Content is King, but sometimes we need to replace the King

(guest post from Ben McPhee)
We all know how important content is. It didn’t just rise to the throne à la nepotism like the rest of the kings with which we are familiar. No – content is legit. Content can make or break a campaign, a quarter or even a job.

Now while content in and of itself is critical to pushing out information and pulling in prospects, what is just as important is the ability to manage content in such a way that it is always where it needs to be when it needs to be there. Pretty straight forward, but examples never hurt.

Everyone knows that overwhelming sensation of dunce after sending out a work email to 5 executives reading, “Please see the attached deck . . .” and then shortly thereafter realizing that you either didn’t attach anything but your recently crippled pride or that you actually attached the first draft of the presentation you whipped up 3 months prior on 4 minutes of sleep.

That kind of sucks – but now imagine you actually sent a link to the wrong presentation or an outdated rate sheet or a promotional flyer sporting a decimal place two digits too far to the right . . . to 50,000 of your prospects . . . yikes . . . would be nice if there was an easy way to stuff that one under the rug.

But it’s not just about putting out fires – it’s also about having a scalable, manageable method of pushing out regular content updates to your prospect and client base. You may have the same email going out every week with only minor updates within the content to which the central link in the email directs your audience - do you really want to have to edit that email every single time you send it out? Or have to make changes to HTML or jump through any hoops whatsoever? If the execution and process management suffers from confinement and complexity, ripples can extend from poor content, to lost content to late content and beyond.

Because we recognize the important of a clean and quick content delivery and update process, a while back, we implemented a Replace Content tool that makes it super-easy to swap content to which you are linking in your emails and landing pages - WITHOUT having to actually go into those emails and landing pages! Now, we want to make sure you remembered that it’s there!

1. Uploading your content is easy – just go to the Content Asset area and upload:



2. Then, to insert a replaceable link to the content, copy and paste either the Email Redirect Link (for emails, so that you can track clickthroughs AND ensure that your branding is properly injected into the URL, assuming you have either the Silver or Gold Branding & Deliverability package) or the Trackable URL (for landing pages):



3. Once you have inserted your replaceable content link into your email or landing page, it’s a breeze. Whenever you want to update the content to which the link points, simply go to your content asset, click the dropdown next to its name and select, Replace Content:



4. Then select the file with which you want to replace the content and hit Replace:



You’ll get a warning to verify that you in fact want out with the old and in with the new:



Once you hit ok, the system will begin the replace process and then when it’s done, you’ll see the green bar of success and you’re done!



Now anyone who clicks on the link you inserted in your email or landing page will be automatically redirected to the new content – and you barely had to do ANYTHING!

Go ahead and test it – send an email out with a replaceable link in it, click it, see the first round content, replace the content, go back to the email, click the link again, check out the new content - takes a few minutes and you can see just how powerful this feature really is.

So remember the next time this saves your organization either time or embarrassment – Eloqua’s got your back!

Adding and Tracking Facebook ‘Like’ buttons in Eloqua emails

(Guest post from Vince Lockyer, Demand Gen Specialist, Avid)
vince (d0t) lockyer (at) avid (dot) com

There have been a lot of blog posts recently about Facebook ‘Like’ buttons and how to use them in marketing emails.

While it’s easy to add a link to a Facebook group or page from an email, it’s not been so easy to integrate a fully working ‘Like’ button into an email in a similar way it works with a webpage – and also accurately track who’s clicking it and what they are ‘liking’.
So far only one or two vendors have come up with an embedded solution to this – which of course only works with their platform. Now using the method described here you can get the same functionality for your Eloqua emails. This solution requires a bit of HTML tweaking in the final step.

How it works
From your Eloqua email, a blind form-submit sends the email address of the recipient, the URL, and the name of the webpage being ‘liked’ to an Eloqua form. After logging and tracking these details the form confirmation page then displays the webpage overlaid with the Facebook Like Button Social Plug-in.

Try it out!
Try out this example form with your own data to see how it looks.

How to build it

Create two new contact fields:
• Facebook – Last Like URL
This will contain the URL of the last thing that the contact liked. It’s required also because the form confirmation page will need the URL to display the webpage in the final step.

• Facebook – Last Like Name
(Optional but highly recommended.) Contains the name of the last thing that the contact liked. Required to make the reports more readable and also to be displayed in the form confirmation page.

Create a new form with the following fields. Keep the form name and the HTML names of the fields short as they will be used in the blind form submit URL. Try something like ‘fb’ or ‘like’ for the form name.

• ‘e’ – Email Address
• ‘l’ – URL
• ‘n’ – Name

Add a ‘Update Contact Data’ processing step to update the two Facebook fields from the form submissions.

Add a confirmation page processing step. Here you will need to build the HTML for displaying the webpage overlaid with the Facebook Social Plug-in.

Confirmation Page HTML
The confirmation page displays the webpage being ‘liked’ in an iframe embedded in the Eloqua confirmation page. A semi-transparent layer is overlaid on top with the Facebook Social Plug-in contained in another layer (see image).

A close button is included in the top-left that hides the overlaid layers and reveals the webpage beneath.

Download the HTML for the confirmation page, you can use it as-is or customise it to your requirements. Note: you will need to edit it to update the field merges and locations of the graphics files in your Eloqua instance.

To add-in your own field merges for the ‘Facebook – Last Like URL’ and ‘Facebook – Last Like Name’ use the Insert Contact Field option in the Eloqua Confirmation Page editor. To upload the images use the Upload Images tool under Hypersites or Email Marketing > Tools & Content Components. You’ll need to copy the URL of the hosted image once uploaded and paste that into the HTML.

Adding the Like button to an email

Once the form fields, form and confirmation page is setup you can add the ‘Like’ button to your email. The button will trigger a blind-form submission in this format:



Make sure “?elqFormName=” equals the HTML name of the form you created and “&elqSiteID” equals your unique Eloqua site ID. “&l=” is the URL of the webpage being liked and “&n=” is the name.

Reporting

To get a report of who is liking what, view the Form Data report:


Liking or Recommending

The code described here will allow you to add a ‘Like’ button. You can also add-in a ‘Recommend’ button using the same code – you’ll just need to change the ‘action’ parameter in the Facebook Social Plug-in to ‘recommend’:
“&action=recommend”

SmartXchange - Installing a Template

(Guest post from Miles Thibault, Product Manager for Eloqua's SmartXchange)

Eloqua's SmartXchange template library became available today. SmartXchange templates are marketing assets, such as emails, forms, and even programs; that have been refined and tested by Eloqua and other marketers. They give you better performance in less time.

The rest of this post will walk you through installing one of the Eloqua Best Practice email templates.

1. To access SmartXchange, go to: Setup | SmartXchange



2. This example uses an email template called "BP - Product Offer with CTA, 1 column." Once you've found it, click Use Template



3. Since an email is made of several smaller components, you should give each of them a descriptive name. Once that's done, click Finish. The template is now installed.



4. As an optional step, some templates have tasks that you can complete on the tasks page. Complete as many tasks as you need and click Done.



That's is! In only a few minutes you're ready to use on of Eloqua's best-practice emails.

Using Eloqua emails as social media content

(Guest post from Joel Rothman)

Out of the box, Eloqua allows you to create a link that will send someone to a Social Media site, such as Twitter, Facebook or Linked In. This functionality is great, and very easy to use. But, I have been asked a couple of times how we can create a link to the actual email itself that can be placed used for twitter etc… and there is a pretty easy way to do this, assuming you are just a little bit comfortable with HTML.

Most social sites have a specific URL type that can be used to push someone to the site, and prepopulate the content box with the text that you want. For example, for twitter, it’s this format:



Where you substitute what’s in the “content” are for what you want to pre-populate, with + signs instead of spaces in your text. So, what you need to do is come up with a line, such as “Check out this Newsletter for valuable B2B tips”, that would look like this: (click for larger image)



But wait, it’s missing the URL! How do you get that, you might be asking? Simple, insert this code: (click for larger image)



So, you’ll end up with a link that looks like this: (click for larger image)



And Voila:

Now, a couple of notes. Any personalization in emails will not show. In fact, it will just be blank (ie if you have Dear Joel, it will say just Dear). Also, these links expire after a few weeks.

Now, that URL says now.eloqua.com.. what’s up with that? Can you change that? Stay tuned…

Newsletter Dynamic Customization using Blind Form Submits

Vince Lockyer, Demand Generation Specialist at Avid was kind enough to send in this excellent (and very detailed) example of using blind form submits to customize a newsletter to the exact preferences of each recipient.

The Avid Spotlight newsletter has a subscriber base of well over a million contacts – from bedroom DJs and home video editing enthusiasts through to network TV news engineers, Top 10 music producers and Hollywood feature film editors.

To ensure our broad range of subscribers get the most relevant content, ADC (Activity Driven Content) is used to pull in sections of news and promotional content targeted towards six different segments.

In this post I’ll show how we used ADC and Email Blind Form Submits to dynamically customize the newsletter. Using this method our subscribers can personalize their newsletter with additional content preferences, and then immediately view the updated email in a web browser.

In the first month over 4000 individual customizations occurred using this method. Not only does it help to ensure people get the news they want, but it means our subscribers can provide us with explicit segmentation data about themselves.

How it works

Avid Spotlight content preferences are stored as a series of six contact fields containing an ‘on’ (form checkbox) value indicating whether the subscriber should be receiving that content. If an ‘on’ value is present for a particular content preference then that content gets pulled into the final email using ADC criteria rules.




An additional set of ADC rules check to see which content preferences the subscriber doesn’t have – displaying blind form submission buttons (right) that automatically add values to the respective content preferences fields.

After the form submission, a confirmation page is displayed automatically redirecting the subscriber to the Web Preview version of the newsletter containing the updated content (below).



Try it Yourself!

http://forms.avid.com/forms/spotlightdemo

Use this form to subscribe to our newsletter (you can remove yourself at any time). You’ll immediately receive the latest newsletter to try out the customization.

The Form

To keep the blind form submission URLs as short as possible, the HTML name of the form is simply called ‘sl’. The form fields are:

• em (Email Address)
• pref (Preference) – Containing the additional content preference code
• sguid (elqEmailSaveGUID) – Used to display the Web Preview
• elq (RecepientID) – Also used to display the Web Preview

The Blind Form Submission

Here is the format of the blind form anchors, using Eloqua dynamic email fields to pull in the email address and Web Preview fields:




Processing Steps

When a blind form submission is received, Eloqua does the following:

• Updates the Contact Field with the relevant content preference (‘on’ value)
• Updates an additional contact field containing the full name (text string) of the content preference (this is used in the confirmation page).
• Updates two more contact fields – RecepientID and elqSaveEmailGUID (also used by the confirmation page).
• Redirects to the Confirmation Page.

After the processing steps, the contact table will look something like this:




The Confirmation Page

This is where the additional content preference is confirmed to the subscriber in a Web Page, followed by a meta redirect to the saved Web Preview version of the email. In order for this last part to work, Contact Table field values have to be pulled into the confirmation page.



Firstly, the page pulls in the name of the content preference and the email address. In our case CEF100441 equals the content preference name field, and C_EmailAddress is the subscriber's email address:



The final part of the confirmation page is the meta redirect, which is in this format:



Where CEF100440 is the elqEmailSaveGUID, and CEF100442 is the RecipientID.
Note: these field names will be different in your instance of Eloqua, and you’ll need to use the ‘Insert Field’ menu item in the Confirmation Page builder to insert the HTML containing the field name.

Locking Down Your Assets

Guest post from Chad Horenfeldt
============

Eloqua has some great security features that let clients of all sizes implement specific business processes within Eloqua. In this post, I’m going to focus on securing assets in Eloqua.

By assets, I’m referring to the following objects within Eloqua that can be locked down:

- Email
- Email Group
- Contact Filters
- Distribution Lists
- Programs
- Forms

Eloqua allows you to lock down assets by either security group (a specific group of Eloqua users) or by individual user. Let’s look at a specific example. Let’s say you want to modify the security rights of an Email Group within Eloqua as you don’t want certain users to have access to these emails within this folder. We’ll assume that you have Customer Administrator security rights. Login to Eloqua and go to the Email area. Click on the drop down menu of the email and select “Edit Security”.



From the “Edit Security Rights” window, you can quickly select if the various security groups should have the ability to view, edit, delete or modify the security rights for this Email Group.



All you need to do is click on the red X to change it to a green check and vice versa. In this case, we only want certain users to have access to the emails in this group so we’ll disable access for most of the email groups and add the two users that we want to grant access to: Greg Lui and Jeff Porter:



You’re all done! Only Greg and Jeff can access this Email Group. Just to add to this, users who create their own Email Groups can adjust the security access to it.

The same type of asset protection can be done for the other assets listed above such as emails, email templates, forms, programs and email distribution lists. As another example, you can remove editing privileges of an email to a security group or user(s) but these users can still copy the email and modify it for their own purposes. We often recommend to our clients to create emails that will be used as templates this way. After they’re created, put them in an Email Group called “0 Templates” so they appear at the top and ensure that the emails are locked down so that they can’t be modified. You can also secure the sections of an email but we’ll leave that topic to a future post. Remember to lock down your assets – especially if you have multiple groups operating within one Eloqua instance.

Astadia's Proper Pasting Party

Our friends at Astadia have maintained a great series of Eloqua tips, based on their work with 1000s of great marketers around the world. They covered a very important topic - Pasting in order to avoid Microsoft Word formatting - and I wanted to share that tip with you as it is a quick win that can save a lot of time and headaches.

I encourage anyone interested to sign up for Astadia's tip of the week, view all the past Eloqua tips, or visit their marketing best practices blog.

==============================

You're invited to the Proper Pasting Party!
Where: Your Eloqua install
When: Now and Forever
Why: To avoid looking like you lack attention to detail by blasting out emails from Eloqua that look unclean and unprofessional because of your bad, improper pasting habits.
BYOC (Bring Your Own Content or Cocktail if you'd like)

There's an often-overlooked button in Eloqua's email editor toolbar: Paste:

In this Tip of the Week, we're going to show you how to make use of this unsung hero to avoid pasting bad content into your Eloqua emails.

Your usual workflow probably goes something like this:

1. Write the text for your email in Microsoft Word and receive revisions and approval from your team.
2. Create a new email in Eloqua.
3. Open your Word document and select all of your text. Click CTRL+C (or right-click and select "Copy") to copy all of the text.
4. Click over to Eloqua and click CTRL+V (or right-click and select "Paste") to paste all of the text into your email. NOTE: DO NOT DO THIS! Read further to learn why...

But when you run the email checker in Eloqua, you get this annoying error:



You may also notice some strange characters or empty boxes in a few places in your email when you test it on a non-Microsoft email client. Not testing on multiple email clients? Well saddle up cowgirl/boy and get 'er done! It is a best practice to test your emails in various email clients since your readers are not likely to be using the same one (no, not everyone uses Microsoft Outlook). The ugly email content is caused by some of the HTML formatting in Microsoft Word which is not compatible with all email clients.

But fear not friends – there's a solution!

Steps 1 through 3 above are all the same. But when you get to Step 4, you need to make a small yet muy importante change (that's very important for you non-Spanish readers):

In Eloqua, click the small black arrow next to the Paste button on the email editor toolbar.
From the menu for Paste Options, select Paste Plain-Text.




Now, all of your text will be dropped into your email, but without the problematic Microsoft Word formatting. If you choose Paste Formatted Text, it will continue to create the problematic Microsoft formatting.

Party on, Pasters!

Making your Email Content Searchable

Success in natural search optimization has a lot to do with the quality and frequency of the unique content you publish. As marketers, we often spend significant effort creating content that goes into emails, the landing pages they drive people to, and the marketing assets that these lead to, and we are not left with as much time as we would like to create content for blogs and other online properties that are searchable.

However, this does not have to be the situation. With Eloqua, it is very easy to repurpose any of your email content to make it publishable and discoverable by search engines. (see Eloqua's own feed of interesting content for an example)

The first step is to create an RSS feed that you will publish your content into. In the communication area, under Communicate-> Feeds, create a new RSS feed, and call it something like “Marketing Events and Promotions”. This is where we will keep a running feed of all the marketing content that would be interesting for people to discover in a search. Be sure to select that this is an internal feed (a feed that his hosted within Eloqua) rather than capturing an external feed (such as from a Blog's RSS Feed as we talked about previously).

With this feed created, but empty, our next step is to feed content into it. We are creating a lot of content in email, but this content does not get found by Google as it does not generally end up hosted on the Internet in a way that it is linked to and discovered by Google. We’re going to change that by generating a publicly available feed of email content that might be interesting.

For each email that is interesting and non-promotional; new whitepapers, notices of events and webinars, thought leadership articles, or case studies, the email that you use to announce it can be added to the RSS feed we have just created. To do this, from the email editor, select Publish to Fee from the Content menu. Select the RSS feed you just created, make sure the title and description are accurate (it will default to the title and description from your email) and click Publish.

Now, the email is linked into the RSS feed. The feed will show the title and description of the email, and the link will guide the user to a hosted landing page that is the exact content of your email. The feed itself can be very useful for internal constituents, like your sales team, who are interested in knowing what marketing communications are happening. Adding the feed to a web desktop such as iGoogle, or an RSS feed reader, gives a very quick and easy way to stay on top of the communications that are happening.

However, this feed can be used to create a web friendly, hosted portal that highlights the events and promotions your marketing team is running, and makes them all immediately searchable by Google. Simply build a landing page on an Eloqua hypersite, and insert the RSS feed into it. By adding a style to the feed, and some creative around the feed, you can create a more accurately branded experience. Make sure that this page is linked to from somewhere, such as your main web site, so that it can be found by the search engines, and all the content within it will be found by them.

Now, each email that you send out can be dropped into the RSS feed and will appear on your landing page without any extra work on your behalf. You gain the search benefits of creating a rich, consistent flow of content, without having to duplicate effort or write any new material. Of course the more interesting and non-promotional your material is, the more likely it is to have other people find it interesting and link to it, which further increases its search friendliness.

When the article in the feed is clicked on, or crawled by Google, the full content of your email shows up, cleanly formatted and fully searchable by Google:

Security Popup - Get Rid of It

We've all seen the popup that appears whenever you edit any marketing content in an email or landing page editor. It adds an unnecessary click to your day as you allow it to display the non-secure content that you are editing.

The great thing is that there is a quick and simple setting you can use to get rid of it entirely.

Before I start, I should admit that I am borrowing this tip from the folks at Astadia, who came out with it in a Tip of the Week a few months back. However, it's too good not to repeat.

Simply go to the Tools->Internet Options menu in Internet Explorer, and choose the Security tab. For each of the "Internet", "Local Intranet" and "Trusted Sites" zones, go through the following process:

Select the zone

Click "Custom level..."

Scroll down to the setting for "Display mixed content"

Choose "Enable"

Click "OK"

That's all you need to do - but remember to do it for all the zones, and be sure to add https://secure.eloqua.com as one of your trusted sites.

You may need to close and restart Internet Explorer before the changes take effect, but once you do, you will no longer see the security popup when you edit content.

Emails, Blackberries, and Text-Only Sending

More and more of today's executives read their emails on their blackberries, or other similar devices. The challenge with these devices is that they will receive the HTML version of an email, if it is sent, but will not render the HTML correctly. This leaves us with a very poor recipient experience as the email is challenging, if not impossible to read.

Luckily, there is an easy way around this challenge within Eloqua if you are able to identify which of your recipients are likely to be reading your email on a blackberry. You can tag a group of recipients within an overall batch to only receive the text version of an email and by doing so present them with a more easily read option on their blackberry.

The first step is to create an aesthetically pleasing email in text. This is a very minimalist environment where formatting such as bold, italics, and colors are not supported, so make careful use of copy and spacing. You can use "+", "*", or "=" characters very judiciously to separate sections or provide highlights.

You can, of course, use dynamic field merges in your text version and the links are trackable as you would expect in a regular HTML email within Eloqua.

With the email content created in a text version, remember to test. You can do this as you normally would to test an email - in the QuickSend area, under the Testing tab. In that tab, you will see an option for selecting which version of the email to test.

Select the Text Email to only test that version, and run the test as you normally would.

With great text content created, the next step is to define who in your audience should only receive text. This is done through the Contact Group interface's Advanced Options menu. With the intended recipients in the Contact Group, open the Advanced Options panel, select "Allow Only Text Emails to Group Members", and click "Apply Advanced Options".

This is a one-time setting, so if new members are added to the group, the option will have to be run again. When the contacts in that group are added to a campaign, they will only receive the text version of the content.

Please note that if you don't see the Advanced Options panel, it is because you do not have sufficient security access within your install, so you may need to

ask your administrator to grant you the needed access, or perform the task themselves.

Once you have sent the campaign, you may wish to switch the contacts in question back to receiving HTML emails if that is appropriate.

For slightly more detailed instructions, please feel free to download the guide featured here that walks you through in more detail.

I look forward to your comments on how this has worked in your marketing to executives carrying blackberries.

Quick Tip: Image Properties

If you are working with images in the Eloqua email editor, be sure that you're aware of the image properties dialog that lets you manage many of the key properties of your images.



In the WYSIWG editor, when you have highlighted an image by clicking on it, you will see an "Insert/Edit Image" button in the bottom button bar. With an image highlighted, this will give you access to the properties box for that image, and allow you to manipulate most of the relevant HTML properties of the image.



You can manipulate any of the following image properties:

• Image dimensions


• Text wrapping around image


• Border size, style, and color


• Alternate text to be displayed when the image is not displayed

Many of these are valuable editing properties, but the alternate text is worth paying attention to. Many, if not most, of today's email inboxes do not display images automatically. When the email first appears, only a placeholder for the image will be shown. Although the best idea is to ensure that your email design is not entirely dependant on images, if images are unavoidable, it can be useful to include alternate text that will show up in the mouse-over of many email clients.