Technology is helpful when it can take something complex and make it simple. The Eloqua Campaign Canvas is one of those technology solutions. The simple user interface takes the many moving parts of your digital campaign and represents it in a simple icon format.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve spent some time with new Oracle Marking Cloud Eloqua customers walking them through their campaigns and assisting them with the design of their Campaign Canvas. There are some fundamentals, when understood, that make your life that much easier. In the post below I’ll walk you through a specific Campaign Canvas and explain each of the steps.
The campaign canvas above is designed to target a group of people, a Segment, send them an invitation to access a whitepaper, drive them to a Landing Page and then have them complete a Form and then move them to a second campaign.
For those people who miss or don’t open the first invitation, we wait for a period of time and then send them a reminder. Once people have been through this campaign, we then Move them to another campaign inviting them to join a webinar.
Let’s walk through each of the steps. Throughout this post you’ll find a range of links to the Oracle Eloqua Help Centre. Go ahead a click on these to learn more about the Campaign Canvas.
Step A – Segments
The starting point for 95% of your campaigns will be a Segment. The Segment contains a target list of contacts you’ve selected to be *Campaign Members. You can have multiple Segments on the Campaign Canvas. It’s often easier to determine your target lists via Segments if you have varying types of message/emails designed for various audiences.
EXAMPLE: If you’re hosting an event, you may want to invite Customers, Prospects, Business Partners and even target specific internal staff. The way you present your message will likely differ to each of these audiences. This is a perfect example of why multiple Segments on your canvas makes sense. The other benefit of multiple Segments on your canvas is that when you view the Individual Email Performance dashboard, you can view engagement with each email, by Segment. This is helpful when you have a wide audience type.
*NOTE: Campaign Members is an important concept to understand about the Campaign Canvas. A single contact can only receive one stream of communications in a single Campaign and by default a Contact cannot enter a Campaign twice. This removes the chance of them receiving the same email a second time at some stage in the future. If you have one contact in two Segments on the Campaign Canvas, Eloqua will determine which email they receive through a complex series of alphabetical and numerical order. TIP: focus on getting the Segments right to avoid this outcome.
Step B – Email
Sending your email is generally what your campaign is all about. It’s from the Campaign Canvas that you can control “who” the email comes from i.e. the name that appears against the email in a person’s inbox. To do this, you need to have created Signatures and Signature Rules – see “A” below. Using the Scheduling feature – see “B” below, you can select the times of day and days of the week your email is received.
The Scheduling feature is helpful in a Multi-Step campaign because you want to control when the second, third and subsequent emails are sent. Nothing says spam like a personalised email delivered at 4:00am on a Saturday. The Scheduling feature gives you control over this problem.
Step C – Wait
The “Wait” step is probably the most misunderstood step on the Campaign Canvas. It’s easy to get buried in your Campaign Canvas and forget that the Campaign is designed to interact with people. You have no control over how and when people interact with your Campaign.
If you miss the Wait step and go directly to Step D – “Opened Email?”, you’re literally giving people a nano-second to receive the email and open it. That’s not going to work. As a general rule you should always include a Wait step following an email send.
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EXAMPLE: If you’re hosting an event, that event will take place on a specific date and time. This will generally mean you want to have the various communications prior to the event delivered on a specific date and time. If you’re running a nurturing campaign where the campaign may be active for 6-12 months, waiting for a set amount of time e.g. two weeks, is the option you’ll want to select.
TIP: If your campaign is active for a longer period of time and you have Campaign Members entering the campaign at regular intervals (i.e. in addition to the original Segment), you will generally want to select the Wait step for a set amount of time.
Step D – Opened Email?
This is when you start to engage with your Segment based on their engagement or their Digital Body Language. When you select this Decision Step, you need to add the email in question to the step. This is typically the same email shown in Step B above.
TIP: There are several Decision Steps you can execute following your Wait step. e.g. Did they open the Email? Did they Click Through? Were they sent another email? You can compare Contact Fields e.g. which state are they in or which industry? But, Opened Email? is probably the most common. A Decision step gives you two possible outcomes – Yes or No.
If a person hasn’t opened your first email, they’re a good candidate to receive the email again. It’s a also a good idea to change the subject line of the email and also the day and/or time of day it’s delivered. You may also want to adjust the opening paragraph of the email acknowledging that the person “may not” have had a chance to read your first email.
NOTE: You cannot place the same email twice on the campaign canvas. So while your reminder email, Step G above, is essentially the same as the email in Step B, you will need to “Save As” the email in Step B in order to produce the reminder email, Step G.
Click here to learn more about the Opened Email? decision step.
Steps E & F – Landing Page & Form (Reporting Only)
These two steps are added to the Canvas when you access them from the Email step. In the screen grab below you can see a small Landing Page icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the Email step. Follow the steps in the screen grab below.
If you have the same Landing Page link in other Emails already on the Canvas, once you save the Canvas Eloqua will draw grey lines connecting all of them. These lines from the Emails to the Landing Page (reporting only) icon are visual confirmation that you have the hyperlink in your Email to that Landing Page.
You can manually add other Landing Pages to your Campaign Canvas if you’d like them included in your Campaign reporting.
Step G – Email
This is essentially a repeat of Step B. The only thing you want to think through are a few changes to the subject line of this repeated email and to perhaps adjust the day and time of day delivery from the first email.
Step H – Wait
See Step C above, this is the same process.
Step I – Move to Campaign (optional)
Once you’ve taken the time to map out your buyer’s journey it’s likely you will want to progress your contacts to another campaign with an additional offer. You can also “Add” the contact to another campaign. This means the contact will remain in the first campaign while also being added to the next campaign. You can use Wait steps at the entry point of the next campaign to ensure your contact isn’t bombarded with emails.
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