Equitable cuts campaign build times by 75% with Salesforce

Equitable's Team Struggled with Outdated Processes and Fragmented Data

Despite a decade of successful adoption of Agentforce Sales and Agentforce Service, Equitable's Employee Benefits team was stuck. A homegrown data connector between their email platform and Salesforce CRM had become more of a liability than an asset, constantly breaking down and holding strategy hostage to technical constraints. 

“We were never really able to evolve our email strategy to send more targeted messaging or scale in a way that was sustainable.” 
Alexa Ischia
Head of Sales Optimization and Analytics, Equitable Employee Benefits 

The impact was felt across every campaign function: 

• Audience Management: Building target lists meant manual CRM extracts, tagging, multiple uploads, and external opt-out and bounce management. 

• Email Development: A single resource who specialized in coding HTML controlled all email builds, creating a five-day bottleneck that prevented instant response to market fluctuations. 

• Campaign Execution: Campaigns were stitched together into a single send. Lists had to be rebuilt for each deployment with manual, in-office launches. 

• Sweepstakes: Using a disconnected third-party platform required two-plus hours of manual data scrubbing per campaign to sync entrant records into Salesforce.

A modern marketing stack built for speed, scale, and strategic control.

Equitable determined that digital marketing transformation was essential and identified Agentforce Marketing as the clear solution. 

“The decision to move to Agentforce Marketing was really a no-brainer for us.”
Alexa Ischia 

Instead of copying old processes, Equitable formed a cross-functional team of marketing, technology, IT, and distribution experts. They audited pain points and redesigned their campaign framework from scratch, removing technical constraints. 

Native CRM integration: Equitable established a secure, bidirectional link between Agentforce Marketing and Salesforce CRM, ensuring full system availability and a single source of business data. A three-tiered approval process enforced company-specific business rules, while marketers quickly generated targeted contact lists in just two clicks using Salesforce Reports. 

An agile content library: The team built an internal Agentforce Marketing content library with 20+ brand-approved static and dynamic content blocks. Authorized users can now drag and drop customized emails in minutes with automated personalization, pulling in the assigned sales executive's name, title, contact info, and auto-generated UTM parameters. 

Agentforce Marketing journey builder automation: Multi-step campaigns are built in advance and run on a set schedule. Audiences enter journeys once via Salesforce, and engagement-based splits handle follow-ups automatically. Agentforce Send Time Optimization uses historical engagement data to send each email when a recipient is most likely to open it. 

Integrated Agentforce Marketing Cloud Pages: Equitable replaced third-party sweepstakes platforms with Salesforce Agentforce Marketing Cloud Pages, which are web-based landing pages that connect directly to the CRM. Entrant details are pre-filled from existing CRM records, duplicate entries are blocked automatically, and an automated process notifies the team immediately when a winner is selected. 

This transformation eliminated fragmented data, reduced IT dependencies, and restored creative control to the marketing team. Processes that previously required a five-day external coding cycle now take minutes, allowing campaigns to launch in real time. Multi-touch campaigns that were once assembled manually now run autonomously, enabling the team to focus on strategy and broker engagement instead of execution tasks. 

The success of Agentforce Marketing Cloud Pages has already sparked new use cases, including a “Request a Meeting” page that automatically triggers follow-up tasks for sales executives inside the CRM.

Equitable's roadmap is ambitious. The team is expanding always-on, evergreen marketing journeys, such as automated welcome emails for broker contacts, and increasing transactional email capabilities. They're developing custom engagement scoring using AMPscript, Salesforce's scripting language for personalized email content, and exploring Agentforce, with several use cases identified. 

“I really look at this as a living, breathing program — and the key to success is having a highly collaborative, end-to-end development process with all stakeholders.” Alexa Ischia