How Financial Services Companies using Salesforce Marketing Cloud can take Marketing Automation from “Good” to “Great”

This article was updated on December 8, 2025 with an up-to-date FAQ section.

Today I am excited to speak with SalesWings partner Paul Gordon, Co-Founder and CEO of Bubblebox, a Canada based Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner that is serving 200+ clients such as Rockland Trust, GoEasy or College Avenue Student Loans proudly around all things Salesforce, marketing automation with 100+ Salesforce Marketing Cloud installations.

Paul Gordon: According to this article, consumers are now in charge, and the typical financial services experience, regardless of the sub-verticals, must reflect to the consumer’s expectations and privacy concerns. It must also adapt to the evolution of technology.

Given the heightened attention to privacy due new CASL and GDPR legislation and the number of high profile data breaches, financial service companies have to try even harder to ensure trust is obtained and retained. Increased security processes must be at the heart of any customer experience. The Marketer’s appetite to acquire and retain customers should have trust at the core of it’s messaging.

Financial services companies have to try even harder to ensure trust. #finserv Paul Gordon Click to tweet

Marketer’s in the financial services sector have no shortage of data to draw from today. Whether this be website behavioural activity from tools like SalesWings for Marketing Cloud, customer transactional data or rich geo-demographic data, we have the potential to know a lot about an individual. Often data is pulled from multiple sources and is spread out across platforms, making it challenging to tie data to a specific customer or prospect. Great care should be taken in the use of this data in ensuring that marketing with this knowledge is performed responsibly. It is no longer simply about “right time, right message, to the right customer”, it must ensure content delivered through the chosen channel is fit for purpose.

Paul Gordon: Here at Bubblebox we observe how customers lead today’s businesses and choose how to communicate with financial services; whether it’s through email marketing, website updates, or social media, which requires marketers to adapt to a cross-channel marketing strategy.

Customers choose how to interact with their financial institution, and Marketer’s should listen. Having worked with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (“SFMC”) for over seven years, I believe it is its flexibility to mould itself to the customer’s journey with the financial services company that makes it so unique. Marketing is it’s first use case, however it’s journey development capabilities across all channels ensures it can respond to financial services customers in a more personalized and helpful way.

Trust is a core value of Salesforce, and that’s a relief to financial services marketers. There’s a high level of security that eases the minds of Marketers, regardless of the industry they are in. For example, if you have contact data that is too sensitive to store in your Marketing Cloud instance, Tokenized Sending is a feature that may be of value. You can take information from your own data systems and transmit it to the Marketing Cloud only at send time via an API call.

Instead of storing sensitive information in your Marketing Cloud account database, your account stores a single token per send attribute. This token resembles a standard email address or phone number but does not include any information about the contact.

Marketing Cloud has the ability to process enormous amounts of data such as transactional data, first-party data and second-party data, to manage and optimize the customer lifecycle. Utilizing data is the first step to building trust and creating an experience your customers will remember.

Yes, Marketing Cloud has the horse-power to deal with the sheer volume of data available today, but it also offers features and deep integration with Salesforce that can leverage this data well beyond the marketers role. Wealth Advisor onboarding journeys have helped reduce time to market, and households are able to be treated both as individuals and collectively – depending on the age of the household members and the relationship to other household members. Marketers are only limited by their own imagination.

Lastly, it has a great eco-system of solution advisors like Bubblebox, or software partners such as yours at SalesWings with your lead scoring and customer journey tracking add-on for Marketing Cloud.

Marketing Cloud offers a great eco-system of partners for financial services companies @marketingcloud Paul Gordon Click to tweet

(interview continues below)

Paul Gordon: As technology evolves and becomes part of our day-to-day life, adopting a digital marketing strategy is inevitable. When it comes to implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud for financial services, it’s truly a matter of harnessing the platform’s features effectively. Having a strategic phased approach delivers tangible ‘quick-wins’. “Don’t bite off more than you can chew”.

SFMC allows marketers to create and manage marketing relationships and campaigns with their customers, delivering the capability to optimize their strategy in a pragmatic and measurable way. However, without proper implementation and project management, your efforts will go to waste. When my team at Bubblebox first connects with a customer considering to implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the primary objective we have as a Salesforce Consulting Partner is to ensure we align with the Business Outcome that drove the decision to invest in the first place. The most common mistakes we’ve seen are not building out a solid foundation that allows for smooth Marketing Cloud strategy implementation, disorganized or missing data, and lack of project management and ownership of the platform.

One of the most common failures of a project is often a misalignment of expectations with the executive team who sought to purchase the ‘best of breed’ technology, and the experience within the team to deliver on that. A successful implementation is often where the Business Outcome is delivered on through close realignment throughout the activation and onboarding process.

Paul Gordon: Before diving into building and executing a journey, you must set a clear objective for the journey you want the recipient to experience. Be specific in defining the profile for your persona, and define clear goals. List out specific touchpoints you predict or know your customers and prospects are taking and implement them into your journey.

Keep in mind that there’s no perfect path. Start small, make adjustments where you see fit and expand as you progress. The more complex the journeys become the more challenging is to define the successes and failures of your journey. The most successful journeys we have experienced are often through the development and testing of smaller journeys first.

Paul Gordon: Having insight into the actions your customers are performing helps you better understand the relationship of the current customer journey to the desired outcome.

A great exercise I would recommend any marketer to do is to list out all the actions your current customers and prospects are performing. Analyze the path they’re taking and whether it meets your objectives and expectations. Is it taking them longer than expected to reach the end goal? Are they taking fewer steps and leaving your site?

Marketing Cloud indeed offers B2B functionality with tools like SalesWings for #leadscoring Paul Gordon Click to tweet

Depending on the path and actions your customer and prospect are taking, assign them a lead score and create a customized journey. SalesWings is a good solution to provide flexible lead scoring capabilities for Marketing Cloud. For example, a prospect that visits your career page should have a lower lead score than someone visiting your services page. Based on what page your customer or prospect visits, you can target them with specific content.

Also keep in mind the stage of your current prospects and customers when creating content. The ultimate goal is to convert your prospects to customers, however, if their actions show they are an unengaged buyer, make sure to tailor the content to their needs. There’s nothing worse than being bombarded with unpersonalized and sales driven content when you’re not ready to invest.

Paul Gordon: There’s nothing more frustrating for sales teams than receiving unqualified leads. Pursuing leads that will inevitably go nowhere is a waste of resources and money, and will negatively impact your marketing strategy and business growth. That’s not news to any B2B marketer. But Salesforce Marketing Cloud is designed for B2B, B2C and B2B2C scenarios.

Scoring your leads (and customers) tells you how engaged they are in your brand, and furthermore allows Marketers to tailor messaging to deliver value. For the B2B marketer, this helps to provide more engaged and ‘sales-ready’ leads to the sales team. For the B2C marketer, this enables messaging to deliver value at every stage of the customer’s journey lifecycle with your company.

Lead scoring for Salesforce for the B2B marketer takes into account not only the behaviour of prospects, but the demographics (e.g. job title, industry, company size, gender, age, etc.). The B2C marketer can gain a picture of the kind of products and services that are of interest and use various channels, such as website content, advertising on social platforms, and of course dynamically generated content within emails, to personalize the journey.

What is exciting about using website behavioural data is that it’s happening in real-time. The actions a visitor takes, both known and unknown, can be acted on in near real-time. For the ‘everything now’ generation, this is a vital tool for financial services marketers.

Paul Gordon: It is definitely a good idea to get a Marketing Cloud overview form a partner. When it comes to choosing Marketing Cloud studios, one should refer to their Marketing strategy and goals. With choosing any type of technology, it’s best to focus on a selected few and maximize their features vs using them all inconsistently. The studios I would recommend for financial services companies are Mobile Studio, Ad Studio, and Audience Studio (formally Salesforce DMP/Krux).

Mobile Studio allows for personalized mobile interactions including SMS, push notifications, and chat messaging. Utilizing the mobile capabilities is a great tool for appointment reminders, rate changes, and triggered events.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio is best for 1-to-1 advertising to acquire and re-engage customers. This feature allows you to build brand awareness, and gain more customers that match your ideal customer while excluding those outside your target audience.

@MarketingCloud advertising studio is great to get maximum ROI on advertising budgets by excluding people outside of a target audience Paul Gordon Click to tweet

Audience Studio (DMP) allows you to build better audience profiles, get insight on your target audiences, and expand your reach by finding new and related prospects. Having access to relevant data gives you the advantage and ability to market anonymously to those who have shown interest towards other like-minded companies.

Paul Gordon: When I’m not working on Bubblebox, you can find me embracing the outdoors and staying active. It’s the reason we moved to the west coast over a decade ago. During the winter months, you’ll find me hitting the slopes and enjoying a day of skiing, and on a sunny day, regardless of the season really, playing tennis. I also coach my daughter’s soccer and softball team. When you live in beautiful British Columbia, you make it a priority to get out and enjoy nature.

Paul Gordon, Bubblebox Co-Founder and Managing Partner, has an exceptional ability to identify digital marketing roadmaps to success for customers. He has experience in a range of platforms, technologies and industries. Coupled with his in-depth understanding of Salesforce’s Cross-Cloud capabilities, this allows him to deliver exceptional results for customers.

With more than 15 years of experience working with digital marketing platforms, his expertise in marketing technology environments provides customers with a strategic and technical advantage over their competitors. Add to this his outstanding sales and marketing knowledge – and you get an unparalleled service offering.

Paul knows the challenges that today’s organizations face. They must respond to changing markets, unique demographics and increased consumer expectations. As Bubblebox grows, Paul is committed to helping Bubblebox customers to initiate effective email, digital and online marketing campaigns and to generate strong results, strategically nurturing tomorrow’s achievements.