In episode 2 of our 3 part series, “Driving event registration success with Eloqua” we walked through an in-person event at a single location. Whether it’s a lunch meeting for 15 key executives or an all-day event for 1,000 guests/students, Eloqua is a pivotal part of your event registration process.
Will your next in-person event be “COVID-19 Safe”? It will likely be an expectation of guests & possibly a requirement of your venue.
While COVID -19 may impose certain requirements during the registration process, there’s no reason those requirements have to be onerous. Registration is of course just one part of the process, who actually turns up at your event is generally the key piece of data that needs to be captured and recorded.
QR codes have become second nature as a check-in process across Australia during the pandemic. While I for one thought QR codes had gone the way of Microsoft’s Zune, they have made one of the most remarkable comebacks in the history of technology. We provide a few examples of how QR codes can help you check people in at your in-person event, address the need to capture details of walk-ins and have it all captured in Eloqua.
Determine your event strategy first, then plan your Eloqua campaign to best suit the audience
Your approach will likely differ depending on whether your event is a small executive group or a larger event with a target audience of a thousand customers. Generally, we see three main approaches for driving registrations to in-person events. If it’s a small targeted event, it’s likely you will use a blend of hyper-personalised emails along with telephone calls from account owners within your business. With a slightly extended audience or depending on the type of event, you may be happy for your targeted audience to extend an invitation to colleagues. For larger events, you may combine both the previous approaches and also target a group to act as influencers and share your event across their social channels.
Hyper-personalise at scale
The most common objection I hear from Eloqua users when I encourage them to personalise more of their campaigns is, “…but our data isn’t perfect”. Well, do something about it. Eloqua provides you with a range of data tools to cleanse and manage imperfect data.
If your “source” system for some of that data is the problem (e.g. CRM or ERP), let’s chat about how we can help you with a strategy to get your data into good shape. Remember, it will never be perfect, but it can certainly be manageable.
Do you need a hand with your source data? Eloqua can help. Contact us today.
Oracle CX Marketing Agency Services
The team at Marketing Cube has been supporting Oracle CX Marketing customers since 2007. We’ve been using Eloqua ourselves for that period and provided agency services as well as traditional application support for close to 100 customers across a wide range of industries & geographies. If you’ve been using Oracle CX Marketing for some time and are looking for agency services e.g. strategic services, end-user coaching/training, campaign support and more, contact us today to talk further about how we can help you.
Your Eloqua Form Design Editor is key to driving your CX.
The configuration of your Eloqua Form will drive much of the automation for your campaign. How you configure the form will also depend on whether you invite people to “register” or to “RSVP”.
The Eloqua Campaign Canvas is the tool to help you deliver a simple & elegant registration.
In episode one we covered campaign canvas design for a webinar. The process of issuing invitations, capturing registrations and then reminders is essentially the same for an in-person event as covered in this months user group. If you need assistance or support with the design of your campaign canvas, contact us today and we can discuss your needs in more detail.
RSVP requires a little more thought & configuration.
The degree to which you configure your form to manage the RSVP process will depend largely on the overall CX you want to deliver.
Once people RSVP Yes or No, do you want to provide a way for those people to change their mind at some stage before the event is due to take place?
Will you provide people with the ability to RSVP directly from the email i.e. a “RSVP Yes” and “RSVP No” button or a single “RSVP Now” button? The answer to this question impacts the CX you’ll be able to deliver.
The critical step in this process is to make a decision about which registration process you want to deliver, before you start building your campaign.
Considerations for your registration process.
I’d suggest finding the answers to these questions before you begin your Campaign Canvas design.
- Are you asking people to “register” or, to “RSVP”?
- How many invitations will you send?
- Will invitations be sent from the company or from a person?
- Do you need to capture dietary requirements?
- Are you inviting people to submit a question when they register?
- Are you offering a SMS/Text reminder?
- How many reminder emails will you send?
- Will you be inviting feedback from attendees about the event?
Do you need a hand with any of these parts of your next in-person event? Contact us today.
Maximise your registration CX with Eloqua Landing Pages & Eloqua Forms
Did you know Eloqua users create more Landing Pages than they do emails? Eloqua Landing Pages provide a unique opportunity to provide a hyper-personalised experience through the registration process.
But we have to use our CMS!
Yeah, ok I hear the above excuse all the time, along with others like…
- “We need one place for all web pages”
- “We need all web assets to be on brand”
- “Eloqua Landing Pages don’t look like our website”
Just because you’ve always done something one way doesn’t mean you have to continue doing it the same way. In a world of hyper-personalisation it’s time to think outside the square and look at the range of tools you have available to drive a magical CX. Your Eloqua Landing Page Design Editor is one such tool.
There’s no reason your Eloqua Landing Pages can’t be “on-brand”. With a little CSS magic, no one will know the difference.
Remember, the main reason you’ll want to use Eloqua Landing Pages is to drive conversion i.e. capture form submissions.
Why use Eloqua Landing Pages over your CMS?
Some key benefits for you to consider are:
- Dynamic Content allows you to present images and copy relating uniquely to each known visitor. You can adjust Dynamic Content based on e.g. a person’s industry, are they a customer or prospect, a student or future student etc. Remember you can use Eloqua Contact or Custom Object Data to drive Dynamic Content.
- Use Field Merges to enhance personalisation. At a minimum you can greet a known person by name.
- Eloqua Forms on Eloqua Landing Pages will pre-populate with known Contact data. You can also take advantage of Progressive Profiling allowing you to only ask questions that you don’t already know the answer to.
The final speaker at your event shouldn’t be the end of the “campaign”.
As Eloqua users, there’s no excuse to send generic post-event communications. You can easily achieve the most basic messaging with “It was great to see you” and “sorry we missed you”. The best way to achieve this is to upload External Activities tagging each person as either “attended”, “no-show” or perhaps “walk-in”. Whichever tag you assign will relate directly to the segmentation and messaging you require.
Should you gate your post-event assets?
Great question. I’d suggest the answer is not binary, it may depend on a range of factors. The most obvious one will depend on the value of the content you’re sharing. If it’s a PDF of the presentation given at the event, maybe those who attended just click and download.
However, no-shows have to go via a form in order to access the content. If you captured walk-ins and have tagged them as a “Walk-in” using External Activities, I’d suggest they should definitely access your content via a form so you can build their profile.
Why you should use External Activities.
“External assets are non-Eloqua activities performed by your contacts or prospects. These assets can be imported for use in Oracle Eloqua campaign reporting. In addition, data associated with these activities can be passed to your CRM systems.
External activities can be displayed in Eloqua Profiler. This feature provides a 360-degree view of a contact’s activities across all Oracle Eloqua functions, including email sends, web visits, and external activities.
External activities can also be used as part of your CRM integration allowing you to track responses to all campaign activities and export them to your CRM.”*
*SOURCE: Eloqua Help Centre
When creating “External Activities” I’d suggest you think about how you typically want to segment audiences from those activities. For example, from an in-person event you will probably want to Segment attendees as “Attended”, “No-Show” and perhaps “Walk-in”. These three values are your “External Activity” and they belong to an “External Activity Type” called e.g. “In-person Event”
Do you need a hand with External Activities & smarter Segmentation? Contact us today.
Enhanced security for blind form URL’s, SSL certificate management & more.
The main focus of the 21C release is security with enhancements to help make PII (personally identifiable information) contained in a URL private, this is typically associated with a blind form submission.
A new SSL Certification Management option will be available shortly after the 21C update. This screen will allow you to view details and expiry dates for the certificates that you own. You will notice a column titled Eloqua Owned. This is part of a planned enhancement in a future release to secure new domains with Eloqua owned certificates.
You can watch the Eloqua Product Marketing Team 21C Release replay here.
We filter through Oracle Eloqua Release details, then deliver what you need directly to your inbox.
Oracle Eloqua Releases take place once per quarter, typically in the second month of the quarter i.e. February, May, August & November.
As details become available, our Customer Success team read through the documentation and consolidates the most important information into this subscription.
