Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Using Eloqua emails as social media content



(Guest post from Joel Rothman)

Out of the box, Eloqua allows you to create a link that will send someone to a Social Media site, such as Twitter, Facebook or Linked In. This functionality is great, and very easy to use. But, I have been asked a couple of times how we can create a link to the actual email itself that can be placed used for twitter etc… and there is a pretty easy way to do this, assuming you are just a little bit comfortable with HTML.

Most social sites have a specific URL type that can be used to push someone to the site, and prepopulate the content box with the text that you want. For example, for twitter, it’s this format:



Where you substitute what’s in the “content” are for what you want to pre-populate, with + signs instead of spaces in your text. So, what you need to do is come up with a line, such as “Check out this Newsletter for valuable B2B tips”, that would look like this:
(click for larger image)



But wait, it’s missing the URL! How do you get that, you might be asking? Simple, insert this code:
(click for larger image)



So, you’ll end up with a link that looks like this: (click for larger image)



And Voila:

Now, a couple of notes. Any personalization in emails will not show. In fact, it will just be blank (ie if you have Dear Joel, it will say just Dear). Also, these links expire after a few weeks.

Now, that URL says now.eloqua.com.. what’s up with that? Can you change that? Stay tuned…

5 comments:

Doodles said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Shivani Chakravarthy said...

This is really useful, Joel. Can you share some tips on Facebook as well?

Jamago said...

Hi Joel. Great story, but what happens if someone clicks on the unsubscribe link of my email? Since I used a mail which was send to my account, am I getting unsubscribed if a user clicks on the unsubscribe link? Thanks, Jakob

Steven Woods said...

Jakob,
putting email content into an RSS feed within Eloqua means it will not show the Email Unsubscribe link at all. All taken care of by the Eloqua platform.
Steve

Anonymous said...

Interesting. But is this method still valid in E10? I tried to insert the proposed link in an email but it turns out to "system action" instead of link to webpage...Thks for hint.