Lead scoring is much more than delivering MQLs to the sales team
3-part series | Episode 3
Eloqua User Group Webinar
Overview
If you’re not using Lead Scoring to personalise your campaigns, you’re missing out on a valuable tool to target your more engaged audience members.
Why this topic?
After taking you on a journey through “Designing targeted experiences with Eloqua‘s multi-step campaigns,” it only made sense to end with this topic.
Assuming you already have an Eloqua Lead Score model set up, we’re here to offer some helpful tips and suggestions on utilising that model to create audiences and customise the experience on the campaign canvas.
We’re about to take your targeted marketing efforts to a whole new level! Get ready to harness the power of Eloqua’s Lead Score model and use it to its fullest potential to deliver personalized experiences to your audience. Let’s dive in and discover how to build your audience and tailor your campaigns for maximum success.
Getting more from your Eloqua Lead Scoring
Over the years I’ve sat with many Eloqua clients to facilitate a process to arrive at a completed Lead Score model. In that process, many clients come to the realisation that their data needs some work. They get excited about being able to build a certain aspect into their data model only to discover the quality of data is lacking.
Three things generally come out of lead scoring workshops:
- A new project kicks off to clean data. A key part of that project is to revisit forms and other entry points to Eloqua. It’s the old adage “garbage in – garbage out”.
- A CRM integration project kicks off as the team realises that if the CRM users, typically the sales team can’t see the lead score against Leads and Contacts, the value of the lead score is diminished.
- In parallel with the CRM integration project, the need for Marketing to obtain feedback from the sales team about the quality of the MQLs provided is key. This is usually in the form of a reason code to support why a Lead was rejected or an Opportunity was Closed/Lost.
The other golden nugget is covered in this Eloqua User Group
This month we covered how to use your lead score model data to drive personalisation. You can use the leads core in your audience/segment build and also on the campaign canvas. The most common application of a lead score in the flow of a campaign is to increase or change the level of outbound communications in line with heightened engagement by an individual.
Keep reading to discover more, or access the webinar replay.
Understanding co-dynamic lead scoring & engagement.
We started the webinar by explaining “Eloqua co-dynamic lead scoring”. Eloqua provides you two parameters when building your lead score model. 1. Access to Profile data and 2. Access to Engagement data.
You could argue that recency is a third and important aspect of your lead score model. Why? Well, it takes into consideration how “recently” a person performed an activity. For example, if they opened an email 12 months ago, that’s good, but if they opened 5 emails and clicked on 4 links in the past 28 days, that’s a much better indicator of interest than an activity performed 12 months ago.
Eloqua Lead Scoring is not…
An accumulative scoring process. By that, I mean you don’t assign a score to set actions or profile data. e.g. opened an email = 5 points, clicked on an email = 10 points or submitted a form = 20 points.
A common approach by other platforms is to consider a person a marketing-qualified lead when they reach 100 points without taking into consideration recency.
Eloqua lead scoring is…
A dynamic and constantly changing value. Scores are assigned ranging from A1 through to D4. Each Eloqua contact is scored every 60 minutes if they’ve completed an activity e.g. opened an email. Regardless of the activity, the entire database is scored every 24 hours.
The constant re-scoring of your contacts takes into consideration any changes to both profile data and engagement data. This is co-dynamic lead scoring.
Key contact engagement & account retention.
We now move into looking at ways to personalise your campaign using your active Lead Score models. In the course of the many campaigns you launch, they will generally be multi-channel and a good number of the lead capture campaigns you run, will make their way into Eloqua.
If your marketing automation strategy is well connected to your lead capture strategy there’s an area we see people often miss. You’re lead score consists of profile data, and profile points that you’ve determined are of high value. e.g. the industry and person works in, their job category, and perhaps their job title. For universities, the primary course of interest for prospective students is critical.
The area we see people miss is the connection between the forms they build and the profile data they’ve determined are of high value. It seems obvious, right? Don’t just build the same forms over and over, personalise your forms with questions you don’t already know the answer to.
Help sales prioritise their time & the people they contact
Your sales team are talking to prospects every day. Those conversations could be personalised if sales had access to a person’s Digital Body Langauge. They can, with Eloqua Profiler.
You can easily add the Lead Score to your CRM/Eloqua integration. This provides sales with a filter they can apply to their CRM Lead and/or Contact lists and reports allowing them to bring more highly qualified people to the surface, making more efficient use of their time.
For account retention, consider creating an Account “engagement” score
Eloqua’s out-of-the-box Lead Score Model function is targeted to Contacts, not to an entity e.g not to a business or organisation.
However, you have some options when it comes to Account scores and closely aligned Account-Based Marketing. See below for those options.
Account engagement in Eloqua.
As marketers chase after the same people with the same tactics, traditional marketing has become less worth the time—and the money.
Email outreach worked until spam clogged up inboxes. Content marketing worked until everybody started to put out sub-standard material. Search engine marketing worked until it became inundated with new players clamouring for attention. Even inbound tactics aren’t delivering the results they once did.
As the need for performance continues to climb, so does the status of account-based marketing (ABM), especially in the B2B sphere.
Aggregate the Contact Lead Score to create an Account Engagement score.
Eloqua’s Lead Score produces a score that displays as e.g A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B2 etc. The A, B, C, & D relate to the profile of the person. The numbers 1, 2, 3 & 4 relate to engagement. 1 being the most highly engaged, 4 the least engaged.
For the purpose of an Account Engagement score, you need to focus on the numerical values. However, this can leave you wanting because you may have individuals with a Lead Score of D1. D1 means you don’t have enough profile data to determine if they’re a right fit for your organisation, however, the engagement is excellent.
Oracle Eloqua Advanced Intelligence (AI) Cloud Service
Account Intelligence leverages the Account Engagement Score to give you a clear-cut view of each account’s level of engagement. Each account is assigned an Account Engagement Score, from 0 to 100 (the higher the score, the more engaged an account is).
Additionally, Eloqua’s Account Performance dashboard provides a single view of an account’s marketing activities, and the Top Account by Engagement Score chart compares an account’s engaged contacts to engaged activities.
What’s new? What’s coming soon?
Release 23B is due in May. There is a range of new features across multiple areas of the platform. The big news is the Controlled Availability of Redwood Design.
What is Redwood Design?
Release Highlights
Please note some of the Release 23B features are in Controlled Availability, this generally means your Eloqua Admin (or Marketing Cube) will have to submit a Service Request with My Oracle Support to request access to this feature.
- Redwood Design | Controlled Availability (CA). You will need to log a Service Request with My Oracle Support in order to have Redwood activated on your instance. You can request it be limited to specific users or available to all users. Our advice is to turn it on for all users. Users can turn Redwood on and off during the Controlled Availability period.
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Reporting API enhancements | Controlled Availability (CA). You can now access Orale Eloqua Insight data using the new Reporting API. RESTful API build using the OData protocol. You can extract reporting data directly from the Insight data warehouse. It makes the data highly consumable – accessible programmatically and/or through standard interfaces and supports data lake/data warehouse integrations. For example, it provides native connections through standard interfaces (i.e Excel).
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In-app Certificate Expiration Alerts | For those without Automated Certificate Management enabled, a new in-app alert banner directly within Eloqua will activate 30 days in advance of any of your 3rd party, customer-owned certificates expiring as a proactive warning.
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Automated Certificate Management – In App Alerts | For those with Automated Certificate Management enabled, a new in-app alert banner directly within Eloqua will activate if any domains have DNS configuration errors. Eloqua clients on POD 1 & 2 will have the automated certificate management available by Release 23D (November), or perhaps by Release 23C (August).
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Program Canvas Enhancements | Move Step Members by Status. A new drop-down with every status will enable the user to select all records with a specific status and move those members. In addition, view Step Members in Program Canvas will now include the Source Campaign Id.
This is important, you may be losing people & they didn’t actually unsubscribe.
- Intermediary Unsubscribe Landing Pages | For clients who choose to offer a single-click global unsubscribe, Eloqua will now offer you the ability to add an intermediary unsubscribe landing page. This new feature will help protect you against unintentional unsubscribes resulting from email scanning tools that click on all links in your emails, including your opt-out/global unsubscribe link.
Unless you have been advised by in-house or external counsel that you must offer single-click global unsubscribe, we would strongly discourage you from offering this feature. At a minimum, you can use the out-of-the-box Eloqua subscription centre. However, the creation of an Eloqua Preference Centre is a much better solution.
Our top 5 tips to enhance campaign personalisation using your Lead Score.
- Build and activate a Lead Score Model.
- Combine your Lead Nurture strategy and your Lead Score strategy to ensure they’re working towards the same goal.
- Consider creating Segment Templates that include your Lead Score Model and score. It will help ensure you don’t forget to use it.
- Create Shared Filters with specific scores for use in Segmentation and on your Campaign Canvas. For example, one Shared Filter may be called “Highly Qualified Leads” and contain all contacts with a score of A1, A2, B1 or B2. A second Shared Filter may be called “Least Qualified Leads” and include contacts with a score of C3, C4, D3 or D4.
- Review your Lead Score model at least every 3-4 months. This review should always include feedback from sales about the general quality of leads marketing has sent through as Marketing Qualified Leads.
Marketing Automation Agency Services
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