Police Bank is an Australian mutual financial institution servicing the wider Police Community. Starting with only 60 members in 1964, the bank has grown to over 70,000 members, using their collective success to find new ways to support members and their families within the police and border force community.
 

As their member base continues to expand, Police Bank needed a central marketing solution that provides functionalities beyond basic email. Their previous platform lacked strong API integration capabilities to bring data across from their data warehouse. Thus, their analysis, segmentation, email sending and member contact management were all manual processes that involved exporting CRM data and analysing through Microsoft Excel.
 

Additionally, members of the Police Bank team were updating Excel sheets for every email sent — a process that took 1 to 2 hours of manual work. Police Bank needed an efficient marketing solution that can cut the time and effort it takes to gain and nurture leads and better serve their members.

With its robust capabilities, Adobe Marketo Engage was chosen by Police Bank to automate and consolidate their email marketing processes.
 

Upon adopting Adobe Marketo Engage, the Police Bank team set up a structured and consistent onboarding process. As a result, the customer onboarding process became more efficient. New customers consistently receive relevant content and other essential information within the first two months of joining the bank.
 

Police Bank also utilised Adobe Marketo Engage to capture data through Adobe Marketo Engage Forms and lead magnets like competitions, e-books and gated content. The data collected is then analysed and used to customise communications to members, who are getting more personalised, relevant and timely information.
 

“Our previous electronic direct marketing (EDM) system was very clunky and restrictive. Adobe Marketo Engage has allowed us to be more targeted and, therefore, in more regular contact with customers — which is something that was important to us,” says Police Bank Marketing Manager Sean Lo Cascio.
 

This approach helped the marketing team to better qualify leads and get a clearer picture of where contacts are in their customer journey before passing them on to the sales team.
 

They also reported being able to cross-sell products quickly and automate the process of flagging the point where customers might be ready to buy a product. By contrast, the sales team previously had to call people one by one to see if they were at the point of conversion.
 

“[With Adobe Marketo Engage], we were capturing more leads and customers than we did before. We have a full view of the customer journey and through lead scoring, we track activity to be able to pass the best information and leads to the sales team at the right time,” adds Sean.

Despite improving marketing efficiency, Adobe Marketo Engage’s out-of-the-box solution did not answer all of Police Bank’s unique needs initially. There were instances of multiple members using a single email address. This was a challenge because the email address is the standard identifier for contacts.
 

The Police Bank and Adobe Marketo Engage teams discussed and worked together to devise a solution. They eventually came up with using a customer number to identify each member.
 

“Adobe Marketo Engage’s flexibility allowed us to [find a solution tailored to our needs],” says Sean.

Adobe Marketo Engage was the first platform that was integrated with the bank’s enterprise data warehouse, which was accomplished through Boomi. Using Adobe Marketo Engage, the marketing team can collect updated data every 15 minutes, allowing them to conduct efficient and accurate analysis and segmentation.
 

The Police Bank team is further looking to integrate other tools, such as Qualtrics, into Adobe Marketo Engage to enhance their Voice of the Customer initiatives.
 

“It has centralised our digital activity and provided a tool for analysis,” says Sean. “As part of our digitisation journey, we’ve gone from systems not talking to each other to now really transforming the business to be more digital-centric. Our Technology team created a data warehouse where we could have APIs connecting to a range of different platforms and Adobe Marketo Engage was the first piece.”
 

According to Sean, switching from paper to email is a big driver at the moment as well as a cost-saver. Encouraging people to opt in to receive product information via digital means can now happen through Adobe Marketo Engage. The team also built a preference centre in Adobe Marketo Engage, allowing Marketo to be the main distribution channel for member communications.

As their wider business is now going through a digital transformation, the Police Bank team is constantly looking at ways to leverage Adobe Marketo Engage beyond the marketing team.
 

“We’re bringing in different departments to use Adobe Marketo Engage now. Initially it was just marketing and now, we’re bringing in the digital team, the products team and the retail banking (sales) team. We tell them, ‘This is the data we’re capturing. What would you like to do with it?’” says Sean.
 

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, one of the bank’s main concerns was how to ensure workers’ safety if they had to be in the office sending paper letters. Adobe Marketo Engage became Police Bank’s answer to that challenge.
 

“That was the realisation — we’ve got Adobe Marketo Engage here. Whereas before, no one really knew what Marketo did outside of marketing and sales, now they’ve realised that we’ve got this capacity to do a lot more,” notes Sean.

Since using Adobe Marketo Engage, Police Bank automated manual tasks, implemented better lead scoring, created more targeted campaigns and relayed relevant data to involved teams at the right time.
 

Manual processes that took 1 to 2 hours to accomplish can now be done under 5 minutes. Due to better lead qualification and faster lead response time, the bank recorded a 150% increase in conversion rates across comparable campaigns. Over this time, the overall conversion rate also improved by 70%.

“Adobe Marketo Engage has provided an enormous amount of efficiency to our marketing initiatives whilst delivering some great insights into our members’ behaviour. It has provided us the security to reach the right members and provided tools to qualify and score leads,” says Sean.

“It enabled us to remove many manual processes for our marketing and frontline staff, allowing them to develop their skills in other more meaningful areas and focus on more strategic thinking.”

In addition to all the improvements that Police Bank has implemented using Adobe Marketo Engage, Sean shares that Police Bank plans to continue leveraging Adobe Marketo Engage in the following areas:

• Improve internal processes, particularly in shifting from paper to digital
  
  
• Continue to improve lead scoring, measurements and metrics
  
  
• Build up content base and set up strong nurture streams
  
  
• Get more data points around the customer journey
  
  
• Attribute revenue back to marketing campaigns and events

 “The main point for us is we can become data-centric more than anything else and Adobe Marketo Engage will play a massive role in that because it’s giving us a lot of transparency. The possibilities are endless around where we can go and it’s more around data being the main source and using Adobe Marketo Engage to leverage that,” concludes Sean.