Our customers live in a world of fractured finances. A checking account here, a credit card over there, investment accounts someplace else. And don't forget their insurance policies, that old 401(k), and financial apps like Mint which they use in an attempt to tie it all together. In short, most of them look like Rachel here:

There's a benefit in consolidation to the customer. And there's obvious benefit in share of wallet growth to their preferred financial services provider. An effective cross-sell journey, coordinated across marketing, sales, and service can deliver these benefits.

First, the marketer must be able to answer the following:

• How do we identify a cross-sell candidate?
• What constitutes conversion?
• How do we move them from identification to conversion?

How to Identify Cross Sell Opportunities

Financial institutions have more data about their customers than just about any other type of company. And every card swipe, every transfer of funds, every visit to the mobile app or website adds to this. Buried in this ever-growing sea of data are signals that a customer might present a cross-sell opportunity:

• Is a deposit-only customer making regular transfers to a competing investment firm when your company offers wealth management services?
• Is an auto-only policyholder all of a sudden browsing around on your boat insurance page?
• In meeting with an agent, did the customer mention in passing that she was having a baby?

Reading and responding to these signals is critical to your company's growth-and we're way past the days of marketers asking IT for an Excel file to load for an "email blast." What's needed is a system of intelligence that can ingest data from any source, make decisions and put the customer on the journey. To do this, marketing must work in concert with all the owners of data in the organization to ensure the signals being captured are made available to marketing. Whether that's an agent logging a call in CRM, customer behavior in the mobile app, or call center logs resulting from direct mail-it all matters.

Tactics for Converting Cross Sell Prospects

Now that you've identified your cross-sell prospects, what do you want them to do? Simply saying, "We want them to use the product we promote to them," is not enough. We're not talking about buying shoes, here. Many financial products are complex and a conversion on the web isn't always an option. Conversion for the marketing journey could mean any number of things:

• Completion of an application for the new product
• Scheduling an appointment to meet with an agent
• A high-level of engagement with the journey messages

Whatever the metric is, it's critical that the decision is made jointly by all stakeholders. It's also critical that you, as the marketer, have access to the conversion data in order to measure the success of the journey.

Techniques for Managing the Financial Services Journey

Most financial providers have a process to identify which offers a customer qualifies for at any one time. Once a customer signal has been read, it's time to marry that with the appropriate offer and start the cross-sell journey. But the journey from identification to conversion must happen where your customers are. To you, this means having a platform that can power all channels. Managing a patchwork of point solutions is simply not an option when your customers live omni-channel lives.

With the power of an omni-channel platform, marketers can go well beyond the classic three-step email series.

• With your historical channel engagement data you can calculate a channel engagement propensity and use that in your journey design. If the customer prefers your app, then don't send an email.
• If the first email doesn't elicit a response, try reinforcing the second one with a digital ad.
• If the customer reaches the end of the journey, has shown some engagement, but not enough to convert don't despair. Create a task for the agent or specialist to follow-up by phone.

As time passes, you'll be able to see which tactics drive the most conversions. Test different creative and message cadences. Optimize for new cross-sell prospects. And further the coordination of marketing, sales, and service.

It sure would be nice if there was a marketing platform that did all of this, wouldn't it? There is. Learn more-check out this demo of Marketing Cloud.

About the Author:

Chris Serger is a Principal Solutions Engineer for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud working exclusively with enterprise financial services customers. He's been working in digital marketing his entire career and has a long history with Salesforce Marketing Cloud having first been a client at National City Bank, and then a partner where he solutioned and implemented more than 40 customers.