Most credit unions already have a substantial technology stack.
Member and account information lives in the core. A CRM may support relationship management, service, or sales workflows. An MCIF, data warehouse, or other data platform may organize and analyze information. Digital banking, lending, analytics, email, and other platforms add their own capabilities.
So when marketing automation enters the conversation, there’s a reasonable question to ask: Where would it actually fit?
One way to answer that is to look beyond the systems you own and consider how your marketing team gets work done through them.
Start with something your team wants to accomplish.
Maybe you want to identify members who have a checking account but no direct deposit. Or communicate differently with members whose certificates are maturing in 60 days versus 30 days. Or use predictive insights, such as product recommendations or churn predictions, to help determine which members should enter a campaign.
That information might come from the core, CRM, lending system, MCIF or data warehouse, digital banking platform, or another source.
It doesn’t need to live in one system. Different technologies serve different purposes, and centralizing everything in a marketing platform isn’t the objective.
What matters is whether your marketing team can access the information it needs in a form and cadence that supports how the team wants to use it.
Now follow what happens when your team decides to use that information.
Consider a cross-sell campaign targeting members with a checking account but no auto loan who meet certain credit criteria.
The data might need to be pulled from the core or data warehouse. Someone prepares and formats it. The list gets uploaded to the email platform, and the campaign launches. A few weeks later, the audience has changed, and the process starts again.
The campaign itself could run continuously. The surrounding process is what forces the team to manage it in cycles.
Financial institution marketing often involves multiple technologies and teams. But looking at the end-to-end process reveals what a feature inventory won’t: how much ongoing work it takes to keep a campaign running as intended.
A workflow that’s manageable for one campaign can become difficult to sustain across many.
The objective isn’t to eliminate every handoff. Some should exist.
Compliance may need to review communications. IT and data teams may maintain integrations, security, and data governance. Other platforms continue supporting the functions they were selected to perform.
The question is whether those handoffs serve a clear purpose or simply add repetitive work.
If your marketing team coordinates with IT because integration governance requires it, the stack is working as intended.
But if a marketing manager exports a list every two weeks, reformats it, and uploads it into another platform just to keep the audience current, that’s different.
At that point, the problem isn’t the individual systems. It’s the process between them.
Marketing automation can bring together the parts of the process your marketing team needs to manage: using available data and insights to define audiences, applying campaign logic, automating communications and journeys, and coordinating channels.
That doesn’t mean other systems have to disappear. Core, CRM, data platforms, digital banking, lending, and other technologies continue serving their respective purposes.
And not every credit union needs a separate marketing automation platform. If the existing stack already supports what your marketing team needs, adding another platform won’t create value on its own.
But if campaigns are difficult to execute or sustain because of the process required to keep them running, that’s where marketing automation can have a clear role.
Before evaluating another platform, take one marketing initiative your team runs today and follow it from beginning to end.
Look at:
Where does the data come from?
How is the audience built, and what happens when it changes?
Which systems are needed to launch and maintain the campaign?
Which steps require manual intervention?
You may find that your current technology already supports the way your marketing team operates. Or you may find that the capabilities exist across your stack, but using them together is difficult to repeat or scale.
Either conclusion gives you a stronger basis for evaluating marketing automation than starting with a vendor’s feature list.
If the work reveals that your marketing team spends too much time moving data, rebuilding audiences, or keeping campaigns current across different systems, that’s the type of process Prisma Campaigns is designed to simplify.
Prisma Campaigns is an omnichannel marketing automation platform purpose-built for credit unions and community banks.
On data and insights: Depending on the institution’s architecture and use case, integrations can be data-based, channel-based, or API-based, enabling the use of available member data to support segmentation and campaign execution. Prisma Campaigns can also use predictive models, including product recommendations and churn predictions, to help determine which members should be included in specific campaigns.
On audiences: Credit unions can create dynamic audiences based on defined criteria. As updated data becomes available to Prisma Campaigns, members can enter or leave audiences based on those criteria.
On campaigns and channels: Prisma Campaigns brings campaign logic, automated journeys, and channel coordination into one environment across email, SMS, online banking, push notifications, and direct mail.
Prisma Campaigns isn’t intended to replace the core, CRM, data platform, or other systems. Its role is to help marketing teams use available data and insights to build audiences, automate campaigns and journeys, and coordinate communications across channels.
When considering where marketing automation fits in your credit union’s technology stack, don’t start by asking which box is missing from the diagram.
Follow the work instead.
That will tell you much more about what your marketing team actually needs.
If you’d like to walk through how this applies to your credit union’s current marketing process, talk with our team about where marketing automation could help.
CRM and marketing automation capabilities can overlap. The difference depends on what your CRM allows your marketing team to do, including maintaining audiences, automating multi-step journeys, and coordinating communications across channels. If it already meets your team's needs, you may not need a separate platform.
Prisma Campaigns supports data-based, channel-based, and API-based integration approaches depending on the institution’s architecture and use case.
Follow one campaign from beginning to end. If you find repetitive manual steps, audiences that require frequent rebuilding, or campaigns that are difficult to maintain as member information changes, marketing automation may be worth evaluating.
No. Marketing automation can work alongside the core, CRM, data platforms, digital banking, and other systems already in place.
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