Identifying Bounceback Hotspots with Analytics

(Guest post from Rob Heerdegen, one of our top Product Specialists in the EMEA region)

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I love reporting! I'm one of those analytical geeks who just can't help but prove how right was my assumption. Sound familiar? This will be right up your alley.

Eloqua is home to thousands of great reports. And then when you combine some of those reports with our segmentation and activity based filters, WOW, you have analytics that keep you and your marketers busy for days!

A client I work closely with in the Financial Industry here in London, UK, was eager to find different use cases for these new filters. Email deliverability is always a hot topic for them. With marketers around the world, they very much leverage Eloqua's decentralised flexibility but put in monitoring tools (proactive and reactive) to keep tabs on the health of the global marketing efforts, centrally.

Here was ONE way they could leverage these filters to be more on top of issues of email deliverability or subscription health by understanding exactly where any issues (such as a high number of bouncebacks) were taking place.

(1) Show me my Data! Building a contact view

Create, or have your administrators create, a contact view, to isolate the field(s) of interest from all of your segmentation fields. See only what you want and need!



(2) Find me all my bouncebacks (or unsubscribes) in the last X days/months by Country... OR Geo region... OR etc.

Country, Geo.Region, Email Address Domain, Job Title (normalised I hope!), etc.

Simply create a new contact filter, with a single criteria 'Bounceback' (or Subscription) and set the time range for something practical, in the past 1 month.




(3) Build me my report!

Go to Reporting and search 'Field Completeness'. Find the report 'Contact Field Completeness by Contact Filter'.

Chose your filter, pick your view, and run!

Drill down on each of the major segments (e.g. Country, Email Domain, Region, etc.) to get the breakdown. Add these reports to a dashboard, or to an email update report!




Quick tip! Want to keep your finger on any hot leads turning cold? Copy your bounceback filter just created and add a contact segmentation field 'Lead Status' = HOT (or whatever your naming convention is) to find and be alerted instantly to any changes to email status of 'HOT' leads.

The Postman always rings twice, but how often do you ‘ring’ the Postmaster?

Great post from Sweeney Williams, one of the Email Deliverability gurus who helps keep Eloqua head and shoulders above any other marketing automation platforms when it comes to the critical issue of getting your email delivered.

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I get asked quite often about how / where I find out about best practices when delivering to an ISP, removing blocks, etc. and there are a few answers there. The main one is that ISPs tell EVERYONE who takes a bit of time to look.

How do they do this? Via Postmaster pages, which are sites set up to provide delivery information specific to those ISPs. The Postmaster is the person / group of people responsible for email traffic in and out of that ISP’s network.

Something I find gets lost all too often when discussing ISP delivery with clients is that ISPs do not have a bias against email marketers and by no means do they look to block as many as possible. They are also not tirelessly trying to find new ways to send your legitimate mail to the Junk folder. They are, by large measure good natured folks who simply want to ensure their clients get the mail they want, and none of the mail they don’t. Stop and think about that for a moment…it’s not about ‘blocking’ or ‘filtering’, it’s about ‘allowing’, but ONLY allowing WANTED mail. They are working to ensure the best possible email experience for their users, which means allowing only good email in.

This is an enormous task when you consider the sheer volume of email that is incessantly trying to enter their networks. Coupled with that is the economic reality of shrinking Postmaster teams, at times pared down to one or two individuals, in the face of an ever growing stream of SPAM email. One way to ensure that legitimate mail does not get erroneously flagged as SPAM is to tell legitimate marketers what is required to achieve the best possible delivery.

I am not going to list all Postmaster sites here, as that would take away the fun of searching (hint: there may be a Word to the Wise somewhere that could help), but do want to highlight a couple of my favorites: Yahoo! and AOL.

The Postmaster site for Yahoo! is http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/ and provides information about their SPAM policy, SMTP error codes (I hope you’re checking that Bounceback History report every once in a while), and even My email is being blocked by Yahoo! Mail. What can I do?

By the way, you can even find out if there are inbound mail issues that can affect your mailings here:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ymailadmin

The Postmaster site for AOL is http://postmaster.aol.com/ and takes things even farther. Not only does it list information about error codes, block removal, best practices, and authentication, it also has a relatively new and incredibly cool feature: AOL IP Reputation!

That’s right – you can find out EXACTLY how AOL views your mail via their internal reputation system located at http://postmaster.aol.com/cgi-bin/plugh/check_ip.pl. Simply plug in your IP address and you can see if your reputation is Good, Neutral, or Poor:




They then link to resources that can help you correct issues that may have led to a poor reputation. I think this is a great feature and hope that others follow suit.

As always, the best way to ensure you get into the Inbox is to keep your data clean and your content relevant, but too much information is never a bad thing. Visit the Postmaster from time to time and see what’s listed.

Denver Customer Success Tour Recap

(Success tour writeup by Jason Pemberton, Eloqua Customer Success Manager)

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Eloqua prides itself on having a vast community of innovative marketers and partners who are proving time again marketing value with their Eloqua instance. In some cases, clients are not able to attend our international user conference Eloqua Experience which brings together our users together to learn and share with great marketers, but also to celebrate marketing excellence with our annual Markie Event . A key point is that our clients never lose sight of community as throughout the world, we offer customer success tours. From a new user, to the more mature Eloqua ‘Maverick’, nothing brings the marketing user community together better than attending a success tour. Nothing beats networking with like-minded marketers in your neighbourhood to share ideas and best practices with!

Recently, I hosted the Denver Success Tour (see Facebook for pictures) which to date was the largest attended event for the area! We are spurred on to succeed by hearing the success of others! At this event we shared not only the successes of two of our clients, but also spent time learning some tips and tricks to turn our clients into reporting ninjas and providing insight into the upcoming product releases.

Some of the items that we highlighted during our event included:

- Product Overview and Success Story from Return Path – As Return Path is both a value added partner and also a client our group was able to take advantage of their deliverability expertise by providing insight into the functionality that was available in Eloqua and also highlighting the importance of our Boost package offering. From a marketing standpoint, Return Path blew us away with their ‘Wizardry’ program, demonstrating to the group that they were effectively using landing pages, forms, and a detailed integration with CRM to pass qualified leads to sales in a unique fashion!

- Use of Eloqua at Vaisala – A very compelling story of a client who has learned everything from our self help options! Vaisala has been able to implement multiple lead nurturing programs, create a contact washing machine, set up sales notifications and reports while looking ahead to developing their lead scoring program – ALL OF THIS IN HOUSE! Vaisala credits their CSM and Customer Central for their successes thus far! When asked – how much of your time does Eloqua take the client responded – “about 15% of my time!” This session spurred great discussion from the group! Everyone wants to be a Vaisala!

- Become a Reporting Ninja – Discussing a handful of reports that were accessible within Eloqua. It was great to see that some clients were currently using these reports, but to take it a step further, many discussed their favourite report, or began to get into discussions on how they could find their most wanted report.

- Product Roadmap and Demo – By the far the most exciting moment I have had as an Eloquan thus far! Out of the 34 in attendance, only 2 had seen the demo at EE09. Needless to say, the random outbreaks of applauds and hugs were enough to inform the Eloquans in the room that we were on the right track.

A great event was followed by drinks and laughs as we enjoyed the opportunity to speak and network with both the partners and clients that were present! To those in the Denver area, thank you for an amazing event and we look forward to our next visit in September. For those who have not taken advantage of this great experience, please visit http://user.eloqua.com to see when we’ll be coming to your city!

Reporting on sparkly clean data

(guest post from Mike MacFarlane @eloquamike)

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In the year and a half that I have been working in Eloqua’s Marketing Operations team, one of the things that I have realized is that Marketing Automation is more than just “deploying an email”. Actually, it is much more than that.

Using Eloqua to really drive the alignment between our sales and marketing teams, I've realized how valuable it is to have absolute accuracy on any reports. This means, sometimes, I want to run a little bit of a cleanup routine on data before I report on it, rather than just running the out-of-the-box reports.

For our own team, this approach had started off a while back with managing how data came into our database and what we did with it once it entered. Enter the “Contact Washing Machine” – a program that I built within our own instance of Eloqua that helps to standardize and normalize key data that we segment and report off of. Once we were able to align our data, it opened up a world of possibilities in terms of the depth of reporting I could do (as well as how easily I could pull reports).

We wanted this confidence in the data to carry over to all our reporting, and I want to show you how we achieved that when we were building what we call our Activity Dashboard (there is lots of information in Eloqua’s Customer Central on how to build out your dashboard). The primary purpose of this dashboard was the help visualize exactly what was happening in our database – everything from total inquiries, inquiries by segment, inquiries by normalized title… the list goes on and on!

To get the ball rolling on this process, I created a very simple program in Program Builder which would help me to bucket active prospects into one group. We have various definitions of what an inquiry is, but for simplicities sake, I am going to define my inquiry as a form submission.

Step 1: I built an Activity Based Filter that evaluates any and all form submissions within the last day. This lets me get started with the set of data I'm interested in having a sparkly clean report on:



Step 2: I took my filter and added it as a feeder to my program (*note that activity filters only evaluate once a day). This technique lets me work with the data before I see it in a report, rather than use the out-of-the-box forms reports:



Step 3: The same step where I have my feeder setup, I also have a step action to add these people to a contact group. I'm going to report on the contact group members, rather than directly on the form submissions, so it allows me to do a little bit of data cleanup first:



You will notice above that after I add these people to a contact group, I evaluate to see if they are a current customer or partner of Eloqua – if they are, I remove them from the contact group that placed them in originally. The purpose of this is because I strictly want to evaluate inquiries from prospects. Any other cleanup and massaging of the data that you want to do before you report on it can be done here in this program. I'll just show this one cleanup step of removing customers and partner, but you can extend and elaborate.

Step 4: Once you have your contact group setup, you can start to build out all kinds of reports to place on your dashboard. For example, if you wanted to have a report that showed your inquiries by title, you could use the report called “Contact Field Values By Contact Group”. Simply select the title field in your database (or in our case at Eloqua, we use our Normalized Title field which is part of our Contact Washing Machine) and the contact group that is referenced within your activity program and run the report. The output looks something like this:



Steps 5: Next, you will want to add this report to your dashboard:




Your end result will look something like this - a very similar report to what you would have had out of the box, but now sparkly clean:



There are many other reports that you can add to your dashboard by simply utilizing this one, dynamic contact group so feel free to check out the Report Console within Eloqua. I would love to hear your feedback about how you are utilizing dashboards within Eloqua to help provide visibility on your marketing efforts, so feel free to leave your comments below.

Happy Marketing!

Report Highlight: Easily Slice & Dice Data from Your Multi-Touch Email Campaigns

(guest post from Amber Stevens)

Eloqua Report: Email Group Overview Grouped by Contact Field

My colleague, Mike MacFarlane (@eloquamike), is always showing me cool new ways to use the Eloqua application. This past week we were chatting about the performance of a new three part nurturing program that automatically “welcomes” net new names in our marketing database. I was curious about the best way to see how different segments or like contacts were converting in the program. Mike mentioned a report called “Email Group Overview Grouped by Contact Field” – it’s a mouth-full, I know, but I was quickly impressed with the little nuggets it yielded.

Even if you don’t have an automated lead nurturing program yet (here’s a nurture program idea to get you started), you can use this report to group similar contacts and evaluate their response against any group of emails. Some questions you might answer with this report would be – How many CTO’s (or any other job title) clicked through last week’s webinar invite and corresponding follow up? What sales reps by territory are getting the most inquiries? How are my best targets or highest scored leads engaging with a series of emails? Etc (just make sure that your emails are saved as a group).

To test out the report, navigate to Evaluate -> Reporting -> Report Console. Search for the report “Email Group Overview Grouped by Contact Field”.

Choose your report parameters and group by any contact field value that you track like job title, revenue, state, account owner/sales rep, etc. I was specifically interested in the click through rates sorted by prospects co-dynamic lead scores.



Run the report, and check out the results. I learned that in the last week, our “welcome” lead nurture program achieved a 25% click through rate within our best prospect group (A1 lead rank). This was great insight and confirms that the content is working to engage our community of marketers.

I also grouped by Normalized Job Title and discovered that few titles that we may wish to remove from this program due to poor click through conversions, or adjust the content to better relate to these contacts.

Try it this report and share any interesting data points you find by posting a comment below.

Curing Curiosity with Visitor Reports

Guest post from Adrian Chang, Customer Success Manager, and avid tennis fan. Adrian has a long history of helping Eloqua clients succeed, and in this post, he looks at exploring patterns in website visitor behavior through a pair of his favorite reports.



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Like most marketers, I am a curious creature. I want to know what additional information can I help my customers acquire for contacts who reside in the same region, attended the same event or performed the same download. What info can I learn about them? Where did they come from, how frequently have they been on your site, what was their search term and engine? Also, can I get their contact details into the same view for further analysis? The answer is yes - I have two new favourite reports that have helped me develop a newfound love for Eloqua’s ability to capture digital body language for specific contacts – Visitors in Contact Group and Visitors by Contact Filter.

Start with a View

Before we begin, I recommend that you spend some time getting acquainted with our Web Profiling area. You should setup a view that contains the attributes that are important to you. Search tends to be popular with my clients in addition to Most Recent Form Submitted, Most Recent Referrer, Total Pages viewed, as well as Most Recent Search Query. You may also care about First Page In Visit. My point is, if you’re curious like me, you’ll start off with a wide net and narrow it down as you start to figure out what online attributes are you trying to figure out.



If there are contact fields that you would like to add to this view, you may do that by creating a profile Field off a contact field. Bringing in your combined lead rating field from your lead scoring program would be neat to see against recent activity.

Visitor in Contact Group

Many customers are using contact groups to store recently uploaded contacts, event attendees and registrants or blind form submits for recent asset downloads. Since it’s quite probable that these contacts are responding to other campaigns in real time, you should run this report relatively close to the date that their action has occurred. Whether you have just rescored a lead, sent your followup communication to contacts from a tradeshow or have recently launched a new product, I hope this report is of value to you.



Visitors by Contact Filter

If you are looking to find out the online patterns of your contacts who share the same implicit or explicit attributes (visited x pages in x days, are part of this region, or have this job role), then you can derive the same value via this report. (Advanced - try Visitors by Contact Filter and Segment - you can remove your own employees from the report by domain if this is already setup in this area for you).

One of my customers happens to be one of the NBA Teams who came across a previous blog post that suggested that search would be valuable attribute to add to their lead scoring program. They use a contact filter to identify season ticket holders and this report was able to help them determine if there were patterns with search queries and ticket buyers.



Would love to hear how else you are using these reports.

Report Highlight: Contact Field Value by Contact Group

(Guest post from Amber Stevens)

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Marketers are curious creatures. Luckily, Eloqua provides ways to find answers to your burning questions like who is responding to my marketing outreach? What size are the companies? What did they respond to? Etc. One way is to create a Contact Group and use Data Manipulation --> Field Summary. This is a fast and easy way to view high-level point in time summary data on key fields like "job title”, "last lead source" or “revenue” for example. But, what if you want to drill down on values to see the specific contacts that meet your criteria, export to manipulate further, or email and share with the team? For flexibility like this, you should leverage an Eloqua report template called “Contact Field Values by Contact Group”.

To use this report, you will need to have created a Contact Group with members whom you’d like to valuate. For this example, I’ve created a report of all contacts that went through our own Lead Scoring program over a certain time period. I’m curious to see the break out of lead scores – how successful were our marketing efforts in driving high quality responses?

Here’s how to do it.

Navigate to Evaluate -> Reporting -> Report Console. In the “Find a Report” search field, query “Contact Field Values by Contact Group” and select the report template.


Next, select the report parameters – or specifically, the contact field and contact group you wish to analyze and then click “View Report” in the lower left hand corner.

Your report will populate in window and look something like this.

I’m curious to learn a bit more about the A1 group, our highest scored contacts. To drill down, I click on the A1 value.


From here, I can see the specific program lead source that they came from, what sales rep received the lead and other more granular and insightful bits of information. If I wish to manipulate the data further or save as a point in time reference, I can export the data to excel (or another format) and save. I can also put the A1 leads in a new contact group by selecting “Actions -> Add Contacts to Contact Group” and work on developing a targeted campaign focused on driving conversions in this key group. Finally, I can email the report to my boss, and save it to “My Eloqua Today” so that I can access it regularly.

Although we looked at lead score as the summary in this example, you can use this report to analyze contacts on any field value that you are curious about. Another interesting view would be to look at lead source to see which contacts responded to which offers. The “Contact Field Value by Contact Group” report gives you additional flexibility over a more simplistic contact group manipulation. Both are a great way to get a sense for your data and key performance indicators, but it is important to know the use case for each of these features so that you can gain access to the information that you need, in the format that you need it in.

Five in 5: Reporting Fundamentals

To help you get the most out of Eloqua, we're launching a series called Five in 5. These are five very quick tips on how to get the most out of Eloqua - small features or settings you may not have known about, quick tips, and ideas.

The first of this series is Reporting Fundamentals: Accessing Data for Insight, and highlights five reporting tips and tricks you can get started with today.

Each of the tips leads back to a more detailed overview of how to go about doing what is described. Either click on the links in the Brainshark presentation, or download the Five in 5 Reporting Fundamentals PowerPoint.

I hope you get a few good ideas out of this one:

(if this does not load, the original Five in 5 Reporting Fundamentals presentation is here)

The topics covered on Eloqua Artisan are both for you, as users, and from you. Please keep the ideas coming.

Who didn't submit the form?

Today's guest post is another from Joel Rothman, one of our Senior Product Consultants. In this post, Joel looks at landing page to form submit conversion rates, and how to understand who showed up, but did not submit. It's one of those little techniques that make the difference between just doing okay and truly seeing success in a marketing automation initiative.


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Who landed on the form page but didn’t submit the form?

So, you crafted a campaign to drive people to submit your form, but they did not? That’s ok. Within Eloqua, you can easily set up a follow up email to target people who landed on a specific page, but did not submit a form. In fact, there are several ways to do this, but I like the way I am about to outline below. This way allows someone to click onto the page from multiple sources. It requires 2 activity filters, and a program for automation.

For this example, lets use the following URL:

http://www.eloqua.com/contact/

And we’ll call the form “Contact Us”.

First, create 2 Activity Filters.

For the first one, select “Visited Website”. In the “included in” section, choose “specific URL”, and select the URL of the landing page (remember to click “Add”):

This will display everybody who has visited the specific URL in question.

For the second Activity Filter, select “Submitted Form”. For this one, select “Individual Form” for the “included in” criteria, and select the form (again, click the “Add” button):

Now that we have the filters, we need an easy way to overlap them. I like to create a simple program. This allows for automation to be built on top.

See the screencap below for the simple program:

The nice thing here is you can now follow up in 3 different ways! For people who have submitted the form (step 300 above) you can send follow up information, such as event information. For people who have not clicked through on your offer (step 200 above), you can send them a follow up email. For people who viewed the offer, but did not submit the form (step 400), you could follow up through another channel, such as a print mail piece, or a phone call.

As well, you could include other events, such as opened email, did not click through etc…

Filtering IP Addresses from Marketing Analytics

Today's post is a guest post from Leigh Oxley, Team Lead in Eloqua's product support group. She has been a part of the Eloqua Product Support team since 2006, supporting marketers in their quests for marketing automation excellence.

Based out of Eloqua’s Toronto office, she is currently focusing on high-priority initiatives to improve the support organization, as well as working directly with our partner eco-system by providing dedicated support to certified partners. Not only that, but she's great to work with, so if you want ideas, insight, or help on your next campaign, data project, or lead scoring initiative, give Leigh or her team a call, and they are always glad to help.

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I think we can all agree that testing is an important part of any project – ensuring that everything will work as expected from start to finish. One thing we often don’t consider though, is how the test data will affect our reporting metrics once the campaign goes live. For example, if you run an email campaign driving visitors to a brand new landing page, and you have a team of internal people testing all of the pieces, you will want each of those people to click-through from your email to the landing page. Once your campaign goes live, you will have a set of visitors who are only testers, and likely shouldn’t count towards your marketing metrics once you go live – you don’t want to report inflated numbers to your executive team!

A quick and simple way to avoid this is to setup an IP filter within the Eloqua application, so that internal IP addresses are filtered from your analytics. As a Customer Administrator-level user, you have the ability to tell Eloqua “I don’t want to see visitor reporting on anyone coming from these IP addresses” through Setup -> Management -> System Management. This will simply disable tracking for anyone who visits your site from a list of IP addresses you define so that no web visitor information will be tracked. By setting this up for your organization, you can ensure that internal testers won’t be tracked and count towards your campaign metrics.


One question that clients often have when setting this up is how the functionality actually works. Essentially, when the website tracking scripts on your website pages see a visitor from an IP address you’ve configured to be filtered, they will ignore this visitor’s data. That means that if you later decide you want to track information for this IP address, you can simply remove it from the list and tracking will begin to take place. Something important to note is visitor data is removed on an ongoing basis while the IP address filter condition applies, but that existing data is not affected.

If I have a visitor profile with website visits reported from yesterday, and my IP address is added to the list today, then removed tomorrow, there will be a one-day gap in the reporting for my visitor – while I’m on the list, no web activity will be tracked. Another important point is that this does not affect other reporting for the contact, only visitor website activies are affected; all form submissions, program history, email sends, email opens, are still tracked as normal, but email click-throughs (as these are web activity) will not be tracked.

Hopefully this helps you to maximize your reporting efficiency in Eloqua and ensure you’re reporting the truest information to your teams. If you would like to set this up for your organization, there is a step-by-step interactive checklist available here in Customer Central to walk you through.

Email Deliverability Health Check

Today's Eloqua Artisan post is a guest post from Sweeney Williams, Eloqua's Deliverability & Privacy Specialist. As a resident guru of email deliverability, Sweeney is responsible for managing Eloqua's network sending reputation, as well as providing deliverability and privacy consultation to Eloqua clients.

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We all talk about Digital Body Language in the Eloqua world, but there is an aspect of the digital body that is rarely discussed – the health of your IP reputation. As many are aware, the chief determining factor of where your email will end up (Inbox, Junk filter, or SPAM filter) is the reputation of your sending IP. If your data and data management practices are healthy, your IP reputation will be healthy too. If they are out of shape, your IP will be as well and those email metrics will follow suit. How can you keep things in tip top shape? Here are a few easy guidelines to follow:

1 Checkup:

Yes – this is basic but much like the yearly trip to the doctor most put it off due to time constraints, or for fear of what they might find out. Not to worry; this should be painless and relatively brief.

Visit http://www.senderscore.org/. Sign up for a free account and plug your dedicated IP(s) into the search bar. You will see the current score, risk rating, accepted rate and problem areas. Note that you can also see this information from right within Eloqua with our Boost package.



Test campaigns before deploying. Navigate to Communicate->Email Marketing->Email->Tools & Content Components->Email Test Center and click the Deliverability tab. That handy General Deliverability option will show you how your campaign will perform in the real world and is a reflection of IP reputation, authentication, and content.




If your Inbox rate at a particular provider is sub par, check into the symptoms and remedies below.

2. Symptoms:

Don’t ignore those test results. If your checkup didn’t go well, you have to get to the root of the problem and take some good, strong medicine. The two most common maladies are:

Complaints – The cough, the sneeze, the chest congestion. These are the loud and painful signs that something is amiss. Complaints primarily arise when contacts have been sent email that they have not opted in to receive, or have opted in to previously but have not been sent in a long period of time (4+ months). Complaints carry a very high weight when it comes to IP reputation and as a result the threshold is very low. In fact, if complaints amount to more than 0.01% of your total sends, your IP will take a hit. You can see your complaints in Eloqua via the ‘SPAM Unsubscribe List’ report (Evaluate->Reporting->Report Console->Find a report).

Take a good look at the contacts in there. Did they come from a purchased list? You should consider segmenting all contacts from the list source if they have caused your complaint rate to rise above that 0.01% threshold. Are most from a particular ISP? If they are largely from, say Hotmail, that could be the reason for bad performance at Hotmail in the General Deliverability test you ran during your checkup. Did they complain about that concert email when their opt in was for a sporting event? Time to use Subscription Management and better segmentation.

Bouncebacks- Bounce messages provide a wealth of information about the health of your list, DNS setup, and IP reputation. Hard bounces let you know that your lists have quality issues, and if you are seeing a hard bounceback rate over 4% you have either acquired a list of questionable origin, or you have activated an old house list. Either way, segment contacts from the problem list source so that they do not continue to generate bounces and harm your IP reputation. Soft bouncebacks on the other hand do not impact your reputation, but they can provide you with details about other issues. If, for example there is a problem with your branded domain and it is not publishing your Eloqua SPF record, you will see information about this in your soft bounce messages. If your IP has a bad reputation at the receiving network, you will often see a soft bounce message stating that. If you are blocked as SPAM, the soft bounce message will provide you with a web location where you can remediate the block. Take some time out every week to check into your Bounceback History report (Evaluate->Reporting->Report Console->Find a report) and take careful note of the information provided in the Message column. If you need help, there is a handy guide in Customer Central called ‘Auditing the Bounceback History Report’ which can help you make sense of the data.

3. Prevention:

We have all heard the saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This holds true here as well, as preventing issues is much easier than correcting a full blown crisis.

Authenticate – The first thing a receiver will look at is whether authentication is enabled, and of what type. With Branding & Deliverability, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) authentication is required as part of the setup process. This tells the receiver that the IP you are sending from is authoritative to send on the behalf of your branded domain. Branding & Deliverability also provides Reverse DNS authentication which allows a receiver to validate the IP against its domain name. A third level of authentication which is NOT provided by default but can be requested is DKIM signing. DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) verifies the sending domain through encryption and is rapidly gaining popularity at ISPs such as Gmail and Yahoo!. In fact, your email is not eligible to be added to the Yahoo! feedback loop without it.

Segment Inactives – Our Chief Privacy Officer, Dennis Dayman brought the concept of the ‘Emotional Unsubscribe’ with him when he started here at Eloqua. This is the theory that if someone is continually being sent email and is never opening or clicking through, they have unsubscribed without taking the time to physically click the Unsubscribe link. These individuals pose a significant complaint risk (at some point, they will flag the email as SPAM out of annoyance). Inactives can also be SPAM Trap addresses. Either way – it’s best to get them out of your general marketing sends before they cause problems. To do this, use Inactivity Based Filters to check for contacts that have been sent a certain amount of email over a set period amount of time and have not opened or clicked through. My standard recommendation is three emails over three months. Navigate to Communicate->Email Marketing->Contacts and select New Contact Filter from the Contacts dropdown. Choose the Inactivity option.



Then set your filter criteria



The resulting contacts can be sent a re opt in or manage subscriptions campaign to re-engage them or allow them to explicitly unsubscribe. If that fails, they should be added to a group and the group added to the Master Exclude list. They can also be exported and vetted via an outside service such as those offered by Eloqua referral partner Fresh Address http://biz.freshaddress.com/.

Cheers to your good health!

Sweeney
Deliverability & Privacy, Eloqua Corp.

Analyzing the Overall Success of a Lead Nurturing Program

With lead nurturing programs, we'll often use many pieces of content over a many month period in order to capture the attention of prospective buyers. Each of the emails used can be analyzed individually in order to understand its effectiveness, but we often want to look at the overall lead nurturing program to understand whether any of the content caught the attention of prospects within the program.

There's a very easy way to do this, a tip provided by Heather Foeh (@heatherfoeh) in our customer succes team. At the end of your marketing automation program, use a decision rule to split the contacts into two streams - those who did click through emails in the program, and those who did not.

This is much easier to do, of course, if the emails are kept organized, either through an email group, or through being part of a campaign. Then, the activity filter can quickly be built to identify which emails you are referring to.


This decision rule splits the flow of your program into two almost identical steps - they both remove the contacts from the program. The only difference between the two steps is how they are named.

The reason to do this is to make the reporting and analysis easier. When you analyze your program using either a Program Funnel Exit History report or a Program Funnel Motion report, the two different steps will clearly show the number of contacts who did or did not click on emails in the overall program.




This overall analysis is excellent for allowing you to understand and manage the results of your lead nurturing program in aggregate as you work to keep your prospect community engaged.

Quick Tip: Dashboard Pop-Outs

One of the most powerful ways to ensure the your marketing organization adopts a culture of analytics is to focus heavily on building great dashboards. One very quick tip that some users of Eloqua dashboards may not be aware of is the Pop-Out function.

For the sake of keeping your dashboards clean and clear, many tabular reports are automatically truncated to 10 or 15 rows. This is great for clean viewing of an overall dashboard, but can be problematic if you are looking to do a deeper dive into trends that are below your top 10.

If you want to dig in further than the top 10, you'll need to see a full list. Whereas you could easily see this in the report console, there is an easier way with dashboard pop-outs.

Under the "Actions" menu, select "Pop-out Report", and you will pop that report out into its own window, giving you a full screen to work with (useful for larger reports such as visitor lists), and allowing you to go beyond the top 10 or 15 rows.



A lot of thought can be put into what you include on your dashboards, and it's an area that I recommend reading up on. Tim Wilson has a great post on the art of dashboard design and development to get you started on his Gilligan on Data blog.

A well crafted dashboard can give your team great insights into your overall marketing efforts and their success, and when presented to your executive team, can alter their overall thinking about the investments you need to make in marketing.

Better Marketing Analysis Through Dynamic Filters

When you run a report within Eloqua, you will often want to understand a bit more about the data that you have within the report. Whereas you can easily export the data for secondary analysis in a tool like Excel, often the easiest thing to do is to dynamically filter the results of your report to get the view you want.

This is easy to do from most list reports (ie, a list of visitors, or a list of contacts).

In the top menu, under Filter, select "Filter these contacts" and you will be presented with a window that lets you define a filter. That filter is applied dynamically to the report you are looking at, letting you quickly see a subset of your data.

For example, if you had a list of contacts who had submitted a web form for a download, and wanted to understand how effective that marketing campaign had been at targeting CEOs, you might add a filter for "Title = CEO". Note, however, that the need for a contact washing machine becomes very clear in doing this. If we have not managed the data quality of our incoming title data, it will be hard to define a good filter. However, if the data has been standardized and normalized, we can work with a normalized Title field that can be easily filtered.

With the "CEO" filter layered on to our results, we can quickly see whether the campaign has been effective at generating responses from top execs. The filters can be quickly and easily removed or changed, which lets you work with any list report to get a better sense for the data it contains.

Dynamic filters on reports are a quick but powerful tool for getting better insights out of your marketing data.

Insights on Data Quality from Contact Group Dashboards

Understanding your data is one of the most critical things to do as a marketer. Data is a foundation for everything you do; lead scoring, segment definition, content personalization, lead routing, and marketing analysis. Without good data, each of those tasks will be challenging if not impossible.

One of the most powerful tools in understanding your data is the contact group. It lets you build almost any cut of data that you want. Most simply, this can be done with simple group overlap rules that show people who are in group A, but not group B for example.

A slightly more advanced technique is to combine groups and filters to perform robust group manipulation to create a combination of activity and data as a driver for a group definition. This process can be further automated using a marketing automation program to dynamically create a dashboard based on group membership.

With each of these techniques, you are provided with a one-click dashboard of the group. By selecting "Contact Group Dashboard" from the menu, you get a full suite of interesting reports showing you what is happening with that group and the contacts in it.

One of the most interesting reports in this dashboard is the Contact Field Completeness report. This report shows you, based on a view, how complete the fields are in contacts within that group. Each field is shown as being between 0 and 100% complete, giving you good insight into whether you have data to work with for the set of contacts in your group.

However, more interesting than this, is the results you get by clicking on a field of interest. For example, if we click on the "Title" field (98.2% complete), we can see that the data within that field is from a manual text field as it is obviously free form.

A quick look at this data gives you a good sense of whether it is of sufficient quality to build rules upon.

Using this dashboard to quickly understand your data gives you a very quick sense of where you are at and what areas you need to work on in terms of data quality.

Armed with this understanding, you can quickly tune your contact washing machine to best optmize the data that you have and the data that you need. With cleansed and normalized data, building segmentation rules, lead scoring rules, content personalization rules, and marketing analysis becomes significantly easier.

10 Ways for Marketing to Enable the Sales Team

Marketing and sales often don't enjoy the best of relationships. The great news is that this situation has an amazing opportunity to change. Marketing can, right now, provide their sales team with insights that can make a tremendous difference in their lives and drive bigger commission cheques for them. Nothing changes a relationship with your sales team faster than a larger commission cheque.


Here are 10 things you can do, with Eloqua and your CRM system that will quickly deliver a lot of value to your sales team:

For Their Territories:

1) Territory Traffic Light Dashboard - For each sales person's territory, configure them a "traffic light" dashboard that gives them an instant view of which of their accounts are showing buying interest.


Here's how to build a Territory Traffic Light Dashboard



2) Territory-Based Email Alerts - configure for each rep, automatic email alerts for the accounts they own. This will give them a real-time indicator of buying interest, and let them manage the accounts proactively based on buyer interest.


Here's how to set up Territory-Based Email Alerts




3) Unknown Company Visitors - Show them which companies are on the website doing research who may not currently be known to your organization, give you a great opportunity to initiate a conversation as a buying process starts at that organization.


Here's how to configure a report on Unknown Company Visitors




For Their Accounts:


4) Account Insights and Key Players - Give each sales person a roll-up view that shows, for each of their accounts who the people are who are showing interest and what they are interested in. Armed with this insight, your sales team can quickly determine what the key conversations they need to have are.

Here's how to show sales a report that provides Account Insights and Key Players


5) Configure Your Social Media GPS - Identify social media activities and pass those through to your CRM system so that your sales team can understand which accounts, and which individuals are engaged in social media conversations. By presenting the prospect's social media activity within your CRM system, you enable your sales team to understand new context to the prospect interaction without leaving an environment they are comfortable with.


Here's how to Configure Your Social Media GPS

6) Find Sales the Right Contacts - Integration into role-based discovery services to drive real insight into who can make a purchase decision, not just a raw list of quasi-targeted and out of date names. Often, the person doing the bulk of the research is not the ultimate buyer, so discovering the names of the inviduals in the right role can be very beneficial to your sales team.

Here's how to Find Sales the Right Contacts

For Their Contacts or Leads:

7) Prospect Profiler for Sales Insights - enable Prospect Profiler in order to provide a rich, interactive, graphical view of each individual's interest. This allows your sales team to guide conversations and know who is showing the right level of buying interest.

Here's information on Eloqua's Prospect Profiler for Sales Insights

8) Show Areas of Prospect Interest - Configure your CRM integration to identify areas of your website that a person is showing interest in and highlight those within their concact or lead record in your CRM system. This enables sales to immediately know which topic of conversation will be most warmly received. Be sure to also use graphical imagery to more clearly highlight interest.

Here's how to Show Areas of Prospect Interest to sales in your CRM system

For Your Communications

9) Send-on-behalf-of-Sales - Have your marketing team send outbound email campaigns on behalf of your sales team. Not only does this drive a much higher response rate to the email campaigns, but it also builds upon the salesperson's relationship with the prospect and provides a great opportunity to start dialogs.

Here's how to set up your marketing campaigns to be Sent-on-behalf-of-Sales

10) Provide Sales with Content - provide marketing-created content to your sales teams in their Outlook desktop email environment so they can find great content, personalize it, and send it in a trackable way to their prospects quickly and easily.

Here's how to Provide Sales with Content within their Outlook environment

There are many ways that your marketing team can enable your sales team, and the 10 ideas above are great ones to get started with. In today's environment, it is possible for marketing and sales to have a much stronger relationship than they ever have had before, and it all starts with sales enablement.