Your Eloqua campaigns are just one touchpoint for your audience. Maintaining an on-brand experience is critical. Regardless of the size of your organisation, on-brand communications are important.
Saving time & creating a consistent, on-brand CX is achieved through more efficient use of Eloqua templates across emails, landing pages, forms and segments.
Just as we view the website as the “shop-front window”, your email comms deliver a 1-on-1 experience directly into a person’s inbox. Ensuring consistency for your audience, it’s critical that all Eloqua users have access to on-brand templates. This month we walked through various parts of Eloqua that help you make that as easy as possible for team members.
Each year the crew at Litmus publish the State of Email report, I find it essential reading for anyone peddling emails for a living.
You’ll find the report filled with updates on email clients, new features you need to be aware of as a digital marketer and more. You will also find comments and insight from thought leaders in the digital marketing industry.
Litmus State of Email 2020 report, excellent reading
“Every new channel wishes to be as successful as email, which is why so many have proclaimed themselves email-killers. RSS, mobile, Facebook, Slack—they all declared that email is dead.
But email marketing has only become more powerful and more relevant over the past two decades. The coming decade will be no different.
Looking to free themselves from their dependence on paid Facebook and Google ads, smart brands will invest heavily in building out their email marketing relationships and capabilities.” p.38
Chad S. White
Head of Research,
Oracle CX Marketing Consulting &
Author, Email Marketing Rules
How do we use Eloqua templates at Marketing Cube?
I like to tell people that the monthly Eloqua User Group is “templated to within an inch of its life”. By this I mean there are templates for all aspects of the webinar. This speeds the build time and helps ensure consistency from a CX point of view.
Which assets are templated?
Templates are updated from time to time. However, the main priority is to deliver a consistent experience for User Group members & guests.
- Campaign Canvas: We use two canvases, one to issue invitations and the second to capture registrations which then sends reminders to attend
- All Emails: Invitation/s, confirmation, reminders, “sorry we missed you” and “it was great to see you”
- Landing Pages: Registration & confirmation as well as the replay landing pages
- Forms: From time to time, different forms will be presented to our customers, v’s Oracle Eloqua customers i.e our prospects
- We also use a ZOOM template for the actual webinar.
Other components, not templated, but used regularly
These three components help enhance your personalisation and keep your content fresh and current.
- Dynamic Content: Where we have the underlying data to know which time zone a person is in, we present the webinar start time in their local time. Various images & copy changes are also presented based on the profile data of the audience member
- Shared Content: This helps us keep replay landing pages fresh & current, some are up to four years old. We can present calls to action for thought leadership and other webinars
- Content Blocks: A newer addition to our User Group campaign build, Content Blocks decrease email build time as we tailor aspects of the emails from month to month.
Perhaps the easier question should be “why shouldn’t we template this asset?”
While not all assets will or should be built from Templates, you’re doing yourself and the team a disservice by not considering where templates can be used. Think back to when you first started using Eloqua and you were tasked with sending an email to a specific audience/segment. Where did you start?
These tasks can be simplified through the use of templates.
Consider these time saving tips
You will likely have repetitive style campaigns where templates will help save time. Make sure a template is actually stored in the Eloqua Template Manager and is not simply a save-as of a past campaign.
Saving-as past assets requires that you thoroughly review them, which takes time and while the initial objective may be to “save time”, chances are you’ll actually spend more time compared to accessing a pre-built template.
Shared Content is a great way to keep “always-on” assets fresh & current.
Shared content is reusable content snippets that you can create once, then reuse in emails and landing pages. It allows you to “build once, re-use everywhere” for your most valuable common pieces of content.
You can include text, images, hyperlinks and field merges in shared content. For more personalised content that changes based on conditions e.g. profile data or data stored on a custom data object, use dynamic content instead.
You’ll find a detailed breakdown of Release 20C in the July blog post
Release 20C went live mid August for all customers. Enhancements included enhancements to Program Canvas, Content Blocks, SSL Certificate Management, Email HTML Export and more. Visit our July User Group blog post for more details.
