Elitronic Media

With the launch of Conversational Email, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advanced users finally have true two-way capabilities across both Email and SMS. While SMS has historically offered a partial two-way street by accepting specific keywords in the right order, email has largely remained a one-way broadcast.

Ultimately, the projected dream state of Conversational Email and SMS relies heavily on Agentforce and bots answering email and text inquiries. For highly regulated industries like Financial Services, leveraging these features without full AI is a strategic way to bypass lengthy legal and security reviews and ensure data security. Let’s look at two powerful ways to implement two-way marketing today.

Multi-Keyword SMS Routing

In the past, there’s been the concept of the “Next” Keyword, and there’s been some level of data collection to use in future messages (text or email). But, with the ability to listen and route with Conversational SMS, you can have multiple keywords that you can listen for, and act on.

Instead of a single-track rail, you configure the system to listen for a defined set of intent-based keywords after outbound messages — think “BRANCH HOURS,” “LOAN STATUS,” — and trigger the appropriate automated response for each one. It can also be leveraged to start product applications, or purchase products using a pre-defined set of keywords.

It’s not AI, it’s well-designed decisioning. And if they need additional help (i.e. they text in “HELP” or something that isn’t recognized), you can create a case in the same workflow.

This is also where SMS starts pulling real weight as a service channel, not just a notification channel.

Conversational Email & Cross-Cloud Handoffs

The first step in Conversational Email is to get rid of the noreply sending address, and encourage people to reply within the email. If you’re promoting a new loan offering, you can ask the member to reply with some information like when they’re looking to buy a house, or the initial price point they’re looking for to start the conversation.

Since people aren’t used to email being a 2-way conversation, you’ll need to solicit replies at first to get your customers/ members used to using it with more broad marketing emails vs. a 1:1 email from your loan officer.

When the system identifies a signal that a customer is ready to convert, or needs assistance, it automatically triggers the appropriate cross-cloud action: a Referral in Sales Cloud, a Case in Service Cloud, or a task routed to the right team. Critically, the full conversation history travels with it. The member services rep picking up the handoff isn’t starting from scratch — they have full context from the first message.

This is seamless omnichannel done right, and it doesn’t require a bot to handle the actual conversation, nor security to approve AI bot conversations that could contain financial data. The human comes in exactly when they’re needed, equipped with everything they need to close the loop.