Whether you’re new to Eloqua or a seasoned professional, these 3 tips for campaign canvas layouts will be helpful. We’ll show you how to gain a 32% lift in email opens, how to manage the event registration process and the fundamentals of a nurturing campaign.
The Campaign Canvas is a visual representation of the flow or experience you want to deliver to your audience. The examples we’ve provided below could be applied to your organisation today.
There will always be specific considerations on how your organisation chooses to operate Eloqua, however, we’re confident you will be able to extract some keep principles from these examples.
How to gain a 32% lift in open rates with a Multi-Step Campaign Canvas.
By blending some changes to the way you engage based on a person\’s Digital Body Language, you can increase the reach of your campaigns. Our job as marketers is to get people to read our messages, celebrating a 7% open rate means 93% of people never saw your message. Just think about that for a moment.
A few tips for this Campaign Canvas Layout
- You can always have multiple Segments on your campaign canvas. An added plus is the enhanced reporting from the Dashboard > Assets > Individual Email Performance where you can review individual segment performance against an individual email.
- The Contact Washing Machine is an App (free) that you should consider adding to all campaign canvas templates. In this example, we’re using the Propercase Action to ensure all first and last names are propercase i.e. “Derek” instead of “derek”.
- The Wait step is the one canvas step new users of Eloqua forget. Essentially, you need to wait to give people time to receive your email. The time you allow can range from hours, days, weeks or months.
- The Wait step will generally always follow an email send and comes right before a Decision step, in this example, the Opened Email? decision step.
It\’s this Decision step in concert with the following email send that on average provides a 32% lift in email open rates. Remember, if a contact has not opened your first email, attempting another send is a pretty sensible idea.
You will want to changes the subject line of your email, clearly the first one did not work. You may also want to change the time of day of delivery and review the actual day of delivery.
5. This final email send, MUST NOT be the same email asset used in the previous email send. The easiest solution is to “save-as” the first email, rename it and add it to this step on the canvas.
Manage your event campaigns with ease.
If Eloqua has a sweet spot, managing event registrations is the one. Maximising the automation of Eloqua enables an organised marketing team to deliver an outstanding experience.
Even if you’re not so organised, there are some easy workarounds.
It’s unlikely you will have everything you need ready, at the same time, to launch a single campaign canvas. Two or three canvases will cover your needs for an event. If your creative team are a little slow getting the content you need for the various communications, you can break down the various stages of the event across multiple canvases.
Canvas A & B combined
If you have your invitation copy and artwork ready as well as the copy and artwork for the reminders, email and/or SMS, you can combine your pre-event communications onto a single campaign canvas as shown below.
What experience do you want to deliver?
There are many variables and changes that you could make to the sample canvas above. However the above is a great starting point. This canvas is based on you launching the campaign with a static segment where you “Add members once when the campaign is first activated.”
If you want to use a dynamic segment i.e. “Add members regularly until campaign is deactivated.” you will want to explore the Compare Date Decision Step in more detail so you can route campaign members depending on the date and time they enter the campaign.
Why don’t we use the “Submitted Form?” Decision Step?
The Submitted Form? decision step only asks the question ‘has a campaign member submitted the form?’. In the context of an event, it’s likely your contacts will forward the invitation to a colleague and suggest they register. Simply submitting the form for the event does not make them a ‘campaign member’.
SOLUTION: We use the Shared List, populated by the Form Processing Step, to determine who has actually registered for the event. You can then reference the Shared List on the canvas before you sent your various emails to ensure that someone who has already registered does not receive a second invitation.
TIP: You will also want to use the “Add to Campaign” Form Processing Step for event campaigns. This ensures everyone that submits the form becomes a campaign member.
TIP: More about Evaluation Periods
If you choose to use the Evaluation Period function on a Decision Step in place of the Wait Step, the set intervals that Eloqua “evaluates” your decision step will differ.
See below for the various re-evaluation periods.
- If the evaluation period is set to 0, Oracle Eloqua will evaluate the contact immediately.
- If the evaluation period is set for 24 hours or less, Oracle Eloqua will retry the evaluation every 10 minutes.
- If the evaluation period is set for more than 1 day, Oracle Eloqua will retry the evaluation every 30 minutes.
- If the evaluation period is set for more than 1 week, Oracle Eloqua will retry the evaluation once every hour.
CORRECTION: In the past, we understood these intervals to be every 15 minutes. The information above is from the Oracle Eloqua Help Centre and appears to be an update on what we understood was a set 15-minute interval regardless of the Evaluation Period selected.
Do you have questions about any of the points presented in this blog post?
Let’s connect & chat further.
Nurture leads with an ‘always on‘ Campaign Canvas.
In our experience, the fundamental approach of ‘nurturing’ is often played out the same way on the canvas regardless of the audience you’re targeting.
Nurturing campaigns generally consist of a number of emails delivered over a period of time. It could be on-boarding, lead nurturing or an education campaign. The basic format of the canvas is much the same for these campaigns.
The Art of Nurturing & Eloqua’s campaign Canvas
It\’s always best to start with a definition, what is “nurturing”? In the context of marketing automation, nurturing is the delivery of a campaign, over time, that delivers specific insight to people.
The topic for your nurturing campaign will differ, but a single email or even two emails, doesn’t really ‘cut it’ when it comes to nurturing.
In an Eloqua context, this means you have to use the Campaign Canvas or a multi-step campaign. A nurturing campaign should have a defined objective or desired outcome. If a Lead Nurturing campaign is your goal, then the outcome is typically Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL’s) delivered to the sales team.
If your nurturing campaign is an on-boarding campaign, then the goal is likely to provide campaign members with a set amount of knowledge on a specific topic.
“Always On” Campaigns
There is potentially a range of sources for your ‘always on’ campaign. Creating a campaign with a dynamic segment is needed to ensure people move from your ‘source of truth’ e.g. the CRM, to the campaign canvas.
The Start Date and End Date of your campaign should also reflect the time frame for your ‘always on’ campaign. Setting an end date for the year 2020 is easily done, however, you will want to have a business process in place to check these campaigns to ensure the messaging is still accurate.
How Can Eloqua help?
A number of functional areas of Eloqua make this possible. The first is to create a segment, based on filter criteria v’s relying on excel uploads. The segment is placed on the canvas as a dynamic segment which adds people to the campaign at regular intervals. See the tip above “More About Evaluation Periods“.
Using Eloqua to deliver Nurturing Campaigns
The example above shows an introduction section, point 1. We\’ve also highlighted here the Segment as “Always On”.
Sections 2 & 3 are repeats and this is one example of how you would build a nurturing campaign. Each section would carry a unique message and call to action (CTA). The wait times you apply will always vary, you know your audience best and should be guided by your own understanding of what you think is an acceptable level of engagement.
