Tips to help you design extraordinary, engaging campaigns with Eloqua’s multi-step campaign canvas
Eloqua User Group | Webinar Replay
The Campaign Canvas is at the heart of your Eloqua multi-step campaigns. Many have tried to copy it, but they continue to fail. Read on to discover why.
Introduction
In 2018 we hosted an Eloqua User Group webinar on the same topic as this month. That User Group replay is currently at 7,200+ views on YouTube and the associated blog post continues to be our #1 or #2 visited blog post each month. It’s clearly an in-demand topic and one that we’ve covered in numerous user group webinars and other blog posts. Just search for “Campaign Canvas” on our blog – you’ll find plenty to read and watch.
What’s different this month?
Additional functionality is available today when compared to Eloqua in 2018. Those are covered in detail. We’ve placed greater emphasis on the ‘thinking’ required before you start your campaign. While not every campaign will require a significant investment of thinking, you will getter better outcomes if you do some thinking before you activate your campaign.
You really need to watch the webinar, however here are some things for you to consider
If you’ve launched your campaign and find you’re constantly deactivating, making changes and then reactivated the canvas – something is a little broken with your process. There are changes you can make to your canvas without having to deactivate the campaign.
Changes where you will have to deactivate the Campaign
If you decide you want to alter the CX or flow of the campaign or choose to add new campaign elements to the canvas, you will need to deactivate the campaign.
When you deactivate* a campaign, Oracle Eloqua does the following:
- Changes the campaign’s state to DRAFT. The change is associated to the user who last modified the campaign.
- Stops moving campaign members through the campaign.
- Holds campaign members in their current step until you reactivate the campaign.
A deactivated campaign can remain in this DRAFT state and hold campaign members for 3 months. After that, Oracle Eloqua performs the following clean-up tasks on those campaign members Oracle Eloqua was holding:
- Removes the campaign members that were being held
- Removes the campaign entry record for those removed members and they no longer appear in the Campaign Entry report
- Identifies the removed campaign members in the Campaign Exit report with the exit type Removed due to Retention Policy.
*SOURCE: Eloqua Help Centre
Changes you can make without having to deactivate the Campaign
All of your various assets e.g. Emails, Landing Pages and Forms can all be adjusted once the campaign is live. Once you make those edits and attempt to save those changes, you will see a pop-up window as shown below:
In 99% of cases you will click on save, this message primarily serves as a reminder that the asset in question is currently part of a live campaign.
Moving Campaign Members
You can move Campaign Members from one element to another or remove them all together from the canvas without the need to deactivate the campaign. Moving campaign members can be helpful when unforeseen circumstances mean than an individual or a group of people need to have their experience adjusted .
The value of first-party data for Eloqua clients.
With the end of third-party cookies approaching, the importance of first-party cookies is growing. Amplifying your first-party data using marketing automation will be a key driver in future-proofing your marketing.
It’s the canvas elements and how you configure them that makes all the difference.
With four key functions on the canvas: 1. Audience 2. Assets 3. Decisions and 4. Actions you can tailor your campaign and deliver an extraordinary experience for your target audience. One critical piece of knowledge you need to acquire, is to know exactly which function Eloqua is going to perform based on the way you configure each element.
You will find a complete breakdown and description of each element here in the Eloqua Help Centre
If I could give you one tip about the Campaign Canvas
It’s actually some advice given to me when I first started using Eloqua in 1968! Ok, not quite that long ago.
It’s this, the canvas is extremely logical and will do exactly as you tell it to do.
The trick is that you need to have clarity around what it is you’re asking the canvas to do.
I had a client confess to me once that she checks her canvas by reading out loud, to herself, the flow of her campaign. I laughed and told her I do exactly the same thing.
For example, picture her sitting at her desk in front of her 27″ monitor and she says “Ok, my audience enters here and then they reach the first email and that has a signature assigned from Jackie Davidson. From there they move to a wait step which is configured to wait until 23rd October where we….”
The campaign canvas includes a wide variety of elements that you can use to create rich, multi-step campaigns that meet your marketing goals.
Each element has its own configuration needs: some elements, like Wait, are very straightforward, while others require a more complex configuration.
When you fully configure an element, it changes color. You must fully configure all elements before you can activate a campaign.
Release 21B, nothing huge or amazing, but one feature did get a “Wahooo” from one webinar attendee.
During the 21B release webinar the Oracle Eloqua Product Marketing team made the comment that they felt there was nothing overwhelming about this release because there are a range of bigger projects underway for subsequent releases. Nice little teaser there for Release 21C and perhaps 21D.
However we had to disagree with them, two new features are cause for some excitement.
“When using a segment filter or dynamic content, your timezone will be used for the filter criteria (such as today, tomorrow, yesterday, and so on). Previously, Eastern time zone was used.”
For those of outside the Americas, this is a long awaited improvement. We no longer have to use sites like timeanddate.com when Segmenting or creating rules that relate to dates. Eloqua will now support dates based on the time zone associated with your user profile.
To minimise form submission spam, the Oracle Eloqua form spam protection feature can help identify and limit form submissions that are from unverified sources. When spam protection is enabled, and the form is saved, the form HTML will be updated to add submission validation to forms on Eloqua landing pages (HTML needs to be updated manually on externally hosted forms). READ FURTHER HERE.
