Are you ready for 2024? Marketing Automation tips for the holiday period.
In November, live from Berlin we presented 5 tips to help you prepare for the new year & covered some housekeeping ideas to complete over the holiday period.
Overview
For some marketers, the December/January holiday period is a chance to take stock of the year & prepare for 2024. This includes a chance to review campaign performance throughout the year & to complete “data” housekeeping.
Why this topic?
For many Eloqua clients, especially those in a B2B environment, the holiday period is a time to take stock of the year and review always-on campaigns and prepare for the new year.
That’s what this user group is all about. We presented our top five tips to help you prepare for the new year.
These tips are not unique to Eloqua clients, if you’re a marketing automation practitioner, you’ll find some helpful ideas in this webinar replay.
We also looked at a number of Eloqua enhancements delivered by Oracle over the past 12 months.
One of the most significant projects completed in 2023 was the move to the new, modern and fast Oracle Cloud Infrastructure data centres for all Eloqua clients.
What the move to OCI means for Eloqua clients
“Oracle has a longstanding reputation for providing innovative technologies that empower organizations to meet their most demanding business needs. One of our latest advancements is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As the foundation of Oracle’s second-generation cloud, OCI is a purpose-built, best-in-class platform for running enterprise applications. OCI is engineered from the ground up to run mission-critical databases, workloads, and applications while providing end-to-end security. Oracle’s data centers around the globe are standardizing on the new OCI architecture which will deliver even greater performance and reliability.
This move will eliminate the challenges of managing our legacy data centers and delivers greater control, predictability, performance, and availability for the Eloqua platform as we move into OCI Data Centers. Ultimately, this also gives us the ability to focus on other innovation investments and other ways to help our customers drive growth.”*
*SOURCE: September 2023 | Cloud Customer Connect | Topliners | Jody Mooney | Group Product Manager, Oracle Marketing
Each Eloqua Release delivers greater functionality for users
We’ve captured what we see as the highlights for the past 12 months below. Click on each release to read further.
Eloqua & Salesforce CRM integration enhacements
The number of enhancements and updates to the Oracle Eloqua + Salesforce CRM integration app is too great to list here. However, we keep track of specific release updates here.
The new ZOOM App has arrived, built by Oracle
The long awaited update by Oracle to their Zoom Webinar app was delivered with Release 23D. You can learn more about it here from our user group last month.
Explore our top 5 tips for Eloqua users over the holiday period
There are many activities you could invest your time in during the holiday period. The five activities listed below require a little more time, some strategic thinking. Please contact us if you’d like some advice or assistance on any of these activities.
1
Lead scoring | Test & improve
When was the last time you reviewed your lead score model/s? We’d suggest you review, test and improve your lead score models at least every 6 months.
2
Campaign review | Which are your high performing assets?
To help you determine which of your campaigns performed the best this year, create an Insight report e.g. Email or Campaign Analysis Overview.
Don’t forget to define what success looks like before you start creating reports. Click here to find some Insight Help videos, they’re short and they really are helpful.
You can have these reports emailed to you as an excel file by creating an Agent in Insight. Subscribe to these reports on a 30 day cycle, review the results and plan to optismise your campaigns.
Do you need a hand building Custom Insight reports or dashboards?
Click here to contact Marketing Cube Support today
3
Re-engagement campaigns | It’s time to reach out to your less-active Contacts.
The holiday period is a great time to identify those Contacts who are subscribed, but have not hard bounced and are not engaged. The first step is to define what an “engaged” contact looks like.
Once you have agreement on an engaged contact, you can apply various filters in Eloqua Segments to find those who DO NOT meet the criteria.
The holiday period could be a good time to reach out to this audience. e.g. A seasonal message, your office hours over the holiday period or perhaps a relevant special offer.
4
Always-on campaigns | Holiday considerations
The always-on campaign is a popular use of Eloqua. However sometimes we can forget about these campaigns while they go about their magic in the background.
Make some time to review your active always-on campaigns before the end of the calendar year. Are their offers that need to be adjusted given the new calendar year? Are they still relevant or perhaps they need to be updated?
Don’t forget to change the date on your footers to 2024 e.g. “© 2023 Acme Inc. All Rights Reserved“. Make some time to update your Email Footers and any Shared or Dynamic Content where you may also have “2023” displayed.
5
Contact cleansing | Smarter data management
Managing your contact database size is an important activity, usually managed by your Eloqua Administrator. Now is a good time to delete all Hard Bouncebacks & Globally Unsubscribed Contacts from Eloqua.
These Contacts are only taking up space and serve no value in Eloqua. There’s no need to delete them from your integrated CRM. It can be helpful for your CRM users to know that a person has opted out of marketing communciations or that their email address is dead e.g. hard bounced.
Try a targeted, Happy New Year email at 12:01 am on the 1st January 2024
Make some time to develop an audience/segment of your key customer contacts. Then prepare a message that represents your brand and is perhaps a litle more relaxed that your regular campaigns.
Schedule the campaign to launch at 12:01 am on the 1st Janaury 2024. You may also want to consider your audience, their time zone and the relevance of your message. e.g. Chinese New Year will be celebrated on the 10th February in 2024.
Build your “Our offices are closed on the next public holiday” email now
Do you generally send emails to customers to advise when your office will be closed for national or state based holidays? If so, you know when these holidays will fall in 2024. There’s nothing stopping you from building the emails now, it will save you time when the year ahead gets busy.
Creating these emails now gives you more time to look at how they could be personalised for your customers based on their home state or country. For example, you don’t need to email US clients that the office will be closed for the 4th July holiday, they’re also on holiday.
However your customers around the world may appreciate a reminder.
See the email examples below of several “Our offices are closed on the next public holiday” campaigns we’ve delivered over the years.
We’ve taken the more mundane topic of e.g. “Our offices are closed on the next public holiday” & tried to make the message more engaging.
Over the past nine years these emails and others just like them have been sent to almost 10,000 people. The average unique open rate is 9.62%, with the highest performing campaigns reaching a unique open rate of 39.57%.
This email was designed for our customer audience. It’s personalised with a message from our CEO.
Unique Account details were provided to each recipient and the “fun” aspect was the inclusion of a recipe to match with the holiday, in this case Christmas.
Australia Day is Australia’s national holiday. The industry body representing lamb farmers has produced an ad in the lead up to Australia Day for many years.
Click here to watch the 2021 Australia Day lamb ad.
In this example we also included a link to an article from Australian industry magazine AdNews, appropriate given our marketing audience.
ANZAC Day is Australia’s national day to remember those fallen in battle. A somber day where we need to be respectful with our messaging.
We chose to talk about the history of ANZAC biscuits (cookies) in this example. A favourite for families to bake around WW1 becuase the recipe called for no eggs. Having no eggs meant the biscuits would arrive fresh after 6-8 weeks in the post to various theatres of battle.
Note the highlighted message for marketers at the very bottom of the email.
Release 23D wraps up a big year of enhacement & improvements to Eloqua.
- Oracle’s Zoom App for Eloqua: Now available in controlled availability (without opening an SR!) Learn More
- Eloqua’s new Redwood Experience: The Campaigns Launch Pad has been added to the areas now available in Redwood. With 23D, all Eloqua users can now toggle Redwood on and off without having open an SR. Now’s the time to check out Redwood Experience in Eloqua yourself! Learn More
- Note: The arrival of the Redwood switch to toggle on/off for non-CA Program users has been slightly delayed for ALL PODs and will not be available as part of 23D release. It’s expected by the end of November 2023.
- Two new Deliverability Reports: Delivery Rate Analysis and Deliverability Overview by ISP will be new reports available within Insight.
- Guided Campaigns Add-on: Multi-Step Nurture & Event Promotion tactics are being added. If you have questions about Guided Campaigns for your organisation, please contact us today. Learn more
- Oracle Sales App (formerly CX Sales): Now sync marketing activities with 5 supported activities. Learn more
- Updates to APIs, SMS Add-on, Custom Objects, Segments, Form Spam Protection and so much more!
The next release of Eloqua is due in Febraury 2024, Release 24A.
Redwood Design available to all Eloqua clients
All Eloqua users will be able to toggle Redwood on and off without having open an SR in late November, not timed with the arrival of the 23D release.
This only impacts customers who are not currently part of the Controlled Availability Program.
An updated availability date will be provided when possible on Topliners.
Check the Eloqua Release Centre for details.
Eloqua + Zoom App | Created by Oracle
The key enhancement for “version 2.0” (my term, not Oracle’s) is the ability to work with Zoom Webinar & Meeting products. In the past, Eloqua could only work with Zoom Webinar.
Plus, you can add a Zoom Webinar or Meeting join link into the Design Editors in place of manually copy and pasting links from Zoom to Eloqua.
Your Eloqua Administrator should complete this Oracle Eloqua form to gain acccess to the CA Zoom App.
And that’s a wrap, we’ll see in 2024.
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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.
