Great events begin with an engaging event registration process
October Eloqua User Group Webinar
Overview
When it comes to creating events, a few key components just have to work and work seamlessly. The registration process is one that has to work. That’s the focus this month, combined with adding some fun to the process.
Why this topic?
We had two objectives this month.
- Share more creative ways to capture a person’s registration for your next event.
- To expand your thinking about Eloqua as more than a marketing automation tool; it is a tool to help your organisation communicate with audiences beyond the typical remit of the marketing team.
Our focus was on the end of the calendar year and the events most marketers are tasked with doing. Client Christmas events, perhaps staff events, any event really that is more of a celebration and affords you the luxury of ramping things up a little, adding a little fun to the process.
Marketers typically focus on Prospects, those who have yet to procure their products or services. Customer retention & expansion are other common tasks for most marketing teams
However, this isn’t the case for all marketers. Regardless of your primary focus and audience, your organisation will “communicate” with or engage multiple audiences.
Some of those audiences may be shown below:
Eloqua for Internal or External Communications enhances your compliance obligations
Using multiple email marketing platforms is risky when considering compliance issues. Some organisations may use Eloqua for their primary marketing, and some departments will use a e.g. MailChimp subscription for some of their bespoke email requirements.
There’s no other way to describe this other than as a compliance nightmare, a nightmare that could become a very expensive.
When a person opts out, they opt out from your brand, not from departments. All of sudden cheap or free can become very expensive.
Centralising all email communications in a single platform is the best way to manage risk.
Why should you consider giving non-marketers access to Eloqua?
The quick answer is that it may just save you time. That’s got to be a good starting point.
Eloqua is an enterprise platform with many built-in functions you may not be using. Creating specific user profiles is one function that can give you peace of mind by limiting exactly what your colleagues can do once logged in.
The recent 24C release of Eloqua added a new user profile, “Asset Manager”. Your creative and brand team are the perfect candidates for this profile. They can upload images, edits templates but they can’t add or remove contacts or launch campaigns.
The obvious winning idea is to have your colleagues build their emails
We all know that the first email you build is never right, and you go backwards and forward with test email after test email.
Eloqua’s Design Editor is a powerful, easy to use and HTML free experience.
If you add template capability and combine that with Content Blocks, it’s hard to grasp why your colleagues couldn’t build and edit their emails for their non-marketing audiences.
That leaves you to build the segment, design the canvas or a simple email campaign and you’re done.
Speed your in-person event check-in process with our Eloqua QR Code service
How our QR Code check-in solution helped Kroll
We have a better understanding of who attended and who didn’t. Walk-in guests have a better customer experience because our staff is focused on getting them checked in since the check in process for registered guests is streamlined.”
Nicole McKillop
Director of Integrated Marketing
Kroll, LLC
When it comes to events you’re hosting during the festive season, you have a chance to be a little more casual & introduce some fun into the process
“Process” is the keyword here. To expand on this idea, I created the visual below to represent the key milestones of a typical event registration campaign.
The entire process outlined below can be created as a single Eloqua Multi-Step Campaign
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9:45 - 10:30 am
Use QR Codes to speed the check in process
Our QR Code solution enables the use of QR Codes in the registration and/or event check-in experience. For your guests, it speeds check-in when they arrive at your event, and for you, you automate the attendance status of each registrant with data automatically flowing back to Eloqua.
Reminders play a critical role in any event. Are you providing your registrants with options?
I suggest that email reminders be the baseline of any reminder campaign you run. The number and timing of reminders should also be considered carefully. The lead time from when people can register to the day of the event will often determine this.
Providing people with options is always a good strategy, and for events, the most common options are email and SMS/Text Messages.
SMS can easily be incorporated into your Eloqua campaign from the campaign canvas.
Compliance & SMS reminders
How you capture a person’s mobile phone number is important. For example, if your offer is for a reminder only, you really can’t turn around and bombard them with SMS marketing messages.
If you plan to use SMS as a marketing channel, you need to consider this carefully and present appropriate opt in messaging.
What about telephone reminders?
You may have a subset of high-value registrants for whom a telephone call as a reminder could be beneficial.
If an account owner or someone in your organisation who has an existing relationship with the registrant can make the reminder call, that’s even better.
What’s news? What’s coming soon?
We didn’t have these details from Oracle in time for the webinar last week, so here’s the news, fresh from Oracle’s webinar on October 3rd.
Release 24D will roll out across all PODS starting 1st November and will conclude by 16th November. Subscribe to our Eloqua Important Updates service to get a deeper analysis of the upcoming changes.
24D Release Highlights
- Guided Campaigns: Now available to all Standard (5 users) and Enterprise (10 users) customers as base functionality; add-on still required for Basic or to add additional users at all editions.
- Redwood UX: Redwood is now the default UX when logging into Eloqua, and loads of other great Redwood additions:
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- End-to-end Redwood experience for Simple Campaigns and A/B Testing
- New launchpads for email, landing pages and dynamic content
- Signature Rules: Create
- Field Merges: Launchpad and Create
- Forms: External form integration wizard and Template chooser
- AI Add-on: Refreshed Subject Line Optimisation (SLO) model enabled for all customers with Advanced Intelligence Add-on just after the 24D arrives
- APIs: Support for the Signature Rules Endpoint
- List Unsubscribe Header: Changed the list-unsubscribe header from global unsubscribe to group unsubscribe to allow for better unsubscribe experience.
- SFTP Imports/Exports: SSH cipher updates – updates to Host Key Algorithms, Key Exchange Ciphers, and Encryption Ciphers
- APPS: Updates to the Salesforce App and Oracle CX Sales App
Email continues to be the #1 channel for marketers.
This episode attempts to expand your thinking about Eloqua as more than a marketing automation tool; it is a tool to help your organisation communicate with audiences beyond the typical remit of the marketing team.
“With digital communication trends adapting, it may come as a surprise to you that email still is the #1 form of business communication.”*
“Smartphones are so popular, you might assume that phone calls, text messages, video chat, Slack, Trello, or just social media would have surpassed email as the most popular form of communication.
Surprisingly, they have only enabled its growth.
Email is, hands down, the most prominent form of communication and collaboration among businesses, and that’s not expected to change any time soon.
“Over the course of the last year, there has been considerable discussion about the role of email in workplaces that depend heavily on social network and other collaboration tools” says David Roe of CMS Wire.
“In these discussions, there appears to be a general consensus that while social networks are useful to achieve work-related goals, email remains the undisputed communications tool in the enterprise.”
Worldwide, there are more than 2.5 billion users, and that number is expected to continue to climb. That represents more than a third of the global population operating one or more active accounts.
Right now, only about 25% of current accounts are business accounts, but we can expect a rapid increase in those as well. The average office worker will send and receive as many as 121 emails per day.”
*SOURCE: Email remains the top communication tool for businesses – here’s why | The American Genius, the pulse of today’s entrepreneur | Larry Alton, Columnist | Published June 17, 2022.
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