An engaging lead nurturing campaign can build brand loyalty & drive better quality MQLs
July Eloqua User Group Webinar | Episode 2
3 part series | Lead generation, capture & nurturing
Overview
Once you have your ideal client profile in place, you’re in a good position to develop a lead nurturing campaign.
About episode 2
This month we went back to the basics to understand why we develop nurturing campaigns in the world of high-value, complex buying decisions.
Generally, you may see this as a “B2B” environment, however what some refer to as B2C is not all shoes and handbags.
A consumer looking to buy a new home, a new car or explore a university education is arguably also participating in a high-value, complex buying process.
Keep reading to learn more.
For marketers in high-value, complex selling environments, the Lead Nurture campaign is a critical program to have in place
In a complex selling environment, nurturing helps to keep your brand front and centre as your prospect makes a buying decision and supports those buyers through each step of their buyer’s journey with timely and relevant content.
Adrian Jones | CEO & founder Marketing Cube
Understanding your buyer, tips to help design your audience & craft your message based on personas & Digital Body Language
In episode one, we delved into the functional aspects of Eloqua that aid in creating a comprehensive Ideal Client Profile. This includes implementing progressive profiling with Eloqua forms and crafting segments based on the digital behaviour of your target audience.
Enhance your marketing strategy with these tips and more.
Enhancing your relationship with the sales team can be an objective for lead nurturing.
In a recent blog post from McKinsey & Co. they reported “B2Bs with the fastest rates of revenue growth are far more likely to equip reps with deal-level insights and account-specific customer intelligence. Data-driven insights can also help leaders align and allocate coverage and resources more effectively.“*
A good deal of the data-driven insights are delivered to the sales team by the marketing team. If you’re unable to display those insights to the sales team in the CRM, there is room for improvement.
Eloqua users can deploy Eloqua’s Sales Tools to display the relevant data in the CRM, where the sales and service teams can see it, review it and act on it.
Done well, your Eloqua + CRM integration can deliver data to help enhance CRM reporting.
The pandemic has converted B2B buyers to e-commerce in a big way. B2B sellers need new capabilities to meet their new expectations.*
*SOURCE: Building next-generation B2B sales capabilities | McKinsey & Co.
Match your intended audience with your ideal client profile
The key step in this part of the process is to clearly define your audience. Our focus is “lead nurturing”, people who are yet to procure your products or services.
You will find exclusions an important part of this process. Assuming Eloqua is integrated with your CRM platform, campaign entry will be automated on a schedule that you define e.g. hourly, daily weekly etc.
Don’t forget exclusions, define those who should NOT enter your lead nurture campaign
Some standard considerations for campaign exclusions could be:
- current customers, clients, students or members
- ex-customers, clients, students or members. How much time must pass before a customer is considered an “ex-customer”?
- What about prospects who have been through a previous lead nurturing campaign?
A common dilemma
We’ve helped many clients design and build lead nurture campaigns. A common glitch is what to do with contacts who are partway through the existing lead nurture campaign.
If the creation of a new lead nurture campaign coincides with a re-branding or branding refresh, mots
What do our clients say?
The team at Marketing Cube supported Corporate Traveller Canada and USA to develop a detailed and full-scope strategic approach to our automation practices.
Once we’d created detailed personas and mapped each customer journey, Marketing Cube then supported our automation strategy to best utilize these outputs strategically.
– Carré Le Page
VP Marketing | Corporate Division
What’s your primary campaign objective?
Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are the #1 desired outcome, but that’s an inward focus. When designing a campaign to nurture a buyer through their buying process, we really need to be clear about the experience we need to deliver. The MQLs will come if you design your campaign well.
Put your buyer at the centre of your thinking
What should your buyer/prospect learn or discover as a result of working their way through your nurture campaign?
Is there a logical sequence to the content you plan to present?
As you include calls to action and present gated content, think carefully about the questions you will ask and the value of the responses you will collect.
Use your data to help you design the CX
Access Eloqua Insight reports like Email Analysis Overview and Campaign Analysis Overview to help you identify high-performing content that you can recycle for your lead nurture campaign.
If you’re building your first Lead Nurture campaign, focus on content overall. Find the high-performing content to help shape your content strategy for your Lead Nurture campaign.
To view collective Eloqua Form Performance, use the Eloqua Dashboards
Most Insight reports provide reporting on a single Eloqua Form.
If you access the Overall Form Performance dashboard you will be able to view a collective report of high-performing Forms based on Campaign Type, Product or Region and within a date range that makes sense for your analysis.
If the majority of your lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns are categorised under one Campaign Type, this makes your analysis easier.
This is the fun part, but keep in mind the core principles of a nurture campaign.
The key thing you need to understand as you design your Lead Nurture campaign is the buyer’s journey. How long does it typically take from when a person discovers your product or service to closing a sale?
Is it 3 months? 9 months? 18 months? or even longer? This period will give you an idea of the duration of your Lead Nurture campaign.
One of the key objectives of a lead nurture campaign is to keep your brand in front of people as they move through their decision-making process.
It can be as simple as that. They will not always act on your call to action, however, your brand is there as a constant reminder of your company and what you do.
Can your data tell you when a person reaches a certain milestone in their journey?
As we work with clients to help design and build lead nurture campaigns, we use the term “the moments that matter”.
These moments generally relate to the buyer’s experience, not your internal processes.
These moments could be when they share explicit responses that help you identify their key ‘business problem’. Or, a response that helps you clearly understand what their needs are.
Moments that matter can also be implied from their digital behaviour e.g. they spend a disproportionate amount of time looking at a specific product or service on your website.
Explicit responses are usually gathered via form submissions, however, they can also flow into Eloqua from the CRM. Your CRM users may update the Lead, Account or Contact with industry details, the person’s job category, geographical detail etc.
Design the experience and tailor the journey using Eloqua’s Campaign Canvas
You have a range of canvas elements to help you shape the buyer’s journey.
As you map our your content strategy, you need to consider the additional profile data you will obtain as they progress through the campaign.
For example, if your product or service is more successful for people in the Education & Training industry than it is for financial services, obtaining confirmation of the person’s industry as early as possible would be a key addition to your form strategy.
Figure 1.0 – Campaign Canvas example
What’s happening on this Campaign Canvas?
- Your first email contains a call to action to download content. You ask the person to share which industry best describes their company.
- Having waited a couple of weeks, you then check to see if the Eloqua Contact has been updated to include their industry, specifically, we’re asking is their industry Education & Training. We use the Compare Contact Field element to confirm this.
- Now you know their industry and you deliver a more targeted email.
- From here, we move them to a separate Multi-Step Campaign that talks more specifically to those in the Education & Training industry.
What about step 5?
From Step 2 you will have a group of people who are either not in the Education & Training industry, they’ve responded that they’re in e.g. Financial Services or, you don’t have any data to confirm their industry.
So, the campaign continues and you ask the same question again at a later stage in the campaign.
Remember, using Eloqua’s Progressive Profiling will help ensure you don’t ask the same question again if you do have a response.
This month’s Eloqua Hack
Are you accessing a range of additional functions for your Eloqua instance?
Oracle Eloqua feature availability programs & customer participation request processes
There are a number of functions available to Eloqua clients which are not turned on by default. These typically fall into two categories:
Generally available (GA) optional
These features can be enabled upon request. To request access to GA Optional features, submit a service request by logging into My Oracle Support or Marketing Cube clients can log a service request via Marketing Cube.
Controlled availability (CA)
These features must be approved by the Oracle Eloqua Product Management team prior to gaining access. To request access to Controlled Availability features, submit a service request by logging into My Oracle Support.
Archiving your assets in Eloqua
Archiving an asset allows you to restore it if you need it again for future use, rather than having to recreate it if it is deleted. When an asset is archived, it continues to function as normal and assets with dependencies can also be archived. For example, form submissions can continue for an archived form.
Campaign approvals
Campaign approvals facilitate the verification of content (emails, landing pages, and so on) prior to activating a campaign. This feature is included in the Standard and Enterprise trims. For more information, contact your account representative or log in to My Oracle Support and create a service request.
Updated timezone handling in filters
This functionality is particularly helpful for Eloqua users outside the USA East Coast time zone and a day ahead of USA Eastern. e.g. AsiaPac. In the past, when applying a filter to a date field e.g. 14th July, you would need to filter using the between operator – e.g. between 13th & 15th July. Following the activation of this CA update, you can search using the on operator in your filters.
Tracking pixels placed at the top of emails
Within Eloqua emails resides a 1×1-sized tracking pixel image that is embedded in emails by default when email tracking is enabled. The tracking pixel is responsible for identifying opens. It is embedded at the bottom of an email by default. However, the ability to move the tracking pixel to the top of the email is a General Availability optional feature that clients can choose to include on their instance.
Form spam protection overview
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).
Configure External Tracking Domains
If you are using an external web analytics system (like Google Analytics), you can send Oracle Eloqua email tracking information to that system. You can manage the configurations by clicking Advanced Options. See Adding third-party tracking to your emails for more information.
In an inter-connected organisation, governance must include your martech stack, regardless of its size or complexity
You may have Eloqua integrated to a CRM platform e.g. Oracle CX Sales, Salesforce, NetSuite etc. Even at this most basic of integration levels, governance is critical.
Regardless of the size of your organisation and your match stack, you need to keep a laser focus on
Governance
Lead nurture campaigns can run for many months, sometimes years. It’s critical to ensure the content is current, timely and on message.
Be aware of CRM changes, this is often a blindspot for the marketing team. Engage with your CRM admins.
Martech
Always be mindful of campaign entry & exit data sources. Will changes in platforms across the enterprise impact your campaigns?
What is a Data Steward?
A data steward is an oversight or data governance role within an organization, and is responsible for ensuring the quality and fitness for purpose of the organization’s data assets, including the metadata for those data assets. A data steward may share some responsibilities with a data custodian, such as the awareness, accessibility, release, appropriate use, security and management of data. A data steward would also participate in the development and implementation of data assets. A data steward may seek to improve the quality and fitness for [the] purpose of other data assets their organization depends upon but is not responsible for.
Data steward. (2023, May 26). In Wikipedia.
What’s news? What’s coming soon?
Release 23C is due in the first half of August, actual go-live dates are based on your Eloqua POD number. Final updates should be completed no later than Saturday, 19th August Eastern Daylight Time (New York/Toronto)
We expect additional Eloqua user interface areas to move to the Redwood Design experience.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
Release 23C will include the move to OCI for POD 1 & 2 Eloqua clients. With PODS 1 & 2 now on OCI, this concludes all migration across all Eloqua PODS.
Release 23C Highlights
- Additional feature areas added to Eloqua’s new Redwood Experience: Redwood is Oracle’s award-winning user experience (UX). Sign up for our controlled availability program to experience Redwood in Eloqua yourself!
- Auto Expiry / Redirect for Landing Pages: Great for time-sensitive campaigns, redirect an Eloqua landing page to a new destination URL at a defined time/date. This will be a Generally Available (GA) function for all Eloqua users once your instance is live on Release 23C.
- Hyperlink Tracking Updates: Simplify the configuration of hyperlink properties and redirect tracking
- New Webhook App for Eloqua Controlled Availability Program: Push contact data to 3rd parties from Eloqua campaigns or programs (POST requests)
- API updates including exporting external activities via the Bulk API, new lookup table Application API endpoints available, and Reporting API has new endpoints available.
Subscribe to our Eloqua Important Updates for more detail
Other 23C enhancements you can look forward to
Once 23C goes live we’ll expand on the new functions listed below. Subscribe to our Eloqua Important Update quarterly newsletter for additional details.
- Account Engagement Score Algorithm Updates
- Contact Field Dependency Export
- Deleting All Unmapped Contact Records
- Page Tagging Updates
- Salesforce App and Oracle Sales App enhancements – more details to follow
- Eloqua SMS App: Segment Filters, Code Permissions, and Improved Reporting Time of SMS Events
Marketing Automation Agency Services
Since 2007, Marketing Cube has been a trusted partner for marketing automation clients, specialising in Eloqua. In 2018, we expanded our expertise to include services for Salesforce Marketing Cloud clients. Our team excels at implementing your chosen platform and providing comprehensive agency services.
With a track record of assisting nearly 150 customers across diverse industries and geographies, we offer traditional application support and efficient help desk services.
If you’re seeking agency services, such as strategic guidance, end-user coaching, training, campaign support, and more for Oracle CX Marketing or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, reach out to us today to discuss how we can best assist you.
