Less-active or inactive Contacts are a challenge for all email marketers. The challenge is to re-engage these people, entice them back into activity, have them respond to offers by sharing your content and for your brand to be front and centre in their decision making processes.
Besides the commercial reasons, there are other reasons why you need to develop an ongoing strategy to engage your inactive contacts.
Eloqua clients know their annual license costs are associated to the size of their database. Of course the more contacts you have, the more Oracle charge. However, if those people are engaged and you’re deriving revenue from your audience the return on investment (ROI) is easy to justify. A savvy marketer wants to ensure they maximise the ROI calculation, this takes a combination of strategy and process.
The strategy is the mix of campaigns you execute to uncover and re-engage the inactive portion of your database. The process is what you do to remove people from your database once you’re exhausted all justification for them remaining in your database once they essentially become an “over-head”.
This Eloqua User Group focuses on uncovering the inactive contacts and provides suggestions for you to re-engage this group of people.
It’s helpful to get the team on the same page & this begins with agreement on criteria.
Some people will want to call the campaigns “win-back” – this implies the audience were once customers. Other will prefer “reactiviation” or “re-engagement”. I think these last two are better and more suited to the objective and topic of this Eloqua User Group subject matter.
Who qualifies for your re-engagement campaign?
If “re-engagement” is your objective then you need to define “inactivity”. One suggestion is to look at the length of your buying cycle and use that as a gauge.
For example, your business may require customers to renew contracts with you on a 12 month cycle. If a contact has not been sent any communications for 15+ months, something needs to be reviewed.
The other way to view re-engagement is to filter on those Contacts who have been sent any email in the past x months BUT not opened any emails in the same period.
“Inactive” is really two groups of people
- A group that you’re not engaging with i.e. you’re not sending any emails.
- A group of people to whom you are sending emails, but they’re not opening any of them – nothing, nada.
Suggested Eloqua Segment Criteria
The following are some generic Eloqua Segmentation criteria you could apply to building your target audience.
Suggested Segment criteria:
- Not sent any email in X months
- Not visited your website* in X months
- Not opened any email in X months
Exclusions are as important as inclusions:
- Marked as a Hard Bounceback as of now
- Unsubscribed Globally as of now
- Unsubscribed from a relevant Email Group as of now
*NOTE: It will be easier to use Eloqua Page Tagging to filter on general page visits. The Segment Filter Criteria “
This is where the rubber hits the road – take your ideas & build your campaigns.
Before you venture into the campaign design and build, it’s critical that you know who your audience is. Are they:
- Customers: they’re currently under contract and you’re invoicing them for products and/or services.
- Prospects: they’re yet to purchase from you or perhaps it’s been so long since they’ve purchased products or services, they essentially fall into the “prospect” segment.
Once you’ve built your Eloqua Segment, view the Contacts. Get an idea of who they are by, for example, job title, industry, job category, the specific products or services they’ve previously purchased from you. Then consider if Dynamic Content and additional personalisation could enhance your re-engagement campaigns.
Ask for specific feedback. If people aren’t engaging with your content, don’t be afraid to ask them why. Where did they sign up – how did they get into your database? Did their subscription not meet their expectations?
This will largely depend on your brand and tone of voice. Be careful if you have a large multicultural audience. What you find funny, could completely miss the target with some audiences.
The idea here is to advise the contact that you appreciate that your messages appear to be off-the-mark. You advise the Contact that you will unsubscribe them should they not re-subscribe.
The idea that a single email will re-engage your audience is probably more wishful thinking. We’d encourage you to see any of these strategies as journeys, a Campaign Canvas is the obvious choice.
Q&A – Your questions answered
Question:
“What is the frequency recommended for re-engagement campaigns?”
Daniel – Colombia
Answer:
- The frequency should be determined by your audience, which means it may vary once you’ve created the Eloqua Segment.
- If you factor in your buying cycle i.e. the length of the cycle, a similar matched period for re-engagement could be appropriate.
- You could consider an always-on re-engagement campaign with Segment filters dynamically adding audience members to the campaign.
Question:
“I need to know/ test if new subscribers are getting put on then correct segment list.
Kelly – Melbourne, Australia
Answer:
- The quickest way to determine if an individual contact is Subscribed to an Email Group is to view that Contact in Eloqua. Access the Contact and then the PREFERENCES tab.
- Your Form Processing Steps control which Email Group a person is subscribed to.
- Using your own email account to test your campaigns can be problematic because if you have previously subscribed, it may not be clear. TIP – note the “Last Change” date in the preferences tab, that will help. Remember it’s impossible to have the same email address in Eloqua twice. We’d suggest a unique email account will get the best results from your testing.
- We suggest creating a Gmail account for your testing. Watch the Replay to understand why Gmail is the best option, don’t bother with Hotmail, Yahoo etc.
Question:
“Is there a way Eloqua can ensure we are not over emailing people? Something on the canvas that can wait a few hours or a day if the contact has already received an email from us that day?”
Kath – Sydney, Australia
Answer:
- The first thing is to define what we mean by “over emailing”.
- If the person has subscribed to what you’re sending, perhaps you’re meeting their expectations.
- Use Eloqua’s Dashboards and Insight reports to help you determine if you really have a “problem” that needs action.
- Using a Shared Filter on the Campaign Canvas is a common solution. You can configure the Shared filter to ask the question e.g. “Has this contact been sent more than X number of emails in the past X hours/days/weeks/months etc. If the answer is yes, you can route them to a WAIT element and loop them back to the Shared Filter after X number of hours/days/weeks etc.
- Watch the Webinar Replay for a more detailed response.
Release 21A became available through late February and early March depending on your POD.
The list below is a highlights reel. Ongoing enhancements to various apps including the Eloqua/Salesforce integration app along with API enhancements and more can be accessed in Topliners. You may need to request access to the “Eloqua Insiders” group.
- Archiving* is now supported for folders within the Emails page and Forms page.
- Eloqua user records now include a last login time. You can export the last login time on the user export.
- A new Fix Images option is now available in the Source Editors and the Component Library editors. The Fix Images option changes image URLs from http to https.
- Control Form Submissions: Use this option to control whether a form can accept submissions.
- Redwood branding: In this update, the new styling has been applied to the dashboard launchpad page and eight Eloqua dashboards, including popular ones like Campaign Performance and Campaign Analysis.
* IMPORTANT: This feature is part of our Controlled Availability program. To request access to this feature, please log in to My Oracle Support and create a service request.
