Unlocking the Power of Marketing Cloud with Partnership
After investing in a technology platform like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, often times companies don’t know where to start to get the most out of their investment. Working with a trusted and strategic partner can help get the most out of the platform and realize a return on investment. Learn how Lev became a valuable addition to Southern California Edison’s team, and how they transformed their marketing initiatives.
Southern California Edison (SCE), a utilities company, had invested in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but were not using it to its fullest extent.
They were deploying transactional emails, mostly marketing communications, through the platform to inform their customers about rate plan options programs and rates available. Their internal Marketing Cloud team consisted of two to three people who were not completely dedicated to that role. Because everything was deployed manually, resources were limited.
After two years of this, due to evolving customer expectations, the marketing team made a goal to move from a manual operation to an automated one, and to use the unexplored areas and feature sets Marketing Cloud had to offer, as well as applying intelligence such as Einstein and journeys, to their existing communications.
With their new goal of moving from a fully manual to an automated operation, they determined they were missing the expertise and skillset internally to deploy and execute their campaigns. This led them to a partnership with Lev.
With Lev, SCE created a 12-month roadmap for platform optimization, and over time completed a list of projects that helped them utilize the platform. Some of the projects completed were:
- A marketing preference center that allows customers to opt down instead of opting out of marketing communications
- An automated connection to their data platform to pull data directly into Marketing Cloud, shortening their period of getting data from a two-week period to 24 hours
- A Welcome Journey that took the place of a manual process
- An email benchmarking dashboard
The Power of Partnership
Lev’s partnership with SCE is more than just platform enablement and campaign execution. A true partnership provides a lot more.
A great partner is someone that’s able to anticipate the next step for you by seeing the bigger picture goal and understanding how each project impacts that long-term vision for your business. A partner can help identify projects and work streams that can drive the business forward. And most importantly, a partner should feel like an extension of your team, weaving seamlessly into your marketing roadmap, marketing conversations and what you want your company to look like in the next one, three, or five years.
Here are three ways clients and consultants can work together to maximize their partnership:
Open Communication
It's extremely important for a consultant-client relationship to be transparent. Understanding a client’s long-term goals and being honest about the challenges or barriers to achieving them is key. A partner and a client should voice concerns openly, and ask questions about recommendations if there is something that is unclear.
Trust
A client needs to find a partner that they trust. It's very difficult to commit to a direction when you don't have trust in the partnership. If you don't have trust in your partnership, you may have the wrong partnership.
Collaboration
A strong partnership is one that helps each other solve issues and problems. Having a collaborative relationship makes the work more efficient and effective for both sides. It’s also important to celebrate your successes together. At the end of the day when you reach your milestones and your goals, you want to celebrate together.
“Partnership is more than just a vendor relationship. A partner can help you reach its full potential within the platform itself.” -David Aguilar, Southern California Edison
For more on the partnership between Southern California Edison and Lev, watch this session from Ultraviolet 2022.