Unlocking the customer vault: Ask one question to develop simplified personas
August Eloqua User Group Webinar
Overview
Personalisation in the digital world takes many forms. The ability to personalise your marketing automation campaigns combines Eloqua’s rich functionality and the first-party data you have, which is balanced with privacy and compliance.
Why this topic?
Following last month’s Eloqua User Group webinar, Preference Management Master Class, the logical next step was to examine how Eloqua can help you use your first-party data to personalise your campaigns.
This month, we examined Dynamic Content to support personalisation with copy and imagery based on Contact and Custom Data Object data.
In addition, we explain why dynamic vs. static Segments can help lift engagement and support your personalisation objectives.
Finally, we look at how one question can help you personalise your campaigns. We call this Simplified Personas.
Given the evidence that customers want & expect their digital engagements to be personalised, why are marketers cautious about doing so?
The most common response I receive from customers is that they’re not confident about their data. That’s a perfectly valid concern; with bad quality data, your personalisation attempts could fall flat.
However, you can become more adventurous once you become more familiar with Eloqua and understand how personalisation tools like Dynamic Content and Field Merge work.
71%
“…research shows that 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. And 76 percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.”
SOURCE: McKinsey & Co. | The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying |
Trust can be enhanced with personalisation
With changes to the Australian Privacy Act expected this month, I’ve been buried in blog posts on privacy from law firms, government websites, and various government agencies.
One point that stood out to me in all the reading I’ve done is the use of a person’s name in communications. Suppose your standard process is to constantly engage with a person using their name. In that case, the absence of their name in an email from a ‘bad actor’ masquerading as you, is more likely to cause your Contact to be cautious.
Dale Harbison Carnegie 1888 – 1955 | Author
IMAGE SOURCE: Namuwiki
“Dale Carnegie, the legendary author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, once said,
“A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
In other words, if you want to leave a positive impression on someone—to make them feel noticed, important, and valued—say their name.”*
*SOURCE: Mindmaven | Forget-Me-Not: How to Remember People’s Names (Almost) Every Time
Using Eloqua’s personalisation tools to deliver a more elegant CX
Dynamic content has so many applications that figuring out where to start is sometimes a challenge. Dynamic content can help reduce the number of emails you need to build, but I suggest that it’s not the #1 criterion.
Dynamic content is helpful in nurturing campaigns when a person’s profile data changes from the beginning to the end of a campaign.
It’s helpful to present more tailored messages to segment members based on industry, persona, sales stage, customer vs. prospect, etc.
A Dynamic Content quick win
The email subject line is vital to most campaigns. Beyond the the person recognising the sender, i.e., your brand, the subject line can make or break campaign performance.
Dynamic Content can help you deliver multiple subject lines in a single email.
EXAMPLE: When inviting people to an event, your audience will likely be varied, including people from different industries, seniorities, and roles. Once you’ve built your segment, take a moment to look at your audience in detail, identify groups based on similar data points, e.g., industry, and determine a more personalised subject line.
If you have one high-value contact amongst your audience, you can create Dynamic Content only presented to that person. How? Use their email address as the Dynamic Content rule.
Then, prebuilt reports from Eloqua Insight Analytics can provide the detail needed to measure the performance of a single email asset or, more broadly, the campaign.
What is a dynamic Segment?
I use the term “dynamic Segment” to explain that a Segment will continually feed contacts into the campaign on a schedule you define for the campaign’s duration.
The term dynamic Segment is not used in the Eloqua Help Centre, but you can learn more about it here.
In a nutshell, a Dynamic Segment allows you to continue the flow of Contacts from Eloqua into a campaign for as long as the campaign is active.
You can save time by not having to create new segments & multi-step or simple campaigns repeatedly for a single campaign/program.
Personalised streams of communication, based on your 1st-party data
Delivering an experience to reinforce the buyer’s journey is not as simple as some might suggest. However, I’d suggest there are ways you can support a buyer in their discovery and research process.
Of the many campaigns you run, do they sit in isolation, or are they part of a greater understanding of the behaviour of groups of people?
There is only one way to truly automate this process. You need underlying first-party data to help you differentiate one person from another or one group from another.
Using that data is how you drive Eloqua’s personalisation tools like Dynamic Content, Segments, Field Merge and more.
Why streams?
The principle we’re trying to convey here is that all campaigns should be connected in some way. More specifically, there should be a logical flow of the CX people have with your brand.
You can’t control a person’s digital behaviour, including which emails they open, which pages of your CMS they visit, and the time of day they do these things.
This means you need to develop a way of thinking that puts personalisation at the heart of your Eloqua campaign design and build process so that regardless of the above, a person feels connected and acknowledged by your brand.
Remember this statistic from above?
71%
“…research shows that 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. And 76 percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.”
SOURCE: McKinsey & Co. | The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying |
Personalisation First
When I speak with some clients, they’re nervous about using Eloqua’s personalisation tools because they don’t have faith in their data or don’t believe they have enough data to drive personalisation.
Data quality is not a faith issue. It’s literally a binary exercise; you either have the data or don’t. With one exception, is the data correct? That’s another subject matter for another day.
When you access Eloqua’s personalisation tools, i.e. Dynamic Content and Field Merge, you must assign a default value. The default value can be blank; sometimes, this is appropriate based on campaign objectives.
This means that in the absence of expected data i.e. the First Name field of a Contact is blank, Eloqua will deliver a default value e.g. “Valued Customer,”.
This means that in place of ” Hello [AWKWARD SPACE],” Eloqua will present “Hello Valued Customer,”
On a side note, I’m not a fan of “Valued Customer” as a default. It’s hard to suggest you value a person if you can’t address them by name. However, I’ve used Valued Customer as an example below.
This month’s Eloqua Hack
Combining Dynamic Content & Field Merge to manage perceived or real data quality issues
I can’t take credit for this idea; it came from a client. Our client’s problem was with the quality and quantity of first name data stored against their Eloqua Contacts. They wanted to personalise their emails when they had a first name but not have to create weird greetings or work with defaults where they didn’t have a first name.
This client has a large consumer database. In some cases, they have a person’s email address and purchase history data but are missing details like First and Last Name. This isn’t unusual in the B2c/consumer space.
How Eloqua Field Merge Works
In an ideal world, where you have good or excellent population of the Contact field – First Name, your emails (or landing pages) would look like this:
- Dear Jane,
- Hello Jane,
- Good Morning Jane,
- Jane, we have some excellent news for you,
What if your First Name field is blank?
Below, you can see how Eloqua will present the greeting if the First Name field on the Contact is blank & you’ve not created a default value in the Field Merge. Note the uncomfortable spaces around the comma.
- Dear ,
- Hello ,
- Good Morning ,
- , we have some excellent news for you,
What if you use a Default Value?
If you’ve set the Field Merge default value as “Valued Customer” and the First Name field on any given Contact is blank, your greeting will look like this.
- Dear Valued Customer,
- Hello Valued Customer,
- Good Morning Valued Customer,
- Valued Customer, we have some excellent news for you,
Combining Field Merge with Dynamic Content
From a functional standpoint, the prior example works and is accurate.
There are many scenarios to consider, but what if you wanted to avoid a forced greeting when you don’t have a person’s first name on file?
A solution is to create a single Dynamic Content asset, with a single rule and the default populated.
The Dynamic Content default would be, e.g. Dear [First.Name]. You’re adding a Field Merge to your Dynamic Content – yes you can do that.
The rule would be to present “Dear [First.Name]” only if the Eloqua Contact Field “First name” is populated.
This means the greeting in your email sits in a single layout section as Dynamic Content.
If the Contact field First Name is populated, you see this:
- Dear Jane
If the Contact field First Name is NOT populated, you may present something simple like:
- Hello
Of course, “Hello” can be whatever you need it to be. You might dispense with a greeting altogether. Remember, a section of Dynamic Content can be blank, either the default or a section you assign based on the rules you create.
The 2024 Summer Games were underway in Paris as we presented the Eloqua User Group this month. That explains the sports people-based personas.
When you know a little, you can deliver a lot
We lured people to this month’s webinar by promising to share one question you can ask, which, in turn, means you can deliver a lot.
By “deliver a lot,” we mean your ability to personalise campaign content with tools like Dynamic Content and Field Merge and include people in campaigns that are far more relevant to them is much easier.
You’ll need to watch the replay to discover what that question is.
Access the replay to learn more about the four groups of people
Swimmer
Athletics
Cyclist
Default
What’s news? What’s coming soon?
The big news for Eloqua users is that, by November 2024, Redwood will be the default user interface when logging in to Eloqua.
Are you unclear about how to turn Redwood on in your profile today? Click here to learn how.
Release 24C Highlights
The following areas of Eloqua are now available in Redwood:
- Picklist manager
- A/B test campaign guided process
- Image and File uploads and editor
- Launchers: Forms, Segments, Programs, Image and File Libraries, Email Headers, Signature Layouts and Signature Rules, Shared Content, Lead Score Models, Shared Filters and Shared Lists
- Multi-step campaign template chooser.
In addition…
- User Access Settings: Asset Manager enables access to all Eloqua assets for a user. This is helpful for your brand and creative team, helping them with the right level of access to manage content
- Dropping Auto-Responder Asynchronous Bounces
- Ability to export Account Field dependencies: Added to the dependency viewer
- SFTP Server Port Settings: Ability to configure port being added
- Guided Campaigns Add-on For Eloqua: Targeted Account Selling tactic added and more
- New API endpoints for the Oracle Eloqua SMS add-on
- Updates to the Salesforce integration app
- Updates to the Oracle Sales integration app
- Oracle’s Zoom app for Eloqua – you can now capture Zoom Events On-Demand viewers and bring them into Eloqua
Have you started planning your Christmas end-of-year client events?
If you haven’t run an event for a while or feel like you’re not maximising Eloqua’s event registration capture capability, access our Eloqua & Event Registration guide today.
Multi-step campaigns empower you to take maximum advantage of the “automation” in marketing automation.
The Single City Event Registration Guide will give you step-by-step instructions and include screen grabs of campaign canvas layouts.
This guide includes a Campaign Canvas example & extensive directions to launch your event campaign.
Taking advantage of the automation you have as an Eloqua customer will enable your organisation to launch your invitations, walk away, and complete other tasks, such as locking in a great menu for your event.
Eloqua will know who has registered, who has not, issue “final chance” emails and then send email and SMS reminders to those who have registered.
Now you’re on the journey to Modern Marketing.
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