How SoFi powers personalized email campaigns with high-quality customer data

SoFi is a personal finance company and bank that offers a suite of products designed to help consumers manage loans, invest, open checking accounts, and more. 

Like many things, personal finances are easier to manage when they’re centralized in a single place. As SoFi’s portfolio of products has expanded over time, the team has discovered that when customers adopt two or more products, their financial health begins to improve significantly. Thus, they established the “better together” mission, aiming to increase customer lifetime value by encouraging customers to broaden product adoption. As part of this initiative, SoFi’s marketing team focused on using customer data to power strategic cross-sell offers, improve the customer experience, and build customer trust.

The SoFi team had adopted a variety of best-in-class tools to support their personalization and analytics goals. But every tool they added to their stack created more complexity. Different engineering teams were responsible for implementing tools on different platforms, and with a unique set of events being collected into every system, there was no single source of truth in which to access a 360-degree view of the customer. 

Whenever the team wanted to integrate customer data between tools, technical stakeholders had to build pipelines internally, a process that often resulted in data loss and inconsistency. To use Optimizely for A/B testing and feature flagging, for example, Data Science had to pull javascript from Amplitude and upload it to Optimizely, a workflow that pulled technical team members away from high-value work and resulted in a 30% data loss. 

The high amount of data wrangling required to make data actionable prevented marketing from delivering personalized experiences and cross-sell campaigns. To coordinate personalized experiences across marketing channels, the team needed to establish a central customer data infrastructure at the foundation of the tech stack.

SoFi partnered with mParticle to simplify their customer data pipeline and get more value. With mParticle implemented in their websites and mobile apps, SoFi is able to collect customer data through a single integration. As data is collected, mParticle IDSync unifies data from across sources to 360-degree customer profiles. And when users sign-up for the first time and provide an email address, mParticle merges unauthenticated and known activity to a single profile so that the team can access a complete view of the customer journey. 

The SoFi team also leveraged mParticle Feed integrations to ingest data from other SaaS tools into mParticle. With the Branch Feed connected, the team pulls attribution data into mParticle. With the Braze Feed, they ingest messaging engagement data. With all of this information flowing into mParticle in real time, the SoFi team is able to access unified profiles that stay up-to-date continuously.

With a high-quality data set available in mParticle, the SoFi team can then leverage mParticle’s library of 300+ integrations to sync data to their preferred tools without any development work. Instead of enlisting Data Science to pull data from other sources (e.g. digital analytics platform, for example) the marketing team was able to sync data from mParticle to Optimizely without any development work using mParticle’s Optimizely Event integration. This relieved Data Science from having to support this process, and remedied the 30% data loss the team was experiencing with their previous workflow. 

mParticle also makes it easier for SoFi's marketing teams to activate customer data for real-time personalization. By syncing 360 customer profiles to their preferred engagement tools, teams across the organization have been able to design personalized activation campaigns without any development work. Connecting customer data from mParticle to Braze, the team is able to target personalized email experiences and offers based on customer engagements, attributes, and interests. Data forwarded from mParticle is also used to personalize email content, such as spend summary charts.

With mParticle in place, the SoFi team has been able to get more value out of their data while also increasing efficiency, ultimately making it easier to bring their customers more relevant content. 

To see how mParticle could benefit your team, you can explore our platform demo here.