Creating a more unique experience using Eloqua’s Email & Landing Page Design Editors
April Eloqua User Group Webinar.
Image Credit: Photo by ANTONI SHKRABA from Pexels
Overview
Understanding the need to personalise campaigns is generally not up for discussion, that’s a given. The key part of personalised communications is knowing your data and being able to use Eloqua to deliver the personalisation.
Why this topic?
Following the last two User Group webinars, The Data that Matters in February and Working with the Data that Matters in March, it made sense to take the next step.
This month we focussed on using your data to personalise your Eloqua Emails and Landing Pages.
We looked specifically at how Dynamic Content can help you turn a single static email (or landing page) into many unique, targeted and personalised emails.
Avoid putting the “cart before the horse”!
Your need for campaign personalisation will typically come about from two scenarios. Your data sources will vary, you need to work with the broader team in your organisation to ensure Eloqua has access to key data to help personalise your campaigns.
1. Engaging a known audience
These are the people you currently have in your instance of Eloqua. You have some profile data and Digital Body Language™. From these two sources you can personalise using Dynamic Content, Field Merges and also more targeted Segments.
2. Engaging an unknown audience
In this scenario, you’re planning ahead for “what may come”. Lead Generation & Lead Nurturing campaigns generally fall into this scenario. You will build Dynamic Content and use Field Merges to personalise your assets based on the data you’re hoping to capture as people progress through your campaign. A key focus on your defaults will be critical in this scenario.
Your ability to personalise should come from a range of in-house, first-party data sources.
“A recent EY/Financial Times survey of approximately 200 senior marketing executives showed that 77% of the respondents believe the marketing function needs a stronger voice in setting corporate strategy as owners of the customer journey. Areas like data-driven marketing, e-commerce, and CRM cannot afford to be led in silos given how quickly friction must come out of the customer journey to accelerate topline growth.”*
SOURCE: 5 Ways Marketing Leaders Can Drive More Value in 2022 | Janet Balis | HBR.org 23 February 2022
Let’s go back to the basics for a moment.
In order to get the most out of your Eloqua Campaigns, you really need to understand how the Design Editors work and the depth of their functionality. It’s helpful that the interface to design your Emails and Landing Pages is essentially the same, it makes building an email or a landing page quite easy. You will find a range of resources in the Eloqua Help Centre for both the Email Design Editor and the Landing Page Design Editor.
The use of Templates will save you time & deliver continuity to your audience.
Simply “saving-as” a past email is not a template. Taking and email that has been used in a campaign and contains links etc and saving that as a template, is not best practice.
A template should not contain any hyperlinks besides standard hyperlinks like the link to your home page, behind your logo. Or perhaps, a standard link to your Contact Us page.
The use of Lorem Ipsum as placeholder copy is a great idea, for example –
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.”
It’s also a good idea to restrict access to the Manage Templates option found on the Email and Landing Page home pages.
This month’s Eloqua Hack
A smarter way to view your data.
When working with the various personalisation features of Eloqua, it’s often helpful to be able to not only view Contacts but to also view specific fields and the data they contain. You have up to 250 custom Contact fields and 60+ system fields. Trying to find what you need across 300+ columns of data is not a productive use of your time. There is a better way.
A smarter way to view your data.
The creation of Contact Views requires Administration level access. They take about 5 minutes to create, so it’s not onerous for your Eloqua Admin. It will take you longer to write the email to your Admin describing what you want than it will for the Admin to create the new Contact View.
Why are Contact Views helpful?
One of the easiest examples relates to events. As you invite people to register for an in-person event, it’s highly likely you will want to create name tags for registrants.
You can go to the Form Submission Data and export the data, but it may not contain the information you need for name tags. I always add event registrants to a Shared List and then view registrants in the Shared List. From the Shared List I can adjust the Contact View to what we call “Event Registration (INTERNAL)” and then export it to excel. All the data I need to produce name tags is there with no need to delete 295+ columns from excel.
What is a Contact View?
“A Contact view is an arrangement of contact fields that can be customized. Contact views enable you to view specific contact fields according to your preferences.”
SOURCE: Eloqua Help Centre
Contact Views are available across Eloqua where you’re viewing a list of Contacts. Where you have the ability to Export Contacts when viewing them, you can adjust the Contact View and then export the Contacts to have the matching columns headings in excel that match the Contact View you’ve created,
What is the difference between Eloqua’s Dynamic Content and Field Merge?
Dynamic content and Field Merge both use Oracle Eloqua data to determine the output of content. A Field Merge display Oracle Eloqua data directly, whereas dynamic content uses the data to determine which version of the content to display. It is also worth noting that field merges can be included in dynamic content.
Dynamic Content
You can use data from the Eloqua Contact and Eloqua’s Custom Objects to drive your Dynamic Content. While not used as much as the two sources listed above, you can also Compare Account Fields and Linked Records in an Event.
A quick example…
You have 40,000 Contacts and you have good quality data telling you which industry these people are in. You can use Dynamic Content to adjust the hero image in your email (or a Landing Page) to present an image that represents specific industries. A subtle way to personalise your content. Where you don’t have the industry field populated in amongst the 40,000 Contacts, your default will be presented.
Field Merge e.g. “Hello First.Name”
The most used example of a Field Merge is a Contact’s name. However, the Field Merge is a very powerful personalisation tool and is used in Emails, on Landing Pages and with Forms.
Essentially, what you’re doing is taking a field value from a person’s Eloqua Contact, Account record or a related Custom Object and inserting it (merging it) into the email, landing page or form.
It’s not uncommon that you might have multiple versions of a Field Merge for a single field. You’ll have multiple versions because perhaps you want the default value assigned to the e.g. First Name field merge to behave differently, depending on your campaign and where the Field Merge is being used.
Your personalisation approach will vary on the type of campaigns you’re creating.
This month we walked User Group members through an example of a recent newsletter we created and showed them how and why we chose to use Dynamic Content. Our approach is to take a detailed look at our known subscribers. By “known” I mean those people who have proactively subscribed to a specific newsletter at some stage. We know various things about these people and it’s that data I use to ascertain the level of personalisation I will or won’t use for the latest edition of the newsletter.
Another example of personalisation
As you build an always-on campaign, your primary lead nurturing campaign is a great example, your approach to personalisation will differ. Your newsletter subscribers are known to you.
Those entering a lead nurturing campaign may be less known to you or in fact, brand new contacts e.g. you have minimal data or you don’t have as much first-party data associated with these new contacts.
This means you need to think a little outside the box and plan for the likely data that you will obtain as these people move through your nurturing campaign.
The secret to your success will be…
…the amount of time you schedule to review the performance of the campaign. Personalisation is only as good as the data you have to drive it. If a person is five emails into your nurturing campaign and you’ve not invited them to complete a form to access something, anything, then you’re facing an uphill battle.
You may have processes in place where CRM profile/contact data flows into Eloqua. However, that assumes someone in your organisation is in contact with the person/lead and obtaining the data and then enriching the profile.
What’s new? What’s coming soon?
If you’re new to Eloqua, releases arrive in the middle of each quarter e.g February, May, August and November. You can access previous updates with detailed information here.
A little more detail about “Auto Click”
A new metric, Auto Click, is added to the Email Clickthrough Subject Area. You can use this metric to view the number of click-throughs detected as being auto-generated by scanning or privacy tools. These click-throughs are not included in the Total Clickthroughs metric or any associated click-through rates. Auto Click metrics will only start being captured after the 22B update.
At this stage “Auto Opens” and we assume “Auto Clicks” will need to be added to a custom report so you can see the data. In other words, these new Insight Subject Areas are yet to be added to the default reports you have access to.
If you’re new to Eloqua, click here to access high-level detail about Oracle Insight (OBIEE), a description of the two user levels and some short Help Centre videos to help you get started.
Release 22B Highlights
- Audience Split Decision Step on Program Canvas: Split contacts down different paths by percentages. Last release this function was added to the Campaign Canvas.
- New Metric – Auto Clicks: Captures click-throughs detected as being clicked by a scanning or privacy tool.
- Engage Send Limits: Admins can limit the number of sales emails a rep can send to the same contact over a period of time. Helpful to prevent that one Sales Rep trying to be their own marketing team.
- Oracle Commerce and Marketing Campaign Integration: Increase traffic and conversion rate for eCommerce with new Oracle Commerce integration for Eloqua.
- SMS Enhancements and more!
Re-visit Episodes 1 & 2 of this Personalisation Series.
Episode 1: The data that matters.
Episode 2: Working with the data that matters.
The data that matters
Marketers are shifting their focus from 3rd-party data to 1st party, but there’s plenty of work that needs doing before you can start collecting valuable insights. We explored this month in our Eloqua User Group how gateways and other capture methods can help marketers get the most out of content despite its source!
Get started today, a more personal approach to your marketing.
How do we action hyper-personalisation in a high-value B2B environment? Is it as simple as adding an Eloqua field merge to an email? Watch this replay to discover more.
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