Priority Mode - Perfect for Fast Follow-Up

Eloqua's Spring release had many interesting new capabilities in it, but among the most powerful is a new "mode" for processing your marketing automation programs that process leads from inbound forms that need to be followed up quickly.

Typical marketing automation programs in Eloqua use "Standard Mode" for processing. This mode means that every 15 minute cycle, each step in the program is processed, emails are sent, data is manipulated, contacts are updated, and then moved to the next step.

This works very well for situations where you are using a marketing automation program to send outbound campaigns, observe online behaviour, and then send another campaign a few days or weeks later. The time increment of 15 minutes per cycle presents no problem at all in this scenario.

However, for inbound leads, who have just submitted a web form, this is not the case. You often want to score them, cleanse and normalize data on them, and then route them to sales for follow-up very quickly. With each step adding time before the lead got to sales, this was a challenge.

Now, Priority Mode solves that problem. Marketing automation programs that are enabled in Priority Mode will run every contact in the program (up to 100 at a time) all the way through the program every time they run, and they will run every 5 minutes.



To enable a program to run in Priority Mode, simply select that as the mode you wish to run it in when you click "Enable Program" and are presented with the choice.

If you have existing programs that take hot leads from your web forms and pass them to sales, you may wish to revisit them and have them run in Priority Mode if it makes sense.

Note that only 100 contacts at at time will run through the program. If there are more than 100 contacts in the program, the remainder will be left for the next 5 minute increment. As this mode is mainly useful for quickly getting leads out to sales from web forms, this is usually more than sufficient (as most sales teams cannot process more than 100 leads every 5 minutes).

I look forward to hearing from you as you experiment with Priority Mode for your programs.