Integrating Eloqua With Slideshare - Making it Easy

It's no secret that Eloqua is a big fan of Slideshare (allows you to upload power points and other docs to the web). It's not just that we create a ton of presentations (which we do) and need some place to store them but we've achieved some great results. This includes Greg Thorne of JMP Securities publishing an article on Revenue Performance Management based on something he downloaded from our Slideshare site. I also recommend checking out "4 Reasons B2B Marketers Should Love SlideShare" to get a better understanding of the benefits of Slideshare.

Example of a form in Slideshare

How can you make Slideshare even better? Integrating it with Eloqua of course! What does this mean? It means easily passing leads that are generated from forms on Slideshare back to Eloqua. This saves you time as a marketer and gets your leads to sales faster.

Now that they're in Eloqua, these leads can be sent a follow up email, entered into a nurturing campaign, scored and/or sent to sales for follow up. This post assumes that you have set up a Pro Slideshare account.

Integrating Eloqua with Slideshare - Step by Step

1. To get started, you’ll need an Eloqua user account that is API enabled. This is very easy to do, see the post on Cloud Connector Installation instructions and follow the first step only.
   
   
2. The Slideshare Cloud Connector we’ll be looking at here is available on our repository of interesting connectors: cloudconnectors.eloqua.com. They are free to use, just create an account and login. Please note: This account is different from your normal Eloqua login. Under Products > Feeder, select the Slideshare Lead Query option.
   
   
3. Enter in your credentials: In the first step, enter in your Eloqua login credentials and keep going
   
   
4. Configuration: Enter in your Slideshare username and password, the Slideshare CampaignID (it's the number at the end of the URL. For example: http://www.slideshare.net/business/lead_campaigns/12928) and the Eloqua Contact Group / Shared List that you want to add the contacts to (you'll want to pop into Eloqua and create a Contact Group / Shared List).

5. Field Mappings. Map the fields from your Slideshare form to Eloqua fields. You may want to create some new Eloqua fields that you can pass the Slideshare Campaign ID to. Make sure you click on Save Settings.

6. Test it. Fill out the form on Slideshare and then in the Run Step tab, click on "Full Run". Run a few tests to see if it's working. When you're happy with the results, just go to the Credentials tab to click "Enable Step" to enable it to run automatically. That's it!

You can also go into Eloqua and see if a contact has been added to the Contact Group / Shared List. To pass these contacts to your CRM, you can add this Contact Group / Shared List as a feeder into your CRM integration program. You can also create a Program or a Campaign and feed in these contacts to a nurturing program - the sky is the limit.

ReadyTalk and Eloqua Integration

The vision of revenue performance management is one that we've been talking about for a while now, and I often find myself in conversation where people are asking what it means tactically. What needs to change in the day to day world that we're used to if we are to drive towards the strategic vision of RPM. One of the easiest examples there is webinar integration. Webinars are a core part of most B2B marketers' daily activities. More importantly, however, engagement in an webinar provides very relevant digital body language on buyers throughout their education process.

If you use ReadyTalk as your system for webinars or virtual events, you will be happy to hear that it is the latest addition to our suite of webinar cloud connectors. Now, Eloqua can be used as your marketing automation platform to promote and drive attendance for events, while ReadyTalk is used to run the event itself. The data on who registered and who attended can be seamlessly and automatically moved between both systems.

A prospect who registered but did not attend can be sent a “sorry we missed you” rather than a “thanks for attending” email, while a prospect who dropped off after only 5 minutes might respond well to a follow-up proposing a different set of topics that might be more appealing. Similarly, lengthy attendance combined with engagement such as asking and answering a number of questions is a great indicator of high interest and likely purchase intent.

Specifically, to integrate Eloqua's marketing automation capabilities with ReadyTalk's webinar capabilities, you now have 3 cloud connector steps to use at your convenience:

- Register Attendee: Registers a contact who is in that step of a program with a specific event in ReadyTalk.

- Query Attendance: Looks at each contact in that step of the program and queries ReadyTalkto see if they attended the event and for how long.

- All Attendees Feeder: Automatically pulls a list of all people who attended a particular ReadyTalk webinar and feeds them in to Eloqua as contacts and places them into a group (where of course they can be fed automatically into a program for follow-up nurturing). Again, for each attendee, the information captured includes how long they attended the event.

To get started, you’ll need the Cloud Connector installed in your Eloqua instance. This is very easy to do, see the recent post on Cloud Connector Installation instructions for how to add a new Cloud Connector to your install. The Cloud Connector we’ll be looking at here is available on our repository of interesting connectors: cloudconnectors.eloqua.com. They are free to use, just create an account.

Under Communication, you'll find ReadyTalk: Register, and Query Attendance, while under Feeder, you’ll find ReadyTalk: All Viewers – those are the connectors we’ll be working with, and the ones to install.

Once you have them installed, you can begin using them within your webinar invitation and management program. The cloud connector steps for ReadyTalk integration can be plugged into your marketing automation program at whatever points make sense, so be sure to whiteboard what you want to have happen and use the steps accordingly.

Likely, you’ll want to use a ReadyTalk: Register step when the buyer has indicated that they are interested in attending, perhaps by clicking a link or submitting a form.

You’ll want to run the ReadyTalk: Query step after the event has taken place to see who attended and for how long. That data can be used to guide prospects down unique follow-up paths depending on their behavior.


Now, for each step, you’ll need to configure the Cloud Connector to do what you need. Each connector is roughly the same, but with slightly different options, but once you have one figured out the rest will be simple. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll walk through the ReadyTalk: Query step. Choose Cloud Connector as a step type, and pick ReadyTalk Query from the drop-down below (if you have installed the connector in your Eloqua instance as we discussed earlier). Click the Configure button to launch the configuration UI.

The connector will need to be configured with your ReadyTalk credentials, including the Toll free number, Access Code, and PIN. These are the same credentials that you would use to access your ReadyTalk account normally.

A final setting is where you want to store the returned information, in the contact record or in a custom data object (data card). If you're running many events, you'll want to use custom data objects to keep a full history of attendance.

With that configured and saved, move to the field mappings tab, and choose the contact fields or custom data object fields that you want to read data from or write data to.

That's all that's needed to have full integration between your ReadyTalk webinars and your Eloqua marketing automation. You can go over to the Run Step tab to run the integration manually a few times to make sure it's all working. This shows you the results you will be pulling back into Eloqua or lets you manually run the step to check that it's all configured correctly.



When you're happy with the results, just go to the Credentials tab to click "Enable Step" to enable it to run automatically.


We'd love to hear your feedback on this connector, what can be improved, and what else you need it to do.

Cvent Integration with Marketing Automation

As the leading event management platform, Cvent serves the needs of event marketers everywhere. Many marketers work with both Eloqua and Cvent; Eloqua marketing programs providing the drive to compel attendees to register, and Cvent managing the event attendance, payments, and logistics.

What is needed, however, is a way to immediately know, within Eloqua, when a person registers for the event in Cvent. This is critical as you will want the marketing automation programs that you are using to drive event attendance to cater themselves to the fact that the person has already registered.

To do this now is easy, as there is an Eloqua/Cvent connector that automatically feeds registrants from Cvent into Eloqua and places them within a contact group. From there, they can be fed into a marketing automation program, used for analysis, or used as a reference in any follow-on communications.

To get started, go to Feeder -> Cvent Registrant Feeder within cloudconnectors.eloqua.com . Feeders do not require a Program Builder step as they just run on their own and feed data directly into Eloqua.



Create a new Cvent Registrant Feeder step, supply your Eloqua credentials, and specify how often you want the Feeder to run. Usually once a day is sufficient.




In the configuration screen that appears next, add your Cvent account details. Note that this MUST be an API enabled account. Talk with your Cvent account rep if you do not have an API enabled account.

In enabling your API account the Cvent team will need to specify which IP addresses should be allowed. Have them enable the following ranges:

65.55.*.*
65.54.*.*
65.52.*.*
70.37.*.*
207.46.*.*
209.240.*.*

For those familar with CIDR notation, the precise ranges are as follows (note that 65.55.80.0/20 does NOT mean 65.55.80.0 to 65.55.80.20):

65.55.80.0/20
65.54.48.0/21
65.55.64.0/20
70.37.48.0/20
70.37.64.0/18
65.52.32.0/21
70.37.160.0/21
207.46.192.0/20
65.52.0.0/19
65.52.48.0/20
65.52.192.0/19
209.240.220.0/23

With an API account specified, hit Save to refresh the list of available events in Cvent, and select the event you are interested in pulling data for. Specify whether you want the bulk of the attendance information stored in the contact record or within a custom data object, and select a Contact Group to place the retrieved contacts into.



On the Field Mappings tab, specify the contact fields, or custom data object fields that should be used to store the information from Cvent. A wide variety of demographic, attendance, and participation information is retrieved.



With this set up, you can use the Run tab to test run your feeder. You will see within Eloqua, the people who registered for, and/or attended your event show up automatically.



To have this run automatically on the schedule you originally specified, go to the Credentials tab and select the Enable Step checkbox.



With this automated connection set up, you will be able to better cater your event marketing to what is happening with your Cvent registrations in real time. Please don't hesitate to provide feedback as you explore better ways to run your events now that Cvent and Eloqua can be seamlessly connected.

String Concatenation in Marketing Automation

Recently we looked at a string manipulation Cloud Connector that allowed trim, search and replace, and regular expression (RegExp) functions against string values in Eloqua contact records. To add to this capability, we also have a Cloud Connector that allows for concatenating multiple values from different fields together into a combined value.

To add this connector, follow the normal process for adding a Cloud Connector, using the configuration URL you can find at cloudconnectors.eloqua.com under Product -> Contact Data -> String Concatenate.




With the connector installed, begin using it by simply adding a step to your marketing automation program at any point you'd like to concatenate string values within contacts in the program.



For this step, set its step type as Cloud Connector, and select String Concatenate as the Cloud Connector step type from the drop-down list. Now, click Configure to begin configuring the rules for your step.




Under the configuration tab, you can define the structure of the final string you're interested in creating. Use [A], [B], [C], [D], and [E] to represent the values you'll be passing in from other contact fields, and then add any other text you'd like to the string concatenation rule.



On the Field Mappings tab, simply configure the fields that you'd like to use for each variable, A, B, C, D, and E, and the field you'd like to return the results to.



That's all that is required, and you can use the Run tab to quickly check that the result is as you anticipate.



Once you're happy with the rule as you have it set up, use the Enable Step checkbox on the Credentials tab to set the step to run automatically. With it running automatically, any contacts that pass through the step will have the string concatentation values you specify automatically run.



With the combination of this step and the string manipulation step, you should be able to do almost anything you need to with string values in your marketing database. Don't hesitate to provide feedback if there are more areas that you feel necessary.

Adobe Connect and Eloqua Integration

Integration between Eloqua's marketing automation programs and webinar providers is an area we've covered quite a bit lately. Of course, for those who use systems other than WebEx or On24, the comments have been consistent - great structure, but can you support my chosen webinar provider. We're happy to add another popular provider to that community - Adobe Connect.

Adobe Connect, part of the Adobe family, provides an excellent platform for hosting large or small events for marketing, education, or sales. They also provide a robust way to tie the data on who attended webinar events into your digital body language on each prospect within Eloqua.

Like any other Eloqua Cloud Connectors, the connectors act as steps within Program Builder's marketing automation workflows, so the first step is to whiteboard what you would like to have happen. With Adobe Connect, to ensure that the individuals are uniquely tracked (by email address), you'll want to register them for the event via Eloqua.



This creates a guest user account in Adobe Connect that allows you to see who is attending. After the event has taken place, you'll likely want to pull information on who attended into Eloqua. To do this, there is a Cloud Connector step to Query Attendance.



With the plan set out on the whiteboard, let's look at how to get these Cloud Connectors set up in your Eloqua instance. We looked at how to install a Cloud Connector into Eloqua recently, and you'll need to do that for the steps you are going to use. Find these connectors at cloudconnectors.eloqua.com:

Register Contact with Adobe Connect: to create a user account and register them for the webinar.

Unregister Contact from Adobe Connect: if you want to remove people from the event automatically.

Query Adobe Connect Attendance: to get information on who attended after the event has taken place.

and also

Feeder of Adobe Connect Attendees: to feed in all Adobe Connect attendees directly into Eloqua for nurture and follow-up (without using a program step to query from)

Install any of these connector types you wish to use and then you are ready to add them into your marketing automation program. To add a step, put the step in the program as you would normally, then select “Cloud Connector” as a step action. You’ll then see a drop-down of installed Cloud Connectors below (if you have installed the Cloud Connectors into your Eloqua instance). For this post, we’ll look at just one of the connectors, but the flow is similar for all of them. Select the Adobe Connect Query Attendance connector for the step that looks to see if people actually attended the event.



Click the Configure button to begin setting it up. You will be asked for your credentials, and it will confirm the Program Builder step you’re connecting to, and from there it will go straight into configuration. The Configuration tab asks you for some options on configuring the Adobe Connect side of the connector. Important: you’ll need an account that is part of the Administrator group for this integration as user accounts (just guests) are being created.

If the account you are using is your own, you should see your meetings with the “My Meetings” option selected, but if you are using a system administrator account, you’ll want to select “All Meetings” and save to see your meetings. Also configure where you want to store the information retrieved by Adobe Connect; you can either use fields on the contact record or, better, store the information in a custom data object.



Move to the field mappings tab and select the fields on the contact record and/or in custom data objects that you are interested in using.



That’s all that is needed in order to configure the connector. You can run it manually a few times under the “Run Step” tab or go to the Configuration tab to enable it to run automatically. Follow the same flow for the “Register with Adobe Connect” step, and you now have your Eloqua marketing automation fully integrated with your Adobe Connect web conferencing.



Enjoy, and please keep the feedback coming, we’d love to hear from you what about this integration is working for you, and what you’d like to see us add, change, or improve.

String Manipulation in Marketing Automation

Advanced users of marketing automation software like Eloqua sometimes find themselves in a situation where they need to manipulate string data. This can be as simple as trimming the space characters from the start or end of a string or detecting whether a value exists in a string, and it can be as advanced as search and replace or even complex Regular Expression work.

Now, there's a Cloud Connector that allows you to do just that - any form of string manipulation - within Eloqua.

Add the string manipulation Cloud Connector to your Eloqua instance by following the normal Cloud Connector installation instructions. The URL for the step can be found under Contact Data -> String Manipulation in cloudconnectors.eloqua.com.



With this Cloud Connector installed, you're set to go. Add a step into a marketing automation program in Program Builder, and set it as being a Cloud Connector step type.



Choose String Manipulator from the drop-down list of Cloud Connectors, and click the button to begin configuring the settings for how you want your string data to be manipulated. The Cloud Connector will allow you to manipulate the string data in any one contact field for all contacts that flow through this step, and either return the data to that same field, or place it in another field.



Click the Configure button to begin configuring your string manipulation. The first thing you will need to select is what you want to do. There are a few choices:

• String Find: Looks for an exact string that you input (not case sensitive), and returns "True" or "False"
• String Replace: Looks for an exact string (not case sensitive), replaces that string with another string that you provide, and returns the final edited text
• Regular Expression Find: Evaluates a regular expression (RegEx) against the string in the contact field and returns "True" or "False"
• Regular Expression Replace: Evaluates a regular expression (RegEx) against the string in the contact field and then replaces it with the string or Regular Expression you provide. This allows replacing a string with a derivative of itself (ie, replacing any number with "(#)" where # represents the original number.
• Trim (Left/Right/Full): Trims the whitespace from the front, end, or both of a string

Select this from the drop-down in the configuration screen.



With this selected, hit Save, and you'll be asked for the values (find/replace/etc) that your select requires. Use the help provided for syntax assistance on how to write Regular Expressions.



Use the Field Mappings tab to define which field you want to manipulate and which field you want to return the manipulated value to.



Use the "Run" tab to test your string expression against values in the contacts within the step. You'll see the final value that is returned in the Result column, and can make sure your Regular Expressions are performing as expected.



When you are happy with the configuration you have set up, use the "Enable Step" checkbox on the Credentials tab to set the Cloud Connector to run automatically. From here, any contacts that flow into the step will have the field you specified manipulated automatically.


Enjoy this new capability, please don't hesitate to provide us any feedback that you have as you begin working with this.

WebEx and Eloqua Integration - Webinars as source of Digital Body Language

Webinars are as much of a core element of most B2B marketer's day to day tactics as anything. They form a great vehicle for educating prospects on a deeper topic than might otherwise be possible, they allow a richer interaction with presenters, and they provide a great interim point to guide prospects towards that is less of a commitment than a purchase.

However, webinars generally show a wide range of attendance stats among those who register. Large percentages of people who register do not attend at all - often between 40 and 60% of registrants. Among those who do, some may drop off after 5 minutes while others may stay for the full hour. Knowing about this attendance difference is crucial in understanding how to follow up and how to score leads.

A prospect who registered but did not attend should be sent a “sorry we missed you” rather than a “thanks for attending” email, while a prospect who dropped off after only 5 minutes might respond well to a follow-up proposing a different set of topics that might be more appealing. Similarly, attendance for the majority of the webinar is indicative of very high engagement, and may be a good factor in lead scoring.

Historically, this has been difficult as this data would have to be brought in manually. Eloqua now has a cloud connector to change that – making us the first marketing automation platform with a seamless integration into WebEx. The WebEx cloud connector allows four main usage scenarios (each can be used as individual steps within a marketing automation program as you design the promotion, reminder, and follow-up campaigns around your webinars):

- Register Attendee: Registers a contact who is in that step of a program with a specific event in WebEx meeting center, training center, event center, or sales center.

- Unregister Attendee: Unregisters a contact who is in that step of a program from a specific event in WebEx meeting center, training center, event center, or sales center.

- Query Attendance: Looks at each contact in that step of the program and queries WebEx to see if they attended and for how long

- All Attendees: Automatically pulls a list of all people who attended a particular WebEx webinar and feeds them in to Eloqua as contacts and places them into a group (where of course they can be fed automatically into a program for follow-up nurturing)

To get started, you’ll need the Cloud Connector installed in your Eloqua instance. This is very easy to do, see the recent post on Cloud Connector Installation instructions for how to add a new Cloud Connector to your install. The Cloud Connector we’ll be looking at here is available on Black Starfish, our repository of interesting connectors. Go to cloudconnectors.eloqua.com and create an account. Under Communication, you'll find WebEx: Register, WebEx: Unregister, and WebEx: Query Attendance, while under Feeder, you’ll find WebEx: All Viewers – those are the connectors we’ll be working with, and the ones to install.



Once you have them installed, you can begin using them within your webinar invitation and management program. The cloud connector steps for WebEx integration can be plugged into your marketing automation program at whatever points make sense, so be sure to whiteboard what you want to have happen and use the steps accordingly.

Likely, you’ll want to use a WebEx: Register step when the buyer has indicated that they are interested in attending, perhaps by clicking a link or submitting a form.


You’ll want to run the WebEx: Query step after the event has taken place to see who attended and for how long. That data can be used to guide prospects down unique follow-up paths depending on their behavior.



Now, for each step, you’ll need to configure the Cloud Connector to do what you need. Each connector is roughly the same, but with slightly different options, but once you have one figured out the rest will be simple. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll walk through the WebEx: Query step. Choose Cloud Connector as a step type, and pick WebEx Query from the drop-down below (if you have installed the connector in your Eloqua instance as we discussed earlier). Click the Configure button to launch the configuration UI.



The connector will need to be configured with your WebEx credentials, the type of WebEx event (ie Meeting Center, Event Center, etc), and the Session ID (from the event details page in WebEx). You can also configure the Session ID to be pulled dynamically from the contact record if you're running a large number of events and want to manage this dynamically.

A final setting is where you want to store the returned information, in the contact record or in a custom data object (data card). If you're running many events, you'll want to use custom data objects to keep a full history of attendance.



With that configured and saved, move to the field mappings tab, and choose the contact fields or custom data object fields that you want to read data from or write data to.


That's all that's needed to have full integration between your WebEx webinars and your Eloqua marketing automation. You can go over to the Run Step tab to run the integration manually a few times to make sure it's all working, or just go to the Credentials tab to click "Enable Step" to enable it to run automatically.



We'd love to hear your feedback on this connector, what can be improved, and what else you need it to do.

Eloqua and Jigsaw Integration for Better Marketing Data

If there is one common challenge that is faced by every marketer who thinks about marketing automation, it is access to up-to-date, complete, clean, and comprehensive data. Asking for data on web forms is tricky in that the more you ask for, the more visitors tend to abandon forms. Similarly, data collected via web forms generally suffers from being less clean and standardized than marketers might like.

For anyone who joined us at Dreamforce last week, you may have seen our Jigsaw integration and realized that it makes some significant strides in solving this challenge. Salesforce.com’s Data-as-a-Service solution, Jigsaw, has one of the best and most accessible stores of crowd-sourced data that is kept up to date and clean. Now, in an easily configurable way, you can access this data source directly from your marketing automation programs in Eloqua.

The Cloud Connectors for Eloqua/Jigsaw integration accomplish three separate integration tasks, but all are set up in roughly the same manner, so the instructions should be easily translatable between the three different connection options.

Contact Search – When you have companies that you’re interested in, whether you want to flesh out the list of the key people at an account that has shown some interest, or to proactively target a territory or a list of named accounts, this connector allows you to find the contacts at those companies who are in key roles. Simply by specifying the role (ie, marketing, sales, finance), level (ie manager, director, vice president), and geography, you can retrieve as many contacts as you specify at each company that flows through a given program builder step

Company Info – When the information on companies in your database goes little farther than a name, you will be very limited in your ability to market to them. This is a common problem when the information comes in via web forms though as company questions like revenue, industry, number of employees, or stock ticker tend to bulk up forms and drive visitors away. With the Company Info cloud connector, you can quickly append and correct this type of information directly from the Jigsaw company database.

Contact Refresh – when a contact enters your database, its information begins to go out of date immediately. Titles change, phone numbers are updated, and new information may be gathered that you don’t yet have. The Eloqua/Jigsaw Cloud Connector allows a contact refresh to append and update any information that Jigsaw has on any contact that flows through a step in your marketing automation program.

To get started, you’ll need whichever of the three Cloud Connectors you are interested in installed in your Eloqua instance. This is very easy to do, see the recent post on Cloud Connector Installation instructions for how to add a new Cloud Connector to your install. The Cloud Connectors we’ll be looking at here are available on Black Starfish, our repository of interesting connectors. Go to cloudconnectors.eloqua.com and create an account. Under Contact Data, you'll find Contact Search (by Company) and Contact Refresh, and under Company Data, you’ll find Jigsaw Company Info. Those are the connectors you’ll need, and the instructions for each one will be relatively similar from here on.

With an account set up and the connector installed into your Eloqua instance, you're now ready to quickly add in data from Salesforce.com's Jigsaw service into any program.


Add a step to your program, in this case we'll look at retrieving contacts at a specific company. The program step, in this case, will contain the companies, and we'll feed the contacts back into a contact group (obviously, if we want to process those contacts, we can just feed that contact group right into a program, but that's another topic).

For the step definition, choose "Cloud Connector", and you should have a drop down of options appear below. If the Jigsaw Contact Search option is not in that list, make sure you added the cloud connector definition to your Eloqua instance as we looked at earlier.



Click on the "Configure" button to pop open the configuration window. This connector will need your credentials for Eloqua (must be API-enabled), and for Jigsaw (it uses whatever license you have with Jigsaw so you will be charged for data accordingly).

In the configuration screen, choose what roles, levels, and geographies you are interested in, how many contacts per company you would like to retrieve. Hit save on this page to save your selections.


On the next tab, field mappings, pick the contact field you would like to save the data in. Jigsaw returns a lot of great information, but if you don't want any particular field, just leave that blank.



When you're ready, you can either go to the "Run Step" tab to run a few trial runs and see what data you'll get back, or just go right to the "Credentials" tab, check off "Enable Step", and click "Save" in order to have the step running automatically.


That's all that's needed. With that enabled, you'll have Jigsaw returning data on the right contacts at the companies you're interested in. The two other Jigsaw connectors, for company information, and for contact refresh, work in a very similar manner. Enjoy, and please don't hesitate to provide any feedback on what's working for you and what's not.

Generic Web Forms from Program Builder

As your marketing automation programs become increasingly advanced, there is sometimes a need to tie into remote systems from half way through a program. Perhaps a lead needs to be created in an proprietary, custom CRM system, or a demo account needs to be registered if a person reaches a certain threshold.

With Eloqua, you can now accomplish this by triggering a generic form submit from any step in Program Builder. Whether the step contains contacts, companies, or prospects, the data on those individuals can be packaged up and submitted as a web form (http Get or Post). Simply create a step in your program, and choose "Cloud Connector" as your step type to access Cloud Connector functionality.



The Cloud Connector step type we'll use for this is Form Submit Contact. If you haven't done this before in your install, you won't see that connector in the drop down list. That's okay, it's really simple to add them. See the recent post on Cloud Connector Installation instructions for how to add a new Cloud Connector to your install.

To find the Cloud Connector for submitting a form, go to cloudconnectors.eloqua.com and create an account. Under Contact Data, you'll find Form Submit (Contact). That's the connector you need, and follow the instructions to install it. (similar connectors are available for Prospects and Companies).



With that installed, you now can select it, and you will see a "Configure" button beside the dropdown that allows you to access the configuration screen.



The first thing to configure is the destination form. Input the form URL on the site you are targeting. (note, that to perform some interesting creative scenarios, you can also point this right back at Eloqua web forms...).

Choose whether you want http Post or Get as your method, and then add any form variables that are submitted with every form regardless of the person.



Then, to configure the set of fields that are submitted from each contact, prospect, or company, click the Edit Fields button. You will see a simple UI that allows you to choose the fields you are interested in, and then provide the HTML name for those fields in the web form you want to submit.



Click the "Set Values" button, and don't forget to hit save on the configuration screen to save these values, and you're all set. Use the "Run Step" tab to do a test or two to make sure that you've set everything up as intended. You'll be able to see what the forms that are being submitted will look like and what data is retrieved for each contact in the step.



When you're ready to go, go back to the "Credentials" tab and check off the "Enabled" checkbox to have this step run automatically.



Now as anyone flows into that step within Program Builder, a form is automatically sent on their behalf exactly as you specified.

Hopefully this capability is useful for you, don't be shy about feedback, we look forward to hearing from you. For those of you who are inspired to do so, please find the instructions to build your own Cloud Connector here. We look forward to seeing what you create.