What frustrates Modern Marketers?

While spending the morning with a client facilitating an Eloqua Nurturing Workshop, the marketing team shared an annoyance with me.

Their sales team identified a frustration where clients felt they were dropped as soon as they paid their annual fee and weren’t contacted again until it was renewal time. Sales knew this was generally true. Using another system, not Eloqua, they’re sending a single email three times over the year to “maintain contact”! huh! That’s certainly “ticking a box” without any real thought. 

What’s The Difference Between Email Marketing and Marketing Automation?

I could type for pages to answer this question, however I will try and keep it short. Essentially email marketing is the ability, and generally the behaviour, of sending one email to the entire database. This is essentially spam and the outcome is generally as you would expect, not so good.

Marketing Automation is the ability to understand an individual’s digital footprint and to engage with them based on their behaviour. For example, you may identify four hot pages on your website that receive a lot of traffic. Eloqua can help you automatically pick out the people who have looked at those four pages over a pre-determined period of time and engage with them based on their digital footprint.

A smart modern marketer will see this as a trigger-based campaign and the right action would be to prepare a series of emails, perhaps 5 or so and have them delivered to the person over a period of time, once a week is a good place to start.

Nurturing Campaigns Drive Engagement

We often hear the term “Lead Nurturing”, this is a valid term. However, the principle of “nurturing’ is as relevant to customers, partners and even internal communications as they are to leads or prospects.

The obvious candidates for a Lead Nurturing campaign are those who “fall out” of the sales funnel. These people are easily identified if they\’re associated with a “Closed/Lost” opportunity in your CRM. With out-of-the-box integration between Salesforce CRM, Oracle CRM On Demand and Oracle Sales Cloud, Eloqua marketers can automatically drop contacts from “Closed/Lost” opportunities into a lead nurturing campaign.