Advisor Group pilots pandemic networking and major merger with Oracle Eloqua

Advisor Group is a network of thousands of wealth management professionals based in the United States. The group’s business traditionally relied on face-to-face meetings and events to nurture relationships with its affiliated financial professionals, who in turn used the same tools to build connections with their clients. But when the US government declared lockdowns due to COVID-19, in-person events were canceled, threatening the foundation of the group’s community-based business model.

Additionally, Advisor Group was in the midst of a major merger with Ladenburg Thalmann, whose five firms would join Advisor Group’s four companies to make the group the largest network of independent wealth management enterprises in the US. The new organization would have to manage nine separate wealth management brands supporting more than 10,000 financial professionals.

Although Advisor Group operated on a shared services model with centralized departments, Ladenburg Thalmann’s firms used their own departments, processes, and technologies. The challenge of restructuring these new firms into the shared services model was further complicated when the organization transitioned to remote work and business travel stopped.

Advisor Group chose Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation because of the product’s powerful automation and data centralization, which enables the company to run personalized marketing campaigns across multiple channels in real time, creating seamless customer experiences for its affiliated financial advisors.

The ability to integrate third-party applications into Oracle Eloqua, part of the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience suite of applications, gave Advisor Group significant additional leverage in its communication activities. Vidyard for Oracle Eloqua and Zoom for Oracle Eloqua provided data for personalized campaigns and apps such as vMix Live, SurveyMonkey, and Slido, which enabled the organization to create a more immersive webinar experience.

Oracle Eloqua serves as the core of the organization’s marketing stack and houses all existing and prospective financial data used for marketing purposes. Advisor Group addressed both of the group’s core challenges—sustaining relationships and integrating the merged firms—by using Oracle Eloqua as the primary communication tool.

Oracle Eloqua enabled Advisor Group to pivot its customer experience strategy by focusing on its community of financial advisors during the first year of the pandemic. The group’s objective was to support the affiliated professionals with the resources needed to navigate the pandemic and strengthen their ties with Advisor Group and with each other.

As a result, Advisor Group retained 84%—nine points above the industry standard of 75%—of the financial professionals from the merger, which represented US$27.8 billion in assets administered.

Advisor Group created an Oracle Eloqua-driven hub called the Coronavirus Response Resource Center, which provided resources such as prewritten emails to clients as well as tips on setting up videoconferencing and how to apply for small business loans. These activities were well received by the financial professionals, who reciprocated by referring 186 colleagues to the organization in 2020—an increase of 345% from the previous year—representing US$31 million in pipeline revenue.

The company also used the Coronavirus hub for regular webcasts, podcasts, and newsletters. Advisor Group created a video-based peer mentoring service to replace the lost face-to-face opportunities. These activities culminated in a three-day virtual conference toward the end of 2020 with an attendance increase of 111% compared to the previous year and a satisfaction rate of 91%.

Advisor Group merged all communications from its newly merged partner firms’ email systems on Oracle Eloqua. With the marketing team integrated and working exclusively on Oracle Eloqua, Advisor Group had visibility into all communications, including audience segments, email frequency and volume, and information about how the group’s professionals were engaging with the system across marketing channels.

This enabled Advisor Group to make data-driven decisions about its marketing campaigns and to continuously enhance the experience of the group’s financial professionals and their customers. The latter was especially valuable because at that stage the organization had not yet completed the customer relationship management (CRM) part of the merger.