How Equitable Cut Campaign Build Times 75% with Agentforce Marketing

Equitable's Employee Benefits division sells group dental, vision, life, disability, and supplemental health products to small and mid-sized businesses, competing in a market where broker relationships and marketing agility are the primary growth levers. Despite a decade of successful Salesforce adoption on the sales and service side, the marketing team was operationally stuck.

The root cause was a homegrown data connector between their legacy email platform and Salesforce CRM that had become a liability. When it broke — which it did frequently — campaigns stopped. Building a target audience required manual CRM extracts, tagging, multiple uploads, and external opt-out and bounce management. A single developer who specialized in HTML email controlled all campaign builds, creating a five-day bottleneck that made it impossible to respond to market fluctuations in real time. Sweepstakes required two-plus hours of manual data scrubbing per campaign to reconcile entrant records into Salesforce.

Equitable replaced the stack with Salesforce Agentforce Marketing, rebuilding their campaign framework from scratch rather than porting old processes. A native bidirectional CRM integration replaced the unreliable custom connector, making Salesforce the single source of truth for all campaign data. An internal content library of 20+ brand-approved dynamic content blocks let marketers drag and drop customized emails with automated personalization — pulling in sales executive names, contact info, and UTM parameters — without touching code. Agentforce Marketing's Journey Builder automated multi-step campaigns on set schedules with engagement-based audience splits, while AI-powered Send Time Optimization used historical data to time each email for maximum open rate. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Pages replaced the disconnected sweepstakes platform, pre-filling entrant data from CRM records and blocking duplicates automatically.

The measurable shift: overall campaign build time fell 75%. Audience segmentation dropped from 60 minutes to five — a 91% reduction. Sweepstakes admin work fell 75%. Multi-touch campaigns that were once assembled manually now run autonomously, and the five-day HTML coding bottleneck became minutes with drag-and-drop. Marketers reclaimed strategic time that had been consumed by execution tasks.

Equitable is now expanding into always-on evergreen journeys, custom engagement scoring with AMPscript, and early Agentforce use cases across the Employee Benefits business.