Desert Financial Credit Union Achieves Digital Transformation

How a major credit union transformed their growth with revenue marketing consulting, resulting in more memberships and a 2X increase in marketable database.

Background

Desert Financial Credit Union, with over $3.5 billion+ in managed assets, sought to gain 1 million+ new members in the next seven years – but they knew their existing processes and tech wouldn’t cut it.

Enter: The Pedowitz Group

We were engaged to lead a multi-phased plan to uplevel all marketing and sales systems, processes, and skills as part of their overall digital transformation.

Using our RM6 methodology that’s foundational to revenue marketing concepts, we:

Defined key business goals
Assessed areas of strategy, customer engagement, people (skills), revenue operations, data, and technology
Designed a roadmap for workstreams and milestones
Aligned stakeholders, resources, KPIs, and project plans
Executed the roadmap through design, building, testing, and optimization
Sustained continued growth

12%

increase in membership within first 6 months

2x

increase in marketable database

"The Desert Financial Credit Union marketing team kicked off a rapid transformation initiative to grow our digital marketing capabilities. We were thrilled to top Finalytics.ai’s 2021 Credit Union Digital Experience Report’s list of the top credit unions in digital marketing. A big thank you to Jeff Pedowitz and his team at The Pedowitz Group for helping us to jump start our efforts. We couldn’t have come this far without your guidance."

Cathy Graham
Executive Vice President, Desert Financial Credit Union
(via LinkedIn)

How’d it happen? Read on for details!

Architecture

1

TPG audited main areas to begin building a strategic roadmap:

Data Assessment – Including MarTech stacks, data managment processes, and utilization by teams
System integrations – We identified missing links between the client’s marketing automation platform, Eloqua, and their CRM (Salesforce)
Talent – We identified resource gaps and opportunities to add key roles to support the company’s growth

Buyer Journey

2

After presenting the roadmap and gaining approval, we oriented everything about greater customer centricity.

Not only did we more fully define existing customer personas, we also mapped a journey for adoption of the credit union’s full suite of services and encouraging long-term retention for increased lifetime value.

We then aligned content with key journey points and recommended thought leadership to improve customer trust.

Campaign Design

3

We recommended new ways to optimize both inbound and outbound campaigns and tie everything to their Eloqua instance.

Then, we built out enhanced audience segmentation and designed nurture campaigns to support increased automation that maintained a customer-centric focus.

Lead
Management

4

Not only did we map, design, and enable a new lead lifecycle, we got both sales and marketing in alignment on key lead scoring metrics so any lead that was passed to sales had full team confidence in its readiness for outreach.

We then implemented closed-loop reporting for greater attribution from campaign to lead to revenue impact.

Results

Desert Financial was eager for change and receptive to ideas, which led to faster results that contributed to the bottom line:

Membership boosted by 12% while campaigns were just beginning to ramp up
A key metric was database growth, and in less than 3 years it grew from 92,000 to over 244K (150+% growth)
The Chief Marketing Officer commented that organization recommendations allowed for increased growth
Key gaps that caused major headaches for both sales and marketing were removed as both teams were far more aligned

Ultimately, they were on track towards their stated goal of 1 million+ members and with the processes, tech, and skills in place to sustain long-term growth.