Using Flash to submit an Eloqua Form

Today's guest post is from Cheliyan Pancras, an Eloqua Product Specialist who joined us recently from the University of Windsor's computer science program. In this post, Cheliyan uses some of that background in showing how to integrate an Eloqua web form within an Adobe Flash element.

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Flash is a great way to engage with website visitors, but far too often it is treated as separate from demand generation marketing efforts. Often, marketers even think it may not be possible to engage with web visitors using a form within a Flash element. Not true. Why not embed a short form at the end of the Flash video and submit it to Eloqua? For example you could ask your web site visitors to subscribe to upcoming updates on a new product/service at the end of a teaser video… The easiest way to build this is in Flash to use the method GET to send the web form data. You will be using the function called getURL (link to definition on Adobe). This is ideal for a short form.

First you will need to create a new form or use an existing web form. Within the form you will need to setup the processing steps to handle the incoming data. I would also create a new confirmation page tailored to your Flash video for a smoother transition after the data has been submitted. You can find great users guides on how to create forms and set up confirmation pages on our customer portal (Eloqua’s Customer Central).

There are two mandatory hidden fields, elqFormName and elqSiteID, which are used to identify the form and the instance of Eloqua you are submitting to. Once you create a Form in Eloqua you can retrieve this information by going into the ‘Form Details’ area and clicking on the ‘Integration Details’ button. The ‘Website Integration Details’ will give you the address to post the data to and the form identification values - using a similar technique to how we found form details for setting up hidden form submits or for integrating web forms into PDFs.



In our example below we are using Adobe Flash CS4 © (ActionScript 2.0). The screenshot shows you a simple form with 3 text inputs and a submit button. The input fields include First Name (c_firstname), Last Name (c_lastname) and Email Address (c_emailaddress).




Now that you have a layout created and the fields labeled, you must get into the actual code to setup the URL. To do this you need to go into the Flash Action and start by creating an event handler for when the button is released. Right click the submit button and select ‘Actions’ to bring up your ActionScript window.

Start by using the event handler ‘on(release)’. This will execute the getURL function when the button is pressed and released. The screenshot shows you the code within Flash for the short form. The description of each line item can be found below the screenshot.



• Line 4: Declare variable for hidden form field elqFormName
• Line 5: Declare variable for hidden form field elqSiteID
• Line 6: Declare input text field c_emailaddress. The Eloqua form is expecting this text input as c_email.
• Line 7: Declare input text field c_firstname. The Eloqua form is expecting this text input as c_fname.
• Line 8: Declare input text field c_lastname. The Eloqua form is expecting this text input as c_lname.
• Line 10: getURL function which has the URL to post the data to, the window parameter (to specify the HTML frame to load the URL) and which method to use to send the data (GET).

Note: In our example above we used the ‘_blank’ parameter to load the URL in a new window. Your other options are ‘_self’, ‘_parent’ or ‘_top’. You can find what each of these parameters do in the definition link at the beginning of this post.

That’s it! Now you can use this Flash video to submit data to your Eloqua form. You can test the sample I discussed below. The form will open a new window and confirm your submission. Then redirect you back to the blog.

Using Search Queries to Understand Buyers

One of the things that I talk about quite frequently is thinking about the prospects' buying process rather than our own selling process. Thinking in this way is key to making sure that we deliver the right message to each buyer based on where he or she is in his or her own thinking.


I wrote about the topic over on the digital body language blog here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2009/02/scoring-stages-of-buying-process.html


This discussion though quickly leads to the question of what to look for to give an indication that a prospect is at a certain phase of their buying process. One place to look is in search queries - the full search term used, not just individual key words.


I pulled some examples from the raw data in Eloqua's own marketing to give you a sense of this. In the first list, you can see general, pain-related and category-related terms, "lead management", "demand generation", terms that are only related to the general space in which Eloqua operates such as "marketing service provider", and terms that are clearly education-oriented, such as "digital body language".


Individuals with these search queries are, more likely than not, in an early education phase of their buying process. They are trying to learn about possible opportunities, or looking into solutions for pains that are somewhat related to what we solve.

At this phase in the buying process, high level thought leadership, ideas, and market research are often most of interest.

The next set of terms seems to be one step further down the buying funnel. By looking for more specific details such as "lead generation software", or detailed use cases like "marketing automation case study", we can see the buyer is progressing to the phase where he or she is looking to discover specific solutions to a more well formed view of a problem or an opportunity.

Being clearly visible (SEM and SEO) to searchers on terms at this phase in the buying process is key, as they are often looking to put together a list of possible vendors.

As buyers move further through the process, and begin to validate their chosen solution, or finalize their decision among two or three short list vendors, their search terms begin to get much more specific.

Often at this phase, you will see your own company name, and a very tactical query. Pricing, objections, issues, and specifications will often show up. From a marketing perspective, ensuring that information on key decision points and objections is readily available is key.

Also, as you work with your sales organizations, ensuring that they have insight into this aspect of their buyer's digital body language is critical as they can understand how the decision is progressing, and what top-of-mind issues are happening. Presenting that digital body language in their CRM system, or through Prospect Profiler can be a great way to keep sales armed with developments at the buyer's organization