Technology, processes, and people.

BNY Mellon Investment Management, formed following the merger of Bank of New York and Mellon Financial, prides itself on being at the forefront of evolving financial services. This forward-thinking approach can be traced back to its launch in 1784 when one of America’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, recognized the need to have a bank that served the quickly growing port of New York City. The company believes that people are at the heart of its success — a belief shared by Andy Mullings, Head of Demand Operations at BNY Mellon Investment Management.

“I’ve always felt that technology, processes, and people are the foundational pieces that businesses need,” says Mullings. “But of those three pillars, ‘people’ is the most important. Technology needs people who know how to get the most out of it, and processes need people who are constantly trying to optimize them.”

As BNY Mellon Investment Management already counts the largest financial institutions in the world as its clients, the company is in a unique position where its sales and marketing teams largely focus on introducing its existing client base to the new products and services released every year.

“When working with a very focused target audience, we need to constantly innovate our marketing. Otherwise, we’ll see negative results as we’re repeatedly approaching similar audiences,” says Mullings. “With Adobe Marketo Engage and Adobe Workfront, BNY Mellon Investment Management teams combine technology with automated processes to create a solid foundation for improving lead management and returns.”

Delivering emails at scale

BNY Mellon Investment Management uses Marketo Engage to power all of its email campaigns. The demand operations team creates multiple templates for all types of communications, from transactional emails to nurture campaigns to special communications around webinars and events.

While many emails aim to help clients engage with products, the company also prides itself on delivering valuable thought leadership information to help promote change in the financial world, such as reports exploring sustainable investing or ways to close the gender investment gap.

By integrating its marketing automation and collaboration platforms, BNY Mellon Investment Management creates reliable and automated workflows to manage demand operations tasks, such as managing and tracking campaign requests. Project requests are now initiated in Workfront, which automatically creates tasks needed to complete the process. Once requestors have submitted all the information needed for an email — including type of email, subject line, text, CTA, and audience — the demand operations team is automatically alerted to begin constructing the email campaign.

Once the email is complete, the project automatically triggers the approval and review cycle — an essential step for any financial services company needing to comply with strict regulations. “Because all comments and changes are recorded in Workfront, we have a clear audit trail for each email,” says Mullings.

The efficiency gained with the integrated technology and standardized processes allow BNY Mellon Investment Management to bring all email creation in-house. While working with an agency, emails would take at least 16 hours from creating the brief to being ready to send. Now it takes just 10 hours.

“With six hours saved per email and hundreds of emails sent every year, we’re saving thousands of hours for campaign creation,” says Mullings. “On their own, both Workfront and Marketo Engage offer us tremendous efficiencies, but when integrated, you see the full power of what they can do for your campaign processes.”

Optimizing client experiences

With a solid technical foundation in place, the team now concentrates on improving lead management. Mullings pays especially close attention to data and encourages his team to suggest new ways of improving open rates, click rates, and visits to key product pages on the website.

“Analytics is the most enjoyable part of marketing in my opinion,” says Mullings. “I love analyzing data, discovering what customers are doing, and most importantly, figuring out how to apply what we learn from the data.”

Mullings and his team experimented with subject lines to improve open rates, even resending unopened emails with a different subject line to improve results. Emails now consistently hit the company’s benchmark open rate of 19%. The team also changed the CTA to improve click rates, finding that clients preferred following a single CTA that linked to a landing page over multiple CTAs that each linked directly to a product page or insightful article.

The Marketo Sales Insight (MSI) dashboard brings the sales team into alignment with marketing by sharing customer insights with sales representatives through Salesforce. Automated alerts notify sales representatives when a strong lead is identified. They can then look at the dashboard to see all interactions that a client has with BNY Mellon Investment Management — including email clicks, website engagement, and webinar or event participation — to help them understand the client and better ways to approach them.

Next, the company plans to build on the foundation with personalized journeys. A pilot personalization campaign sent emails inviting clients to click on a pillar of interest. They are then enrolled in different email campaigns based on their interest. This campaign improved clicks by 2%, website visits by 142%, and repeat visits by 314% compared to non-personalized journeys.

Optimizing client interactions

BNY Mellon Investment Management plans to continue building upon its technology foundation by integrating with even more systems. For instance, LinkedIn Matched Audiences helps the team deliver consistent messaging across both email and social media. Integrations with apps such as Adobe Analytics and Adobe Experience Manager will help demand operations continue optimizing processes.

“I want to make sure that every person on my team feels empowered to do their jobs without any roadblocks,” says Mullings. “Adobe solutions are not only powerful, but easy to use, helping my team focus on what matters most: creating meaningful customer experiences.”

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