Delivering Always-on campaigns with Eloqua
June Eloqua User Group
Image Credit: Adrien Tutin on Unsplash
Overview
What’s the best way to reach out to your customers? With a trigger-based or always-on campaign, you can automatically reach out to people based on their activity. This way, you can be sure that your message is always relevant and timely.
Plus, it’s a great way to keep your customers engaged & interested in what you have to say. Ready to get started? Check out our tips for creating successful trigger-based & always-on campaigns.
Why this topic?
Automated marketing campaigns are a great way to keep your leads engaged and moving through your sales funnel. But one question I often get asked is, how do you determine the specific data that will serve as the trigger that places a unique contact into the campaign?
The answer is actually quite simple. First, you need to identify the goal of the campaign. Second, you need to determine what action you want your contacts to take in order to reach that goal. And third, you need to set up your campaign so that it automatically registers new contacts and adds them to the appropriate campaign based on their actions.
By following these simple steps, you can ensure that your automated marketing campaigns are highly targeted and effective.
Explore multiple use-cases for automation in your marketing
Once you start to build lead nurturing campaigns, welcome campaigns or even newsletter campaigns, you begin to realise than manually adding people to these campaigns is not a great solution.
After all, you’re an Eloqua client, you have a marketing automation platform.
Maximising Eloqua’s rich functionality
Part of the reason we host these complimentary webinars each month is that we know it’s a challenge for Eloqua Users to be completely up-to-speed on every aspect of the application.
It’s the same with most software applications. We decided to explore Always-on or Trigger-based campaigns because they typically mean additional thought into how people enter the campaign.
This requires the configuration of your Eloqua Segment and is best achieved with filter criteria, not uploading excel spreadsheets.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Once you begin to talk about and design a nurturing or welcome campaign, the discussion quickly turns to “how will people enter the campaign?”. That’s a great question. The answer to your question has to be data-driven.
That means creating Eloqua Segments with filters as opposed to manually uploading an excel spreadsheet to an Eloqua Segment. By using Segment Filters to build your audience, you can then take advantage of the automation you have available. The Segment filter will automatically pick up anyone who meets the filter criteria and then be added to your campaign, on a schedule you design. It could be every 15 minutes, once a day or once a week etc.
You may also include “auto-responder” emails in this topic. While not a traditional always-on campaign because the auto-responder email is typically sent following a Form submission e.g. after a person accesses your content, that person could be added to an always-on campaign that relates to the subject matter of the content they have just accessed. You could use the Form Processing Step “Add to Campaign” to do this.
A trigger campaign is when marketing messages are delivered after being activated by a:
- Certain date and/or time,
- A change in the state of current events,
- Action on behalf of the user, or
- Time elapsed since the last interaction.
Some real-life examples of always-on campaigns
- Re-engage people based on their lack of activity. e.g. has not opened any emails in the past X months.
- Target people based on their recent visit to a specific website page or Eloqua Landing Page.
- Automatically add people into welcome or onboarding campaigns if they’re new to your database or a product or service.
- Route people to the CRM as a Marketing Qualified Lead if their Lead Score reaches a certain point.
You control who enters your always-on campaign based on your Eloqua Segment filter criteria.
Trying to define the “right” people is really more of a strategic discussion followed by a data discussion. Once you have a profile of the type of person who should be added to your always-on campaign, the discussion then needs to focus on the underlying data you have to be able to build that audience.
Your target audience can be built on profile data, observed behaviour or implied interests.
- Profile data: This is the data you have stored against the Lead or Contact in your CRM, the Eloqua Contact or associated to an Eloqua Contact on an Eloqua Custom Object.
- Observed behaviour: This is the Digital Body Language™ Eloqua captures for you and associates to the Eloqua Contact. e.g. Email Clickthoughs, Landing Page or Website/CMS page visits, form submissions etc.
- Implied interests: This is much like the observed behaviour, but you’re going to draw some conclusions based on the behaviour of the person. e.g. A person visited 4 website pages in the past 2 days for Product X. You know they’re not a customer and they have previously attended a webinar on this topic. All of these points of data, combined, can be identified using Segment Filter Criteria. Together, they’re the “trigger” for your always-on campaign.
It’s just as important to exclude some people from your always-on campaigns.
The ability to exclude a range of people based on certain filter criteria is sometimes forgotten as the campaign is in design mode. The usual suspects for exclusion would be the following:
- Globally unsubscribed contacts
- Perhaps Eloqua Email Group level unsubscribed contacts
- Contacts who have previously Hard Bounced
Beyond these somewhat generic Eloqua filters, your organisation will likely have custom fields & values that may require exclusion. For example, if your always-on nurture campaign targets prospective customers, you’ll want to exclude current customers.
This month’s Eloqua Hack
Accessing Eloqua in multiple languages
Did you know that you can change the language used in the Eloqua interface without modifying your browser settings? If you’re supporting Eloqua users across multiple geographies and languages, you may find it helpful to view Eloqua as your users do e.g. taking screenshots of Eloqua to share for internal documentation etc.
Eloqua supports a wide variety of languages, and customers occasionally ask how to modify the language settings without changing the browser settings. The good news is there is a very quick and easy way to accomplish this!
Eloqua supports the following languages
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- Finnish
- French (Canadian and European)
- German
- Hungarian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brazilian)
- Russian
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Turkish
How to change the interface language
By adding a “culture=LANG” parameter to the Eloqua login in URL, you can change the interface in Eloqua to display any of Oracle’s supported languages by adding the desired two-letter ISO code.
For example: if you want to change Eloqua to show in Dutch instead of English, you would set the URL to:
https://login.eloqua.com/?culture=nl <– notice the addition of “culture=nl”.
SOURCE: Special thanks to Jody Mooney @ Oracle Eloqua Product Management for this hack from Topliners.
If your audience feels like they’re being digitally stalked, you need to re-think your CX. This needs to be balanced with your objective to engage at the right time with relevant content.
There is a range of ways to manage your trigger/always-on campaigns. Adding and removing Campaign Members from a Shared List is a helpful process & can be used across other segments as an inclusion or exclusion. Use Wait steps to slow the delivery of your triggered content. Remember you can remove people from a campaign as easily as you add them.
This campaign enables our sales or service teams to send an automated email to a person, inviting them to subscribe to the Eloqua User Group following a discussion. The email come from the User Group host and references the discussion they had with our team member.
This always-on campaign sources campaign members from the CRM. CRM users add Leads or Contacts to the CRM Campaign, they’re then brought into the Segment via integration & added to the campaign above. Don’t forget to consider the CX as you build your always-on campaigns. You don’t want people to feel bombarded. Think through the likelihood of your email being sent at 2:30 am on a Saturday, is that the desired experience? You can control many of these aspects of your campaign
Do you have questions about any of the points presented in this blog post?
Let’s connect & chat further.
What’s new? What’s coming soon?
With Release 22B you will have a new metric available in Insight – Auto Click. It’s added from 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.
IMPORTANT: Auto-Click metrics will only start being captured after the 22B update. Auto-Opens became available in Insight during Release 22A, mid-February 2022.
You may find our recent Blog Post “Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection: What does it mean for Oracle Eloqua email marketers & what to do now” of interest as it explains Auto-Opens and Auto-Clicks.
Release Highlights
- Updates to Oracle CX Apps for Eloqua are now scheduled as monthly maintenance and do not require any platform downtime.
- If you are an Eloqua administrator, you will be able to limit the number of sales emails that a rep can send to the same contact over a period of time.
- Oracle Eloqua is moving toward securing all customer-branded domains with Eloqua-owed DV SAN certificates. This will include automatic renewal of the certificates prior to their expiration. Eloqua clients on PODS 6 and 7 will have access to this feature first. If you have questions, please contact us today.
In Summary
In this episode, we looked at the “mechanics” of how to build your always-on or trigger-based campaigns. We explored your Eloqua Segment design, ensuring you include and exclude the right people. We then looked at a range of tips to help you with Campaign Canvas design, helping deliver a better CX.
In our next episode – July 2022, we’re going to look closer at the Campaign Canvas and ways to ensure the CX you deliver is aligned to your strategy. Your content is always king, but we need to ensure the CX you deliver meets the objectives of your always-on campaign.
Thank you for reading this blog.
