Defining Segments using Group Overlap

As B2B marketers, we're often asked to target a market segment that is defined in a way that seems to make sense verbally, but hard to define as an exact market segment given the data. Something like:

"Take the list of attendees from that last webinar, but remove anyone who
is already a customer, and anyone who is VP level or higher. Send them the
invitation, but make sure you don't send it to anyone who got the invitation for
the other event last month."

If you look at this, you've got a few ways of defining who is meant to receive the communication; Groups that already exist (webinar attendees, customers), Filters (VP title), activity (email history). What sounds like a simple segment to define becomes complicated quickly.

One simple trick to help with this is using Group Overlap to find people who are in two Groups, and remove them from one. You can use this technique in any situation where it gets too complicated to define your final segment criteria in one Filter. Build a group that is a broader audience than intended, and then remove a sub-group of that based on an overlap with another Group.

Go to the Group Members menu in the Contact Group interface and select "Remove Contacts". You are then given a menu of ways for how you want to remove the Contacts from this group. In this case, we have started with a Group of all webinar attendees, and we are going to remove the existing clients.

Select Group Overlap as a way to remove Contacts, and then select the Group you want to use to look for overlap. In this example, we are selecting the Current Clients group, and we will see what overlap there is between "Webinar Attendees" and "Current Clients".

When you click Continue, you will be shown how many Contacts are in both Groups. You may then select which Group you want to remove them from. In our example, we're looking for a final list of Webinar Attendees who are NOT Current Clients, so we'll remove the overlap from the Webinar Attendee Group.

Click Remove, and you're done. It's a useful technique for building segments that you might otherwise have found a bit tricky. I look forward to your comments.

Using reminders to drive more attendance to your events

Anyone who uses events, either online or offline for demand generation or inbound marketing will likely suffer from the same challenge - all the effort you put into promoting the event and driving registrants gets diminished by half on event day as 50% of your registrants forget to show up.

There are numerous reasons for this, but let's look at them one at a time. Just plain forgetting is one of the common reasons, made even more common if you don't do everything possible to ensure your prospects are able to remember.

Giving them a quick and easy way to get the event details into their calendar is one simple way to smooth out the path to great attendance by eliminating one way in which they might simply forget to attend.

In the email editor, click the Insert/Edit Hyperlink button, which pops up the Insert Hyperlink dialog box. Instead of inserting a normal hyperlink though, change the action to "Open an ICS Calendar file". That provides a standard Calendar file that will work with Outlook or whatever desktop email/calendar program they happen to be using.

Click on the Select box to select your ICS Calendar file. If you've already created one, you can find it and insert it, but if not, you can create one in one of two ways. The first option is to create it manually by typing in the event timing and details. This gives you the ability to set times, reminders, subjects, etc.

In the Calendar Entry section, be sure to add in any online event details for your web conferencing provider for the meeting so your attendees have quick and easy access to the information they'll need to join.

The second way to create the ICS file is to have it automatically created from an existing event in the Eloqua Event module. Once your familiar with using ICS files, you'll be able to create one from an event in a similar manner to how we've created it manually here.

With that set up, just drop the ICS link into your email and you're done. When you send out out your "Thanks for registering" email, that link allows them to drop an entry into their Calendar with one click.

Nothing beats a great speaker and compelling, original content for driving attendance at a webinar or seminar, but the more you can help your registrants to remember the details of the event, the better your ratio of registrants to attendees will be.

Firefox, browsers, and plugins

Ah, my first contentious post. Okay, well here goes.


We don't currently support Firefox in the application. Unfortunately true, I wish it wasn't. While the development team is actively working on that (yes, it's coming soon), I did want to share a tip for those of us (yes, me included) who use Firefox as our default browser. It can be frustrating to have to switch back and forth in order to use two different browsers for different purposes.

The good news is that for Windows users, you can use Firefox as a default browser, and your use of Eloqua can be completely seamless. Here's how it works:

1. Install the IETab plug in from Mozilla: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/1419


2. Install the User Agent Switcher, again from Mozilla: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59


3. Go to Tools > IE Tab Options and under the Sites Filter tab, add the following URLs: http://now.eloqua.com/, https://secure.eloqua.com/, then click OK.


4. Make your Tab into an IE Tab by clicking on the IETab button


5. Select Tools > User Agent Switcher > Internet Explorer 7 (Windows Vista). You do not have to be running the Vista OS to make this selection (Note: You only have to do this once at the beginning).

And you're up and running. From here on, you should be able to open Eloqua in Firefox completely seamlessly. There's a more detailed set of instructions here: http://eloqua.icentera.com/exLink.asp?7813408OU91F44I29388608 if you want step by step instructions (I skipped some of the "Click OK" bits), and I look forward to announcing full support in the near term future.

Reading and Responding to Web Interest

On the topic of personalization, one of the most effective ways to understand what type of message a prospect is most interested in is to use their web activity to identify the topic of interest, and then use that to trigger a communication.

I'm going to again borrow from our own Chad Horenfeldt, who blogs at Anything Goes Marketing http://anythinggoesmarketing.blogspot.com/, and share one of his videos that walks through creating this process here: http://www.eloquasm.com/eloqua/wallboard/real_time_custom/real_time_custom.htm .


The idea is simple, and has three main areas. First, identify an area of your website that you want to "watch", perhaps it's product specifications, or customer case studies. Some of our real estate clients have even used this for monitoring specific floor plans in individual building projects.


Second, identify the visitors to those pages, with a specific level of interest you're looking for. Maybe you want to identify people who looked at more than 3 case studies, for example.


Third, define what you want to communicate to them when they show interest in the way you've identified. Perhaps this is a special offer, or a push to attend a very topical webinar. You can easily feed the invididuals who meet your defined criteria into a program that communicates the right message to them, at the right time.


Chad goes through the process for building this in Eloqua in detail in this video: http://www.eloquasm.com/eloqua/wallboard/real_time_custom/real_time_custom.htm


Enjoy, and I look forward to your feedback and comments.

Hot Leads, Delivered Fresh Daily

One of the easiest and quickest things you can do for your sales team is to deliver them an list of leads, who have shown interest by visiting your website, to their email Inbox on a daily or weekly basis.

If you do this, there will definitely be requests from your sales team for tweaks and changes to the rules of when leads are delivered, how frequently, and what information is contained in the email. This is a good sign as it means that sales is engaging with the leads you are sending and is interested in them as a critical source of new business.


To get started, go into Reporting -> Report Admin and choose "New Email Update" from the drop-down menu for the user you wish to configure (you'll need each sales person to have a user created in Eloqua first).

Configure the subject line for the email, the address to send it to, how you want the reports delivered, and delivery timing (daily, weekly, etc). Then, you are all set, and just need to add reports to the update that will be delivered by email.



You can add existing saved reports, or create new saved reports to be sent. Often, you will have more than one report being sent, but we'll just walk through creating one.


Create a new report, and under Visitor Profiles, choose the Visitors by Profile Field Value report. We'll send a list of any Visitors who have been on the website if they are known to be the right salesperson.


Choose the "Salesperson" profile field, and type in the value of the salesperson you are configuring this report for. Note that this is looking for an exact match, so make sure that you know exactly how the data in the salesperson field is structured. Often this field is synchronized from your CRM system, so the data will be exactly as that system stores it.



Save that report, and add any other reports to your email update. They will be delivered according to the schedule you have set up, and will give your sales team an up to date view of the prospect who are taking interest in your marketing and visiting your website.


As you get more familiar with profile data and your web visitors, you will be able to more precisely select and target the leads that your sales team is interested in. To configure exactly what information is shown in the email updates, you can configure the Visitor Profile View - selecting the fields to be shown and the order to show them.


These emailed reports are often best to send weekly, and your sales team will adjust their use of them as they deem appropriate. It will often lead to more requests from sales in terms of real-time alerts, visibility into this data from their CRM system, or more precise scoring of leads. These are all great conversations to be having with your sales team as you work to align sales and marketing more closely.

Something for Everyone - Personalized Content

Content personalization is often like Mark Twain's comment on the weather - everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. Well, not true exactly, but more personalization could certainly be done in most B2B marketing. Let's look at a way to quickly insert a chunk of content into an email that is personalized based on data in the recipient's contact record.

It's easy to do - but, like everything... dependent on the data you have in your database, if that's a mess, you will have a tough time building personalization rules based on it.

In the email editor in Eloqua, click on the "Insert ADC" button at the bottom of the editor when you have your cursor in the spot you want to insert the content chunk. Create a rule to define the chunk of content to be inserted - and create a default for what is inserted if no rules are met.

The way these rules work is simple - it evaluates, top to bottom, a list of "rules" and then puts in the chunk of content defined by the first rule that matches. You just build a sequence of rules/content and drop that in the email.


Click on "Add Criterion" to add each section. For each rule section, you can add text, HTML, images, anything that you would normally add into an email.

The rule looks at the data in the Contact Field, compares it to a value that you set and chooses content based on that (ie, look at the "Industry" field for "Manufacturing" and if that rule is met, show the "Manufacturing offer" content.

Once you have created all the industry content/criteria you need, you can see the full set in the main rule interface. Make sure you test this with the Preview option from the top menu as it will allow you to scroll through the various options and ensure that the content renders correctly with each one.

Once that is complete, you are ready to send your email. Personalized content, done well, has a significantly increased response rate in most situations so don't hesitate to try this out in your next communication with your audience.

Targeting a Territory

Lots of marketing is still geographically targeted in B2B - face to face events, breakfast seminars, local references, or field events for a particular territory to fill up that field team's sales pipeline. Let's take a quick look at how to target a territory with a Contact Filter.

The first step is creating your Contact Filter - under the "Contacts" tab, choose "New Contact Filter" from the top menu. You've probably done this before, but the piece that some know about, and some don't is the "in" condition. This evaluates whether a particular field value is "in" a list of values. I think that this was one of the most common requests I heard at a number of Eloqua user groups, as prior to this, the only way to do it was with many individual criteria... not a great solution, we readily admitted.

So choose "Country" is "in" as a filter criteria, for example, and let's pull together a group of Contacts in South-East Asia. Click on the List, and it will pop up a list editing interface where you can add your list of countries.

It's easy to see why data quality is absolutely critical in managing your marketing database, as you can see I've built this filter assuming the data on country is not normalized, and a list of 10 countries quickly becomes a lot longer with over 30 different ways of writing their names (and this is by no means exhaustive).

(See my post on data normalization here http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/whats-in-name-job-titles-and.html or the need for a Contact Washing Machine here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/contact-washing-machine.html for more on that... it's a common topic for me)

Once you've created this filter, save it, and you can start seeing results. Pop open the Contact Filter Dashboard, and you can see that it is capturing the right group of Contacts. Contact Filters can be used in targeting email lists, routing leads, scoring leads, or analyzing your database, so having a quick way to define a territory up your sleeve is always handy.

Comments welcome as always, I look forward to hearing about how you're using territories in your marketing efforts.

Aaaah, New England...

Sometimes the world makes things easy, sometimes it doesn't.

The wise creators of Excel thought that numbers starting with zero didn't make much sense - 00345 is really the same as 345. They had a point. But, they forgot New England. There, zip codes tend to start with zeros. So, whenever they end up in an Excel spreadsheet, the leading zero gets truncated. And, we all know that marketing lists end up in spreadsheets a lot.

So, on the Digital Body Language blog, I talked about the Contact Washing Machine, and mentioned this (http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/contact-washing-machine.html). Let's look at fixing it. It's not an exercise for the faint of heart, but it explores a few concepts and approaches that you might find useful in a few data management scenarios.

First, you probably want to build a decision rule to make sure you only look at addresses where

this is an issue, namely states that are in New England. Create a Decision Rule that looks at whether the contact flowing through the Program is in a Contact Filter. For that Contact Filter, create a list-based filter that looks at the state field to see if it is in affected New England states (CT, MA, ME, NH, NJ, RI, VT specifically).

If you find this, the next step is where you look for truncated zip codes and do an update. This is done with a reference table that contains all the New England zip codes in both truncated and corrected form. Create a "fake" set of Companies that has a "Zip Fix" field and a "Zip" field for each possible truncation.

Don't worry, give your Eloqua CSM a call if you want the list of zip codes. No need to re-invent that.


Once you have that list uploaded, as a group of fake companies called "Zip Fix", you then need to match your contacts to the invalid zip codes and update them with corrected zip codes if found.

Step one is a match rule. You're matching contacts (that are going through the contact washing machine program) with companies (that are in our group of Zip Fix fake companies). Do an exact match to the truncated zip code field.

Program Builder can automatically run both the match rule (to find the match) and the handler (what happens when you find a match). Set up the handler to update the contact's zip code with the correct zip code from our group of companies.

That's it, you've fixed the truncated leading zero problem with New England zip codes. I did promise it wasn't for the faint of heart, but once this is set up in your data normalization Program, it runs automatically on all your contacts and you end up with clean data should you need it.

The concept of this though is very useful in many circumstances; match your data against a reference list and update a field from the reference list when you find it. A bit like a VLookup in Excel. Once you've mastered that, you're well on your way to becoming an Eloqua Artisan...

Quick win - what's going on in my database

Okay, I'm cheating already. Our own Chad Horenfeldt (http://www.twitter.com/chadhorenfeldt ) created some great videos that show you how to put together an Eloqua dashboard with key metrics on your database. Contact growth, email frequency, most popular lead sources, titles of leads that have been ranked as A leads, etc.



I'm all for unique and original content, but when I happen across a 20 minute video that hits on a topic I was about to blog about, I'll just borrow it.


This video shows you a few things; how to use standard system dashboards, or dashboards on each individual asset (emails, groups, filters, forms, etc) to quickly get a view into marketing performance. It also shows you how to put together your own custom view of what you care about into your own custom dashboard.


See the video here: http://www.eloquasm.com/eloqua/wallboard/Dashboards_contacts_custom/Dashboards_contacts_custom.htm


If you've built an interesting dashboard showing your marketing operations results, I'd love to hear about it.

Sales - It's all about knowing...

One of the best things you can do for your sales team is to set them up with real-time alerts when their prospects are on the website. It's quick and easy to do, and it begins delivering real value right away.

In Eloqua, under Management->User Management, pick a user, and select "Visitor Notifications" from their drop-down menu. Create a new notification for "Your Prospects on Website", and fill in the needed information. You can plug in their email address, specify timing (any time, only during business hours, etc), and choose content type.

Selecting the view of the visitor lets you pick exactly what fields you want to send to your sales team. Things like "Most Recent Search Query" and "Most Recent Marketing Campaign" give you good insights into what their interest areas are, while "Total Visits" and "Total Pages" gives you a sense of how deeply engaged they are.

Then, you set out when you want to send sales a notification. Usually, there are two parts to this; prospects who are "theirs", either by territory, or because their name is in the "Salesperson" field, and prospects who are interested.

The bar for interest can be moved up or down depending on the number of alerts you want to have sent out. Too few, and the sales team will not have a process to react to them, too many and they will ignore them. Talk with the team and fine tune this as you go forward.

Requiring at least a couple of visits, more than a few page views, or the existence of a most recent search query can make sure you only alert for interesting visitors.

What your sales team does with these alerts can vary. Immediately picking up the phone and calling is generally a bad idea, but the awareness they gain from seeing real-time indications of interest can be invaluable. Seeing old prospects come alive again, or interesting searches from active prospects provides valuable insight that helps them guide their sales process.

It's an easy thing to set up, and adds value for your sales team immediately. And who knows, they might even thank you for it....

Content For Free?

Creating fresh, interesting content about your industry can be a tough challenge. I think we all know a marketer (not us, of course, but someone we know) who has run out of ideas after a few months of creating content, and because of that, a marketing campaign falls flat. B2B marketing usually involves quite a bit of buyer education and establishment of trust and expertise. This involves helping the prospective buyer learn about your industry, your market, your products on their own. That can take many months. That's a lot of content.

So, here's a way to short-cut that. There are often numerous people within your industry, or even within your company who are creating content on a variety of blogs. You, being in the industry, are probably tracking it all in great detail. Use that to help educate your audience.

The bloggers will enjoy the free exposure, your audience gets rich content, and you look like a hero for producing a great monthly education piece without the usual late nights of content creation.

In the "Feeds" area, under "Communicate", add a feed from a good industry source. All you have to do is drop in the URL for the RSS of the feed. I'll grab the feed for the Digital Body Language blog (the sister blog of this one), and add it in.

Eloqua automatically grabs the feed content and makes it acessible for you to use anywhere you like. Emails, hypersites, etc, can all have the content automatically dropped in just by adding a reference to the feed. Any clicks on the feed items will also be tracked as part of that person's profile.

You can, of course, create the feed items directly from content within Eloqua, but more on that another time.

Now you're ready to use the feed content in your own marketing. I'll go through an example of dropping it into an email, but the same applies in Hypersites if you want fresh content on your landing pages.

In the email editor, at the bottom of the editor, you'll have a link for "Insert Feed" if you have the capability enabled. Put your cursor where you want to insert the feed content (often a side-bar is the best bet) and click Insert Feed.

You'll be presented with a dialog box that lets you configure how you want to work with this feed - don't worry, you can always click on the feed content to change the settings later.

Essentially, you're picking how many items you want to insert, what style and appearance you want, and whether you're inserting the content once, as static content, or in real time as the email is sent.

Unless you have a specific set of content you are interested in, the best bet is an automatically updated feed, as it pulls fresh content on the fly.

That's all you need to do, now your email contains a feed from the blog you have picked, and you can see what topics are of interest to your audience out of those blogs.

This is a new area for us, so if you've started using it and have an interesting story, or feedback on it, I'd be very interested in hearing from you. I know that it's popular in both Sports Marketing (lots of interesting post-game commentary), and Financial Services organizations (plenty of up-to-the-minute market news), but if you're using this in a different way, drop me a line and let me know your thoughts.

What's in a name... job titles and normalizing data

Let's get right into the weeds for a second. When presented with a whiteboard and asked to describe how we'd target a segment, score leads, or personalize content, more often than not, we all tend to throw out "title" or "role" or "level" as a criteria at some point. It's important, and we definitely should. But, the reality is that most of us have fields like "title" coming in from a variety of free-form sources (web forms, lists, trade shows, sales, etc).

Think of the number of ways that one can type in a title that is essentially a Manager of Sales; "Sales Manager", "Sales Mgr", "Mgr Sales", "Manager, Sales", "Manager of Sales", etc. You get the point. When combined with all the other levels and areas of the business, it gets a bit mind boggling trying to come up with the right rule that would target a Manager of Sales.

If you are going to use Title for lead scoring, segment definition, personalization, etc, you need a better way. That's where data normalization comes in. Make it into a habit and you'll be much better off in the long run.

Luckily, it's easier than it seems. The best way is to build what our own Mike MacFarlane calls a "Contact Washing Machine". Every incoming list, form, upload, or data synch goes through this Program automatically, and is scrubbed, normalized, standardized, and cleansed. More on the whole "Contact Washing Machine" concept later, but for normalizing the Title field, here's how.

Add a step in the Program to run an Update Rule ("Update Contact/Prospect/Company Data"), and create a data normalization rule for titles. I'd recommend having two fields for title - the original field as the person typed it in, and a new field for "Normalized Title", it keeps things a lot saner than trying to maintain just one field.

For the data normalization Update Rule, you'll end up with a solid list of title options mapped to the roles you care about. Pull out a list of a few hundred actual titles in your database to get you started and use wild cards to look for the titles you are after.

Start with the most generic titles, and move down to the most specific, to make sure you catch everyone but are able to get the most precision possible. Building a list that looks for "*manager*sales*", "*mgr*sales*", "*sales*manager*", and "*sales*mgr*" should be able to find most of the ways of phrasing Manager of Sales as a title. Use these to set the Normalized Title field to "Manager of Sales", and you will then be able to use that field to look for any Managers or any Sales roles quickly and easily for scoring or targeting.

Leaks in the nurture process

Most marketers I know build their campaigns with a segment in mind to target. Maybe it's geographic, like people in Western Europe, maybe it's verticalized, such as a specific list of industries, maybe company size, etc. The challeng with this, is that there are always cracks in the coverage - people who are not in any targeted segment. These people fall through the cracks of a well-intentioned marketing program.


Here's an interesting experiment - we do this for a lot of clients if they haven't looked at the data themselves, and almost all of them are shocked at the results. How many of the contacts in your database have not received any communication from you in many, many months?


To find out, it's quite simple. Create a new Contact Filter, make it an Inactivity Based filter. Add a criteria for Sent Emails, and select no email in the last 6 months (or whatever timeframe you want to look at). Save it, and look at the results (click "View Contacts In Filter" for the full list if you want to eyeball it and see if there are great prospects there) . I'd be willing to bet it's a higher number than you expected.


Most marketers tend to think that they are overcommunicating, and that might be true for some segments. But there can still be a lot of perfectly good people who connected with you 18 months ago, and have fallen through the cracks.



If you don't have a general, catch-all nurture marketing campaign that is suitable for, and connecting with, all your contacts, you might want to run this analysis to see where you're at. If the list is small, excellent, but if it's larger than you'd expected, have a look at the data to see if there are opportunities you are missing.

Too much or too little - evaluating communication frequency

How does one know, as a marketer, whether you're overcommunicating with your prospects. Although there is no magic answer on what the "right" number of emails per month is, you're doing your organization a disservice if you don't at least monitor and manage frequency.

This is easily done in Eloqua. First, define the segment of the world you want to look at to see how frequently you are communicating with them. Do this by creating a group and populating it with who you want to analyze. Let's say you want to see if you're overcommunicating to your contacts on the East Coast of the United States, you'd create an East Coast group and populate it with anyone with an East Coast address.

Most people use Contact Filters to define who is the member of a Group, in this case, you'd probably be using explicit information (states on East coast, for example).

With this group in place, just open up the Contact Group dashboard from the menu. One of the reports that will show up right away is the Email Frequency Distribution, which gives you a breakdown of the number of emails that have been sent to people in that group over the time period of the dashboard. You'll often see what you see here (this is sample data) - there are people at both ends of the spectrum. Some have received 0 communications from you, and some have received many, many communications from you.

Neither is necessarily wrong, depending on your level of intended engagement with your prospects, but I've rarely met a marketer who wasn't surprised by this data. Most marketers have an intuitive sense that they are at one extreme or another - either overcommunicating or neglecting their prospects. Most of the time, both are correct.

From this point, developing a strategy to manage both ends of the spectrum is needed - nurturing campaign or inactive lead rejuvenation for the neglected end, and constraining communication frequency for the over-communicated end of the spectrum.

More on both of those in another post (or have a look at one approach to nurture marketing here: http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/building-pachinko-machine.html)

Building a Pachinko Machine

I wrote the other day about an approach to Nurture Marketing that makes sure you can (a) continue to nurture your prospects regardless of source, (b) make sure nobody receives the same message more than once, and (c) add new messages to the nurture cycle whenever they are ready. You can read about the general idea here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/nurture-marketing-vs-pachinko.html

So let's look at building a Program that does that.

Essentially, this nurture Program is a very simple chain of "attempt to send a message" blocks that send a message if a person has never been sent it, but skip if the person has been sent it. Much of this could be done with Decision Rules that evaluate whether the person has received a specific email (or just rely on emails never being sent to the same person more than once), but that ignores the fact that often one message can be communicated in many different forms. Let's say it's an offer for a free whitepaper - there may be 4 or 5 different emails that offer this whitepaper.

So, to solve that problem, instead we use Contact Groups to manage whether a person has been sent a particular message. If they have, they skip that block, if they have not, they are sent that message. Any time a person is sent a message that is used in nurturing, they are added to the appropriate group. The Decision Rules you see in this flow for "Sent Message 1?" are evaluating whether the person is a member of the associated Contact Group. You can also add them to a "Read Message X" group if they open or click on the email, if you choose, and that helps significantly for building good analytics around your nurturing program, which we'll look at later.


Once you have the technique for one messaging block, just repeat with as many messaging blocks as you have content for. At the end of the program, wait for 30 days, then route all members back to the start. They will cycle through this Program indefinitely, but they will only receive any message in it once.

When you have any new content, add it into the Program as another messaging block, and everyone in being nurtured will receive that message when they are next ready to receive a nurture message.

Now you have a continuously running nurture Program that you can add your contacts into. New inquiries, old leads, contacts who are not quite ready for a sales call; all are great candidates for nurturing.