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).

Targeting a Territory

Lots of marketing is still geographically targeted in B2B - face to face events, breakfast seminars, local references, or field events for a particular territory to fill up that field team's sales pipeline. Let's take a quick look at how to target a territory with a Contact Filter.

The first step is creating your Contact Filter - under the "Contacts" tab, choose "New Contact Filter" from the top menu. You've probably done this before, but the piece that some know about, and some don't is the "in" condition. This evaluates whether a particular field value is "in" a list of values. I think that this was one of the most common requests I heard at a number of Eloqua user groups, as prior to this, the only way to do it was with many individual criteria... not a great solution, we readily admitted.

So choose "Country" is "in" as a filter criteria, for example, and let's pull together a group of Contacts in South-East Asia. Click on the List, and it will pop up a list editing interface where you can add your list of countries.

It's easy to see why data quality is absolutely critical in managing your marketing database, as you can see I've built this filter assuming the data on country is not normalized, and a list of 10 countries quickly becomes a lot longer with over 30 different ways of writing their names (and this is by no means exhaustive).

(See my post on data normalization here http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/whats-in-name-job-titles-and.html or the need for a Contact Washing Machine here http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/contact-washing-machine.html for more on that... it's a common topic for me)

Once you've created this filter, save it, and you can start seeing results. Pop open the Contact Filter Dashboard, and you can see that it is capturing the right group of Contacts. Contact Filters can be used in targeting email lists, routing leads, scoring leads, or analyzing your database, so having a quick way to define a territory up your sleeve is always handy.

Comments welcome as always, I look forward to hearing about how you're using territories in your marketing efforts.