Pushing the boundaries of personalisation with your email campaigns
Maximising Eloqua’s rich functionality to create more personalised experiences
Eloqua User Group | Webinar Replay
What you need to know
- Eloqua users can access specific features to personalise their emails and landing page assets. Personalisation is the ability to alter the content of the asset based on underlying data. e.g. you can Field Merge specific data into an asset – a person’s first name is the most common example.
- To support your privacy and compliance requirements, you can now nominate which Custom Objects will delete all related contact data when you delete an Eloqua Contact. In the past, you had to manually search for and delete related data from each Custom Object. This change will require some thinking from a data retention point of view and in the context of your privacy policy and government legislation.
- If your copywriters understand Eloqua’s personalisation capabilities, this can help shape how they prepare copy for your campaigns. Beyond the Field Merge, Dynamic Content is a powerful way for copywriters to tailor/personalise copy.
Access our expertise to speed your campaign build time
If you’d like help with any of the aspects covered in this blog post, please get in touch with Marketing Cube Support or email Derek directly.
Eloqua Design Editors | Emails | Landing Pages
We started this webinar with a quick overview of the Email Design Editor. The drag-and-drop, code-free interface allows you to quickly create on-brand emails or landing pages with the support of templates.
Our focus this month, however, was on the personalisation components of the Design Editors. These components are available in both the email and landing page design editors.
Don’t forget that you can use a Field Merge in Dynamic Content. In my experience, you will generally end up with two types of personalisation components:
- Campaign specific Field Merges & Dynamic Content – generally used once. I’d suggest you incorporate a campaign code into the name of your component so it’s clear to you and all users that the component has a specific purpose.
- Always-on Field Merges & Dynamic Content – used again and again across multiple campaigns and they don’t change.
When I conduct Eloqua training for new users, I drive home the following point:
“Never, never, ever modify or edit a Field Merge or Dynamic Content that you didn’t create. You should also be careful editing your own components”
New users generally want to edit existing components because the component almost meets their needs for an upcoming campaign.
Thinking they’re saving time, they could be headed for a customer experience flop if they modify components from a live campaign.
The solution?
Copy the component that you believe is almost what you need, make your edits and add them to your assets. If the component is a Field Merge, my preference is to create new one, in place of copying an existing one.
Personalisation components
- Field Merge
- Dynamic Content
These two components allow you to change the content presented to a single contact based on the known data you have in Eloqua.
A Field Merge displays data from the Contact, Account or Custom Object Record and presents it to your Contact. e.g. first name is the most common example of a field merge.
Dynamic Content works differently. It uses the same data as a field merge to create rules and presents different images and/or copy based on the rules. e.g. a Contact may be based in Germany and the other in Australia. Your German contacts are presented with an image of the Brandenburg Gate and your Australian contacts with an image of the Sydney Opera House.
All of the above takes place in a single Email or a Landing Page asset.
TIP: I prefer to create all Field Merge components from scratch. When you copy a Field Merge and then use that Field Merge in the Design Editors, the field merge takes up more screen real-estate with the addition of the word “__Copy1”. It’s no big deal; I just find it annoying.
Personalisation in two parts
If, like me, your inbox is filled with various people telling you that you need to personalise your campaigns, then keep reading.
When I think of personalisation as an Eloqua user, I come at the topic in two ways:
1
Personalisation that includes known data from Eloqua to create a Field Merge or rules to drive Dynamic Content.
2
The other is using that data to craft more targeted segments or audiences, Segment Filter Criteria.
The objective of Field Merges is to create copy that resonates with the intended audience. In most cultures, using a person’s first name is appropriate and immediately creates recognition. From there, you can field merge any value from the Eloqua Contact, Account or Custom Object.
Have you tried using field merges to personalise email subject lines? You can take it further and use Field Merges combined with Dynamic Content for even more personalised email subject lines. A good example is invitations you plan to send for an event. Let’s say it’s a conference, and you plan to host 3,000 attendees.
If you look at your segment in detail, you will likely see a mix of people whose individual motivations for attending will differ. This is a perfect opportunity to review your data and look for ways to personalise the email subject line of your email invitations.
Once you create the rules for your Dynamic Content, you can use those same rules (simply duplicate the dynamic content component and swap out the content) to present more tailored messages on the registration landing page and in your emails.
Try this example for more personalised greetings
We can build the Dynamic Content below because many years ago, we made it a goal to ensure Country was a value we collected on all forms and made it required in the CRM. Geographical data is important for us and drives many CRM and Eloqua Insight Dashboard reports.
Beyond a person’s name and email address, which data do you prioritise over all other data? Or at least, do you have a list of the top 5 or 10 data points you need to personalise your campaigns? This important data should also be acknowledged and worked into your Eloqua Lead Score models.
We promised to share some resources for re-engagement campaigns
Earlier in this post I suggested that personalisation could be viewed in two parts.
Alex has already taken the step of using profile data and Digital Body Language to identity his audience i.e. “important contacts” who are “not engaging/engaging less with email”.
The next step I suggested was to look at the core profile data for that group of people. You can do this by creating a Contact View that shows you the most relevant Contact and Account fields.
Once you’ve analysed your audience you can then create appropriate messaging and build Dynamic Content to suit, including Field Merges to enhance your email and landing pages.
One of our subscribers asked this question:
“Hey Derek, how can we use personalisation to run successful re-engagement campaigns (for important contacts who are not engaging / engaging less with email)”
Alex – Australia
Head of Digital, Comms & Experience
Do you have an Eloqua question you’d like answered?
View just the data you need, grouped in a way that makes the most sense for your campaign objective
Your Eloqua Administrator can create Contact Views, it will take no more than five minutes. With 250+ contact fields, Account fields, and custom fields, seeing the right data can be challenging.
That’s why you have Contact Views. The example below shows part of the Contact View we have configured for the Eloqua User Group Subscribers. It’s configured to show only the data that relates to those subscribers.
Where ever you view contacts in Eloqua, you have the ability to adjust the Contact View. On the Contact Object as shown below, when you’re viewing Segments, Shared Lists etc.
What’s new, what’s coming?
Eloqua Release 25A
Eloqua’s latest quarterly release was delivered in the first half of February, and it features a range of new functions, enhancements, app updates, and more.
- Redwood UX: The big news is that you can now manage templates via a dedicated Segment and Form templates manager.
- Custom Object Records: To help with privacy & compliance, you can now ensure all custom object record data related to a Contact is also deleted when you delete the Contact. You determine this by each custom object.
- Insight Reporting: The Agent Usage Insight Dashboard gives you a simple way to audit any automated reports you have running using the Insight Agent feature.
- Reporting API: A new endpoint (activityDetails/1/landingPageVisit) & properties.
Aggregate data queries are now enabled for all activity endpoints. - LinkedIn Campaign Manager App: Company matching service becomes generally available (was previously in controlled availability)
- Bulk API, Salesforce App, CX Sales App and more!
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