, vendor negotiation, team training, campaign design and build, and roadmap adoption, measurement KPI dashboards and best practices.

Problem / Challenge

Financial institutions, particularly those in the global money transfer space, operate in a high-stakes environment where scaling marketing efforts requires navigating a maze of compliance regulations, ensuring secure data management, and delivering seamless customer experiences. For this clien, achieving these goals was even more difficult due to internal inefficiencies and disjointed systems and tools that limited their ability to execute and measure impactful marketing campaigns.

The company also faced significant operational and strategic gaps between sales and marketing. These challenges not only slowed down their ability to execute campaigns but also reduced their competitiveness in a fast-moving, customer-centric market.

1. Disjointed Sales and Marketing Alignment

  • Sales teams lacked confidence in the quality of leads provided by marketing, leading to inefficiencies and missed revenue opportunities.
  • Marketing’s role was limited to a perceived cost-center and order-taker, with little influence or measurable ways to show their impact and attribution to sales performance.
  • There was no system or framework in place to provide actionable insights that could empower sales and marketing teams or improve collaboration between the two functions.

2. Lack of a Revenue-Ops Framework

  • The company’s marketing operations team was not structured for a revenue-ops framework, which could have unified marketing and sales efforts, streamlined processes, and provided accountability for revenue-generating activities. Without this framework, marketing’s potential as a hybrid cost and revenue center remained unrealized, further siloing their efforts and an internal reputation as an order-taker versus strategic influence on revenue and CX.

3. Fragmented and Poor-Quality Customer Data

  • Customer information was siloed and scattered across multiple systems (ex. CRM, Finance, MarTechs, spreadsheets, etc., making it nearly impossible to get a unified customer view to enable deep and dynamic segmentation.
  • The poor quality of data limited the company’s ability to confidently deliver personalized marketing messages and campaigns.

4. Inefficient and Labor-Intensive Campaign Execution

  • Developing, executing, and measuring campaigns required excessive time and manual effort, leading to inefficiencies that slowed time-to-market.
  • A lack of tools to automate manual processes and workflows and manage multi-channel campaign execution resulted in significant operational challenges and overhead.

5. Limited Personalization and Poor Customer Engagement

  • Generic, one-size-fits-all campaigns failed to resonate with diverse customer segments across regions.
  • Without tools for customer segmentation and personalization, marketing efforts lacked relevance and meaningful context, leading to low engagement and lost opportunities to nurture or upsell.

6. Absence of Holistic Orchestration Across Marketing Channels

  • Communications with customers were disjointed and fragmented across email, social media, and advertising, resulting in a disjointed customer experience. This included CRM and keeping sales representatives informed on account activity and communications sent to their account contacts.
  • No unified system to orchestrate and manage campaigns seamlessly across these multiple channels.

7. Regulatory and Compliance Complexities

  • Marketing teams faced delays and operational risks due to limited resources, stakeholders decision making and difficulty navigating compliance requirements.
  • The lack of tools and processes to simplify campaign management aligned to compliance requirements slowed down campaign execution.

The clients marketing team and efforts were hindered by many of the typical problems marketing ops. teams face across multiple stakeholders and regional offices, including different tools and systems, fragmented and dirty data, manual processes, poor collaboration and governance between sales and marketing, and the absence of critical capabilities, tools and frameworks needed for the team to follow and deliver impactful, revenue-driving ‘always-on’ account-based marketing programs and campaigns. These challenges not only limited the clients speed to market, marketing output quality and overall operational efficiency, but also their ability to scale, enhance CX with personalization, orchestrate personalized experiences across multiple channels and above all else, attribute sales funnel revenue wins.

The Solution

RiseUp Digital developed and implemented a comprehensive, tailored solution to overcome the clients many challenges, creating tighter collaboration between Sales, Marketing and CRM teams while equipping all teams with the tools, training and roadmaps needed to achieve their objectives, including measurable, revenue-driven performance.

In this case study, Oracle Eloqua was selected as the marketing automation tool of choice. Why?

While each marketing automation tool evaluated (ex. Oracle Eloqua, Adobe Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Klaviyo, HubSpot, and Creatio), had their strengths and limitations, the over-arching goal was to identify the ‘right fit’ for the client. The ‘right fit’ was determined by an evaluation across engaging multiple stakeholders and teams and evaluate the MarTech tools against criteria as ease of use, feature set, scalability, business use-cases, data and analytics, integration flexibility and capabilities with other solutions (ex. data lake, CRM, ecommerce and transactional data sources), ease of Implementation, reporting and analytics, customer support, training and education, and total cost of ownership. Oracle Eloqua emerged as the top selection based on the latter evaluation criteria to ensure “right fit” for the clients business and people. 

Within just three months of implementing the marketing automation strategy and following its roadmap, all underpinned by Eloqua and the team, the client began to see transformative results. After warming up the Eloqua accounts and IPs and launching three high-priority campaigns, the organization unlocked the full potential of their marketing automation capabilities, delivering impactful early wins.

Beyond campaign success, the strategy addressed long-standing challenges by eliminated redundant activities and improving fragmented internal processes. This operational overhaul positioned the Marketing department to shift into a hybrid cost-and-revenue center, laying a foundation for sustainable growth and scalability.

Key Solutions Provided

  1. Strategy Development
    • Team Collaboration: Cross-functional regional teams came together through initial stakeholder interview sessions, capturing their input, goals, needs, problems and frustrations and their vision of a future state. As a result, over 140 user-stories were documented, organized, aligned to key themes, goals and objectives, and rated with an equal weighting against the set evaluation criteria. The purpose was three-fold.
      1. Collaboration & Adoption: Bring multiple teams and stakeholders together to spark the collaboration and buy-in as their adoption would be crucial to the strategy success. 
      2. Quick Wins & Use-Cases: Capture real world goals, challenges and priorities to craft prioritized use-cases that would accomplish both quick wins early-on, and rise-the-tide of larger impact goals. This also enabled an efficient ‘lift and shift’ of use-case solutions from one region to the next versus building the same use-case 3 X over. 
      3. Alignment: The teams feedback not only supported the evaluation of identifying the right marketing automation tool for the business, but it also shaped the strategic multi year roadmap for the marketing automation team.
    • Roadmap: Designed a 3-year global marketing automation roadmap aligned with regional compliance requirements, customer preferences, and organizational strategic goals.
    • Measurement: Defined clear KPIs to measure success in campaign efficiency, customer engagement, lead quality, and revenue growth.
    • Revenue Ops. Framework: Introduced a revenue-ops framework across people, capabilities, process and goals , maturing the marketing operations team to support the entire customer lifecycle, including brand awareness, acquisition, retention, and churned account re-activation.
    • Sales Funnel Ownership: Made accountable marketing’s ownership of upper and mid-funnel performance, enabling their role in influencing the full customer lifecycle and driving growth in share-of-wallet.

  2. Technology Implementation
    • Platform Setup: The implementation process covered several key phases, including planning, technical configuration as regional instances, IP’s, campaign assets and related marketing configurations and databases and performance tracking
    • API integration: Bi-directional data flows were setup between multiple web forms and the CRM (SalesForce). As the client operates over 50 websites localized to regional needs, the CMS used smart web form templates making the integration with Eloqua and rollout run quickly. This included both singular web forms, and multi-step web forms for progressive profiling.
    • Training & Education: Three individuals on the clients marketing team enrolled in the “Oracle Eloqua Implementation Bootcamp.” This course equips participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively implement and manage Oracle Eloqua and provided them certifications, which supported their career portfolio.
    • AI-Powered and Automation: Setup an AI solution to accelerate content creation, best time of day to send a contact a message, analyze customer data for segmentation and suggest the target audience, and automate repetitive processes like progressive profiling, lead scoring and email personalization. This significantly reduced manual effort, improved campaign accuracy, and delivered scalable results.
    • Data Centralization: Centralized customer data from SalesForce (CRM) with Oracle Eloqua, creating a single source of truth for lead management and customer engagement.
    • Marketing Programs & Campaign Setup: Develop email templates and use-case campaign workflows using Eloqua’s intuitive, drag-and-drop interface that allows users to build data flows, triggered events, automated processes as data record de-duping and email throttling, and overall email management workflows in real-time. 
    • Lead Scoring: Developed a lead scoring model integrated with the CRM that enabled real-time lead prioritization and automated workflows for nurturing leads that were not ‘warm’ enough to send to a Sales rep., or did not reach the sales funnel stages for MQL or SQL. This ensured sales teams received hot actionable leads and insights to focus on the most engaged accounts and contacts.
    • Multi-Channel Setup: Using add-on apps, we configured and integrated digital customer channels beyond the inbox. This addressed a digital advertising strategy, real-time sales rep account notifications, and mobile marketing (SMS and push notifications) to deliver personalized, multi-channel customer experiences. All channels were seamlessly connected for consistent messaging and centralized data insights.
    • Campaign Execution: After thorough QA’s and testing, the first personalized, sales-based customer account campaign was setup to run real-time, targeting one of the priority use-cases for sales funnel lead nurturing and scoring.
    • Improved KYC (Know Your Customer):  Key processes by enriching CRM accounts with both marketing activity and behavioral data, such as interactions with email, ads, and website content.

  3. Campaign Execution
    • Always-on Campaigns: The team designed and developed multi-touchpoint always-on marketing campaigns, such as automated lead nurturing and qualification workflows, that operated 24/7 like a digital sales representative. 
    • Lead Scoring: New lead scoring enabled higher-quality prospect requirements, MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads), providing warmer leads and actionable insights to Sales team.
    • Automated & Personalized: Customer account messaging at the contact-level was both personalized and automated, spanning communication execution across multiple channels, including email, website, SMS, digital ads, CRM dashboards, and social media.
    • Event Triggers: Built custom event triggers to executive personal 1:1 precision, such as when a contact interacted with a banking tool (ex. foreign exchange calculator) on the company’s website or high-value touch points within their online customer platform.
    • Multi-Channel Execution: Multi-channel campaigns were enabled for a holistic orchestration of messaging touchpoints with customers across their customer journey.

  4. Data Quality and Measurement Reporting
    • Data Quality: Improved data quality with both cleansing and enrichment from 3rd party data sources as ZoomInfo, ensuring more accurate and confident personalization across campaigns while enabling greater ‘Customer 360’ for the account. 
    • Sales Prioritization: Enhanced real-time customer behavioral and interaction insights for Sales teams, helping them identify opportunities and engage leads effectively in-the-moment. For example, if an existing client interacted with the online foreign exchange calculator for $X, this event was captured and a signal to the account executive to action with an email or phone call.
    • Dashboards: New dashboards linked to the CRM account enabled Sales teams to quickly see which campaigns and messaging their contacts received, how they interacted, and other new insights.
Oracle Eloqua marketing automation canvas for marketing automation and email campaign development

Results & Outcomes

The results of this marketing automation initiative demonstrate the transformative power of aligning strategy, technology, and execution. By addressing long-standing inefficiencies and bridging the gap between Sales and Marketing, the client achieved measurable improvements in revenue, operational efficiency, and customer engagement. From personalized multi-channel campaigns to streamlined workflows and improved data quality, the outcomes showcase how a unified approach can deliver both immediate wins and long-term scalability. Below are the key results and outcomes that highlight the impact of this solution.

  1. 300% ROI Growth through Always-On Campaigns
    • Automated workflows enabled 24/7 sales lead engagement, driving over a 300% return on investment, and growing. The new processes accelerated CRM pipeline speed and improved average deal size (AOV), allowing the company to scale marketing efforts without additional resources. It was also a first-ever shift in Marketing’s accountability for revenue results from shared-goals with Sales stakeholders.

  2. 20% Revenue Growth with Precision Personalization
    • Advanced account segmentation and personalized messaging, driven by ABM strategies, resulted in a 20% revenue lift. Multi-channel campaigns delivered tailored content to high-value accounts, increasing engagement rates and reducing customer churn.

  3. Unified Sales and Marketing Teams thru a RevOps Framework
    • Implementing a Revenue-Operations framework transformed Marketing into a hybrid cost-and-revenue center, fostering seamless collaboration with Sales and shared goals on sales targets. Real-time CRM dashboards and actionable insights from campaigns empowered Sales to focus on high-priority opportunities, boosting conversion rates and reducing the sales cycle.

  4. Multi-Channel Marketing Success
    • Multi-channel campaigns saw a significant lift in audience reach, 40% increase in click-through rates (CTR) and a 25% boost in lead-to-MQL conversion rates.
    • Campaign execution times improved by 35% due to automation, while integrated channels like email, SMS, and digital ads created cohesive customer journeys.
  5. Sales Signals
    • Sales account executives received new real-time notifications when key accounts triggered a high-value ‘sales event’, predetermined by sales. For example, if an account used the online foreign exchange calculator to convert over $100,000. The account rep. would be notified to determine what next step they would like to take with their account.
  6. Enhanced Data Quality and Compliance
    • Improved control over customer data (1st and 3rd party data), and a centralized data source provided a unified customer view, enabling accurate and deep segmentation and personalization.
    • Improved data governance ensured compliance with KYC and regional data privacy regulations, reducing operational and financial risk (ex. compliance fines) and improving overall customer experience (CX) with more relevant, timely messages.

  7. Team & Operational Improvements
    • Reduced Labour Costs: Reduced significant labour costs and manual effort by improving campaign workflows, automating campaign development, execution, and measurement.
    • Accelerated Time-to-Value: Accelerated time-to-market for campaign launches and contact-level messaging, enabling faster responses (semi real-time) to customer needs and market changes.
    • Improved Compliance: Compliance management was improved by reducing delays and operational risks associated with navigating regulatory requirements.
    • Collaboration & Alignment: Renewed collaboration never witnessed before in the organization between Sales and Marketing  by aligning shared goals, improving lead quality, providing shared insights for both teams, and overall helping Sales save time, improve their performance and foster stronger relationships on their accounts at scale.

Conclusion

This case study highlights the transformative impact of the right plan and roadmap, tools and capabilities, execution support and bridging legacy gaps between teams and department across the organization. This showcases an enterprise-level solution and results for a client that serves over 150 countries, and multiple teams structured across North America, EMEA and APAC.

Implementing a comprehensive marketing automation framework, the client overcame fragmented processes, improved collaboration between Sales and Marketing, and delivered measurable results, including a 300% ROI and 20% revenue growth and new relationships and ways-of-working between Sales, Marketing and CRM teams.

With enhanced customer personalization, targeting the individual across channels with the right message and the right time, and operational efficiencies, the client is now well-positioned for incremental growth and scalability for what lies ahead. 

If your business is facing similar challenges or looking to unlock its full potential with marketing automation—whether you’re a small business or a global enterprise—reach out to the RiseUp Digital team. Let’s start the conversation and explore how we can help you achieve your goals.

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