Improving 360-degree visibility for PensionBee using Airbyte
Read about how PensionBee saved 10% of their marketing budget with Airbyte.
PensionBee, based out of London, is on a mission to make pensions simple by consolidating old pension plans into a new digital-first online plan. By partnering with some of the world's largest money managers, it offers customers an easy-to-use dashboard called the ‘BeeHive’ — streamlining the process of accessing pensions anytime, anywhere. Since its debut in 2014, PensionBee has grown to serve over 538,000 customers, who can now manage their pension plans much more efficiently.
PensionBee revolutionized the pensions industry through the digitization of pension providers' plans. As their platform grew, several fundamental business problems needed to be addressed -
Just-in-time visibility for customers
Pensions constantly change over time, and PensionBee’s customers need access to up-to-date data at all times to make critical financial decisions.
“Our customers needed a holistic platform that merged multiple pension pots from various employers, and a single 360-degree view of up-to-date data from different information sources to quickly make financial decisions.”
A deeper understanding of the customer journey
For PensionBee's marketing teams, it was essential to accurately track customer journey touchpoints across their platform — to answer questions like what attracts customers to PensionBee, what drives customers to sign up, and what customers do after they sign up.
“Without such an integrated 360-degree view of customer engagement data, it was challenging for internal product teams to reach the right customers at the right time through push notifications or email messages.”
PensionBee needed a better way to consolidate and organize customer data to better analyze and serve customers’ needs. Their old data architecture failed to meet these requirements and had several problems:
Complex and fragmented architecture
PensionBee was experiencing exponential growth, which meant an increasing amount of customer data to handle, and spreadsheets were not the right tool for the job. In addition, data was fragmented across disparate systems — client profile information was stored in the Salesforce CRM, marketing campaign information was tied to advertising platforms like Facebook and Google, and other supporting data was stored in various online documents and spreadsheets.
“With this spread of information, it was not possible for PensionBee’s marketing team to easily track upper and lower marketing funnel activity by channel or drill down by customer in a short amount of time. Even with tools like Looker, a commonly used BI visualization software, it was still challenging to merge and modify large amounts of customer data, leading to an inefficient data processing system.”
Lack of flexibility and higher costs
PensionBee wanted more control and transparency across their data pipelines. Their old architecture used Fivetran, which lacked flexibility. For example, there was no way for customers to modify data before sending it to the destination, making it difficult to send the appropriate information to data warehouses. Additionally, Fivetran's billing model was row-based, which significantly increased costs as PensionBee was scaling up.
PensionBee had several issues with its old architecture. How did they solve it? Using Airbyte, PensionBee shifted its focus from worrying about data sync to what was most important for their customers - their pension management platform.
Simplified Architecture
Using Airbyte, PensionBee was able to stitch together different client, campaign, and marketing data sources into a singular, coherent platform. Airbyte worked behind the scenes to bridge various data sources together, streamlining data processing time from start to finish. In addition, Airbyte was able to automatically resolve data pipeline issues, allowing PensionBee to focus more on analyzing the consolidated data instead of amalgamating the information itself. Finally, with Airbyte, building a platform that provided a 360-degree view of the upper and lower funnel marketing activity was made possible.
Increased Flexibility
Airbyte can automatically bring the source fields from our Salesforce Marketing Cloud into our database without any hiccups. This made it possible for PensionBee's product teams to easily gather more engagement data and deeply understand different customer profiles.
“We are impressed with Airbyte’s Salesforce Marketing Cloud connector. We get the flexibility of picking which fields to import and can skip the fields we don’t need. Our team is confident that we will end up with an integration that we need and want.”
Lower Costs
PensionBee’s large-scale operations and growing customer base required an efficient cost model to operate. Airbyte's open source model allowed PensionBee to develop newer connectors that were perhaps not available otherwise easily. Additionally, it was beneficial to have a community that could assist in answering questions and bounce ideas along the way.
“With Airbyte, PensionBee was able to save up to 10% of the marketing budget. It pays back this investment many times over.”
Airbyte is an essential component in PensionBee’s platform. As PensionBee continues to grow, it hopes to use Airbyte to power various use cases, including working with financial data and further enhancing the marketing cloud.
Are you ready to explore the possibilities that Airbyte brings to the table? Get started for free at https://airbyte.io/pricing.
Get all your ELT data pipelines running in minutes with Airbyte.
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