Naming Conventions - A Simple Technique with a Big Payoff

Today's guest post is from Joel Rothman, one of our Senior Product Consultants. Joel spends a lot of time innovating new services and deploying our larger enterprise clients, so he has a lot of experience with how to make a marketing automation deployment successful.

Often, as Joel relates, it comes down to getting the basics right. In today's post, he talks about a simple thing - naming conventions - that can be put in place easily, but will pay many dividends in a larger organization's marketing efforts.

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While not really as sexy as “Contact Washing Machines” or dashboards, a proper naming convention is a simple thing that can have great returns. Better to spend 5 minutes now thinking about it, then a few hours later trying to fix it.

Naming conventions can help you organize your assets within Eloqua to make it easier to find in select lists. It can also help with searching across the platform. And, if you are integrating things like Campaigns with your CRM system, it can help you get the most out of reporting in that system too! I would go as far as to recommend that you use consistent naming conventions across all your systems, if possible.


A solid naming convention could be used for consistency around the application, from Campaigns to emails and other channels.
There is no one size fits all naming convention. Best bet, make it as short as possible, while still be as descriptive as possible. Something like this would work well:

Region/Quarter/Initiative/Type/Name



So, you could end up with something like:

EMEA-Q109-LN-WP-NAME

OR

NA-Q209-LG-WB-NAME

Region/Initiative are things that are very specific to the way you do business, and I have seen them called various things. But, I would always recommend having at least a time frame and a type. For timeframe, it can be yearly or monthly, but I find quarterly usually works best. You also need to think through if it’s going to be the starting date of the planning or the execution. I would recommend the start date for the execution of a campaign. For type, things I normally see are webinar, seminar, tradeshow, whitepaper, direct mail, search engine etc…

Now, this is just an example, you would definitely need to choose a naming convention that fits your business. I have seen clients create spreadsheets that help generate the name for you, which is a good way to promote consistency.

If you are late to the naming convention party, I would say come on in, grab a party hat, it’s better late than never. Pick a date, and move forward with all assets after that date. Because naming conventions are about consistency, it’s not something I would roll out for a subset of assets (like emails, but not forms). Rather, it’s something you probably want to do with as much as you can. I haven’t seen any clients go back and change existing assets that were already executed on to line them up with a naming convention. However, assets that are still being used should probably be renamed.

Only Sending to my Territory - List Eligibility

As your marketing database grows, and your marketing team grows with it, you'll soon want to manage communication by region or territory, so that your communications are not accidentally sent to unintended recipients.


You can do this with a very powerful capability called "Eligibility Criteria" for your distribution lists. Eligibility Criteria create a "universe" to which your email can be sent, and ensure that it is not sent outside of that universe. For example, if I was a marketer for South-East Asia, I would want any of my lists to have an Eligibility Criteria of "anywhere in South-East Asia". If a contact met that criteria, they could receive my emails, if they did not, they would not receive my emails, even if they were otherwise included in the distribution list.


The components of a Distribution List's Eligibility Criteria will be familiar to you. The most commonly used is a Filter, but you can also use Groups if you would like. To set up the territory we just described, we would use a Filter that defined the territory of South-East Asia - see the blog post on targeting a territory here: http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/targeting-territory.html.


Now, regardless of how the Include and Exclude criteria are set up, only contacts in South-East Asia will receive this email.


To make this feature more powerful, you can set up defaults for each of your users. In the User Management area, select Distribution List Defaults to set up the Eligibility Criteria that is to be added to each Distribution List created by that user. (this can, of course, be managed in bulk rather than individually for each user, but that will be the subject of a later post).

Quick tip - uploading users

Getting things done in software can take on an interesting pattern - I know I'm guilty of it - where once we figure out one way to do something, if it gets the job done, we continue with it, without necessarily looking for a better way. So, in that spirit, here's a tip that most of you might know, but if I can make things a touch easier for a couple of you, all the better.



If you're working with large numbers of sales users (or even a medium number - anything more than 10 or 20), you have to create, manage and maintain their user accounts in Eloqua. For things like Signature Rules, which are great for maintaining your sales people's personal relationships, you need quite a bit of information in the sales user profile. Maintaining this manually can be quite a bit of work. If you haven't discovered it, there's a better way (and I'm writing this tip because I was just chatting with a user who didn't know of this...).



In the User Management area, choose Upload/Update Users from the top menu. This gives you a familiar upload wizard, very similar to what you are used to for uploading Contacts or Companies, but this one will upload user information to either create or update your user accounts.



There's quite a bit of information that you can manage on each user, so download a copy of the standard user upload template CSV file to give you a good starting point. This gives you a CSV (Excel) file with the right headers to work with to manage any of the relevant fields on the user record. You can work with your own if you want, you'll just have to map the fields in in the wizard.



Fill out the CSV file in Excel with the details of the users you are looking to create or update, and then upload that file in the wizard. You're presented with a mapping screen, but if you used the standard template file, just click Automap Fields, and it will be mapped for you instantly.



Follow the wizard to the end, and click Ok, and you will have uploaded your users into Eloqua with their account information fully set up. You can even set up their appropriate security role membership, password change settings, and CRM user IDs.



Comments welcome as always - I would enjoy hearing whether this level of quick tip is useful, or whether you are interested in more advanced topics on this blog.