Creating a successful Salesforce-backed membership website

The Investment Association is the trade body and industry voice for investment managers in the UK, and its member firms managed over £7.7 trillion of assets.

The Investment Assocation (IA) manages their members in Salesforce, and was manually duplicating member details and data into their website CMS. This worked, but it was painful, and they wanted to close the gap between their website and the CRM.

The commissioning of a refreshed website provided an ideal opportunity to make improvements.

Administrative challenges to address

While duplicating member information between Salesforce and the website worked, it took time and was prone to mistakes. Because of this the IA wanted to simplify the administrative process and automate as much as was feasible.

At the same time, a closer link between Salesforce and the website CMS (MODX at the time) would provide a better experience to members.

The goals were:

Better control over member benefits

Salesforce was chosen to be the single point of authority, and all data for the website would be fetched from it.

A custom Salesforce-backed login system meant no data duplication and an immediate reflection of membership subscription changes and membership expiry.

Tight integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud allowed:

The emails were personalised by member preference and by the level of membership bought. It was imperative for the IA that information was disseminated only to those who were allowed to see it.

Efficiencies through administrative streamlining

Better member experience

Member self-service features to allow members to keep their details up to date without contacting the IA, which is substantially easier when people move between investment firms. An approvals workflow ensures all changes are validated by IA staff.

Technical details

The seamless integration used Salesforce’s SOAP and REST APIs to cover all functionality. Precalculation of data, AMPScript, and filtered datasets were key to making the complex and varied personalised emails work.

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