PenFed Credit Union Enhances Digital Marketing Strategy

“Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been kind of an accidental journey for me,” says Gaurav Bhatia, Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Retail Deposits at PenFed Credit Union. 

Bhatia joined PenFed, the nation’s second-largest federal credit union, five years ago and was tasked with making two products work for front- and backend tasks: Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and another marketing technology vendor. PenFed’s technology organization built Salesforce as the backend for client services and the other product for frontend marketing activities. The problem was, it took time for data to be transferred between the platforms. 

“It made no sense to have that lag,” says Bhatia. “The question we asked internally was, why can’t we leverage the same platform to send communication out?” 

PenFed’s solution was to sunset its legacy product and switch to Marketing Cloud for both frontend and backend activities. Stitching the member journey together on a single platform removed the data transfer lag time and allows PenFed to have a better understanding of its members. Prior to this switch they had to keep changing creative templates because data was coming from different systems. Now they have rules in Marketing Cloud that fire automatically so emails – both promotional and transactional – get deployed efficiently. Analytics has become easier as well. Bhatia’s team has a comprehensive view of its members, including metrics on which emails and app messages they’re interacting with. 

AI has also been a focus for Bhatia’s team. They started experimenting with it a year and a half ago — all their Google and Meta ads now run through AI. They’re also testing Agentforce as a use case to improve both marketing and operations, with the goal of reducing costs and taking the manual work out of the system. “I want to make sure I can put more of my marketing dollars in the market instead of on operations and data and tech,” says Bhatia. 

PenFed is a few years into its journey with Marketing Cloud and is thinking ahead to how they can continue improving their efficiency and external impact. 

“It’s not one and done,” says Bhatia. “We’re looking more at a macro level and saying, hey if we’re able to pull this off, it’s going to be good for the member and it’s going to be good for the brand. We’ll have less tech overhead, and less people overheard. So, it’s faster, better, cheaper.” 

The key is making sure marketing and technology teams are in lockstep and always aligned on strategy. “If the CIO and CMO don’t work together, it’s DOA – death on arrival,” says Bhatia. “It’s not going to work. You’ll be built in silos, tech costs will be high, and you won’t be able to give good member experiences. You’re not going to get the value of the platform. Are we there yet? No, but we’ve made tremendous progress.”