Engage Search Visitors viaTriggered Campaigns

Guest post from Chad Horenfeldt from Anything Goes Marketing

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At the recent MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Summit, Carolyn Nye, Marketing Manager at S&S Worldwide discussed a number of must-have triggered email programs for all businesses. One of these programs included tracking visitors whose last page on the site was the search results page. She explained that in this situation, the visitor didn’t find what they were looking for and left your site. This post explains how to create a simple automated marketing program that will send a helpful email to these visitors assuming they have opted in to receive communication from you.

1. Create the email. Build a simple email that includes helpful advice such as “Couldn’t find what you’re looking for? Please contact us at 1-800…”. You may also want to include links to your blogs or other social media sites like LinkedIn or Twitter so the visitor can find other sources of information that they may not have been aware of.

2. Create a Condition that reports on visitors whose last page was the search page. Go to Automate > Web Profiling > Segmentation. Create a new Condition called “Last page = Search Results”, choose the Last Page in Visit as the Profile field and enter the name of your search results page. You can use wild cards as you only need a small part of the search results page URL so Eloqua knows what you’re talking about. I’ve used *eloqua.com/found/* so Eloqua looks for any last pages that has that as part of the URL. Each site is a bit different so just go to your search results page and grab what you think you need.

3. Create a Condition Visitors Report. Create a report that returns all the web visitors that have visited this page in the last day and save it.


4. Create the marketing automation program. Create a simple program in Eloqua that has a Start step, a Send Email Step and an Exit step. It should look like this:

5. Create the program feeder. In the first step of the marketing automation program, select “Add members to this step” and then choose “New” in the Program Feeder area.

Create the feeder and choose “Visitor Saved Reports”. Use the Saved Report you created earlier and set the feeder to evaluate every 4 hours. Turn the program on and you’re all set.

For more information on feeders see this post on connecting with new contacts in your marketing database.

One last note – you don’t need to worry about Eloqua's sending repeat emails as you can set the email step to only send the email once.

This is a good example of how you can build very simple triggered automated marketing campaigns to engage your prospects and customers. Let us know if you have created other types of campaigns like this.

Chad

High-Value Content as a Feeder for Nurturing

Today's post on Artisan is another guest post from Ben McPhee, on our Product Management team. In his last guest post on checkbox confirmations on web forms, Ben brought some of his insights from his work with sports marketing organizations to Eloqua Artisan.

This time, Ben looks at how to flag high value content - such as a season schedule - and then use the viewing of that content, at any point in time, from any source, as a feeder to a very targeted nurture program. This technique is a very useful one, and can be used in any situation were high value content (a webinar, a product demo, etc) should be used as a trigger for a nurture program.

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Do you have high value content that when downloaded or accessed by a web visitor, you know means that they're more likely to purchase or at least be receptive to future offers? Do you want to offer that download opportunity through one or more emails or web links, and then capture those visitors that downloaded the content so that you can add them to an automated nurture & upsell campaign? Well, in several easy steps you can do that using:

• Content Assets uploaded to Eloqua


• Query Strings to track links wherever they are used


• A Saved Report to identify who clicked on those links


• A Marketing Automation Program with Program Feeder to grab those people

In this example, let's say you want to kick off a campaign that allows your fans to easily download your team's schedule from an email, which would trigger a number of benefits for them (perhaps being added to a "Tell Me About Special Offers" distribution list) and a number of benefits for you (knowing who is interested in timing of games and events for better segmentation for upsell).

First, go to the Content Asset area (Setup -> Content Assets -> Content -> Upload Web Content) and upload your schedule (or whatever high value content you have in mind). This uploads the content and allows you to track the links to it.

Once you have uploaded the schedule, you will be provided with 3 links to the doc - one of them is called "Email Redirect Link" - copy that link and paste it somewhere for the time being, as you will eventually be inserting that link into your email.

Next, go to the 'Web Profiling' area and create a new Query String Parameter:

You can think of this query string parameter as a bucket, for identification purposes, for all the content you will ever offer to your fans for download. So we recommend you name this in a generic manner - like, "Content Item". That way when you are deciding upon WHICH content item you would like to use / report upon for different campaigns, you will be thinking in terms of, "Content Item = Event Schedule" or "Content Item = Player Profile Sheet". Give it a name, and don't worry about the rest of the settings.

The advantage of doing it this way - with Query Strings - is that you can use the content, with the Query String in the link in any email or any link on your website, and the rest of the process will automatically pick it up. Regardless of how you promote your team schedule or other high value content, if the link contains the Query String, the visitors who click on the link will be added to the nurturing program.

Now we'll move on to your email - design the email containing the free download offer and insert the hyperlink - when you paste in the link to your schedule (the link we told you to hold on to a few steps back), you will be editing the end of the URL to add the query string parameter you just created AND the name of the content, in this case "Event Schedule", to record the fact that anyone who has clicked on this link has done so to request your Event Schedule (you might need to click on this image to see it clearly):

The content element of your campaign is done! Now when people click on this link, they'll download your team's schedule! The next part is setting up the reporting and the automation to capture those people and add them to a marketing automation program.

Go to the Report Console and search for a report called "Visitors by Query String Value". Then select the query string parameter you created earlier and enter in the ID/name you gave your content (in this case "EventSchedule") - run the report:

You can see that this return a list of people on your website who viewed your schedule (ie, clicked on a link containing the Query String you specified). Save this report and give it a more specific name - like "Schedule Downloaders" - and make sure you are using a relative time range for the report so that it is continuously filtering in your newest downloaders:

Now, create a marketing automation program that is going to manage the people that have downloaded your schedule - we won't get into the details of the actual program, but let's just start by creating it with the first step to get you going. For the program details, don't allow members to enter the program more than once, and set the default member type to contacts so that we can market to them.

Add a first step to your program to act as the entry point for your schedule downloaders. As an action for this step, we recommend having them added to a Contact Group so that you have more flexibility in how you manage and report on the fans that have downloaded the content (e.g., when put in a contact group it becomes easier to add them to a future email campaign distribution list):

Then, once that first step is saved, go to the "Members" menu and add a Feeder to the program - this is the item that actually defines how fans will be added to this automated progam - so to tie everything together, you'll be telling to system to add to the program all the fans that show up in that report you saved a few steps back - worded differently, anyone who downloaded your schedule will be added to this program:

Save this feeder and YOU'RE DONE!!

Now everyone that downloads your schedule from the email you send out will be automatically added to a program through which you can:

- Send them follow-up emails with further promotional offers
- Add them to other lead nurturing campaigns
- Notify your sales team to contact the fans
- Update their profiles to indicate their activity or change their lead score

Experts in the Field: DemandGen

I’m continually amazed at the creative ways I see Eloqua being used. The most common use, in external marketing campaigns, can still be very interesting, but many creative marketers are applying the automation, data, and communication aspects of the platform to various other uses with great effect. A great example of this came up the other day when I was talking with Dave Lewis and Patrice Greene at DemandGen.

They had worked with Accela on an interesting campaign that educated and engaged internal employees rather than external prospects, and in doing so garnered awards and recognition for the campaign's creativeness.

We all wrestle with the challenge of bringing new employees up to speed, educating them on our companies and brands, and getting them focused on core objectives. Accela decided to apply the techniques of nurture marketing to this challenge, and was successful in engaging 90% of their employee base.

The design of the program was quite simple:

- Over 10 weeks, each person in the company received a quiz about one of the 10 internal departments, with questions contributed by the execs in that department

- Each week followed the same pattern, with a Monday invitation, Wednesday reminder, and Thursday announcement of the week’s winner and overall leader board

- A real-time dashboard showed both results and overall participation

Automation allowed the program to smoothly run over the 10 week period with minimal involvement of the marketing team, and the continuous engagement led to 63% of the workforce playing every week.

As with many marketing concepts that show success, this quickly resulted in a copy of the campaign being used, with some modifications, by human resources to onboard new employees.

DemandGen’s work with Accela is a great example of how the capabilities that a marketing team has with Eloqua can be extended into novel and interesting areas. The goals, techniques, and approaches of nurture marketing are just as valuable with internal marketing campaigns that drive employee engagement as they are with external marketing campaigns that increase engagement within a prospect base.

The details of the Accela case study are available here on the DemandGen site.

Content For Free?

Creating fresh, interesting content about your industry can be a tough challenge. I think we all know a marketer (not us, of course, but someone we know) who has run out of ideas after a few months of creating content, and because of that, a marketing campaign falls flat. B2B marketing usually involves quite a bit of buyer education and establishment of trust and expertise. This involves helping the prospective buyer learn about your industry, your market, your products on their own. That can take many months. That's a lot of content.

So, here's a way to short-cut that. There are often numerous people within your industry, or even within your company who are creating content on a variety of blogs. You, being in the industry, are probably tracking it all in great detail. Use that to help educate your audience.

The bloggers will enjoy the free exposure, your audience gets rich content, and you look like a hero for producing a great monthly education piece without the usual late nights of content creation.

In the "Feeds" area, under "Communicate", add a feed from a good industry source. All you have to do is drop in the URL for the RSS of the feed. I'll grab the feed for the Digital Body Language blog (the sister blog of this one), and add it in.

Eloqua automatically grabs the feed content and makes it acessible for you to use anywhere you like. Emails, hypersites, etc, can all have the content automatically dropped in just by adding a reference to the feed. Any clicks on the feed items will also be tracked as part of that person's profile.

You can, of course, create the feed items directly from content within Eloqua, but more on that another time.

Now you're ready to use the feed content in your own marketing. I'll go through an example of dropping it into an email, but the same applies in Hypersites if you want fresh content on your landing pages.

In the email editor, at the bottom of the editor, you'll have a link for "Insert Feed" if you have the capability enabled. Put your cursor where you want to insert the feed content (often a side-bar is the best bet) and click Insert Feed.

You'll be presented with a dialog box that lets you configure how you want to work with this feed - don't worry, you can always click on the feed content to change the settings later.

Essentially, you're picking how many items you want to insert, what style and appearance you want, and whether you're inserting the content once, as static content, or in real time as the email is sent.

Unless you have a specific set of content you are interested in, the best bet is an automatically updated feed, as it pulls fresh content on the fly.

That's all you need to do, now your email contains a feed from the blog you have picked, and you can see what topics are of interest to your audience out of those blogs.

This is a new area for us, so if you've started using it and have an interesting story, or feedback on it, I'd be very interested in hearing from you. I know that it's popular in both Sports Marketing (lots of interesting post-game commentary), and Financial Services organizations (plenty of up-to-the-minute market news), but if you're using this in a different way, drop me a line and let me know your thoughts.

Building a Pachinko Machine

I wrote the other day about an approach to Nurture Marketing that makes sure you can (a) continue to nurture your prospects regardless of source, (b) make sure nobody receives the same message more than once, and (c) add new messages to the nurture cycle whenever they are ready. You can read about the general idea here: http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2008/12/nurture-marketing-vs-pachinko.html

So let's look at building a Program that does that.

Essentially, this nurture Program is a very simple chain of "attempt to send a message" blocks that send a message if a person has never been sent it, but skip if the person has been sent it. Much of this could be done with Decision Rules that evaluate whether the person has received a specific email (or just rely on emails never being sent to the same person more than once), but that ignores the fact that often one message can be communicated in many different forms. Let's say it's an offer for a free whitepaper - there may be 4 or 5 different emails that offer this whitepaper.

So, to solve that problem, instead we use Contact Groups to manage whether a person has been sent a particular message. If they have, they skip that block, if they have not, they are sent that message. Any time a person is sent a message that is used in nurturing, they are added to the appropriate group. The Decision Rules you see in this flow for "Sent Message 1?" are evaluating whether the person is a member of the associated Contact Group. You can also add them to a "Read Message X" group if they open or click on the email, if you choose, and that helps significantly for building good analytics around your nurturing program, which we'll look at later.


Once you have the technique for one messaging block, just repeat with as many messaging blocks as you have content for. At the end of the program, wait for 30 days, then route all members back to the start. They will cycle through this Program indefinitely, but they will only receive any message in it once.

When you have any new content, add it into the Program as another messaging block, and everyone in being nurtured will receive that message when they are next ready to receive a nurture message.

Now you have a continuously running nurture Program that you can add your contacts into. New inquiries, old leads, contacts who are not quite ready for a sales call; all are great candidates for nurturing.