Customize your Real-Time Web Visitor Alerts

Alerting your sales team that their prospects are online is one of the easiest and quickest ways to add value to sales and enable sales to sell better. A real-time view of prospect activity gives sales insight into which accounts are active, who at those accounts is doing the investigation, and what conversation starters might engage them in a discussion right now.

However, having the content come labeled as "Eloqua Notifications" may confuse your sales team unless you have a chance to educate them on what to expect. Luckily, you don't have to. The notifications can be completely customized to your exact needs.

To begin configuring notifications, go to Setup->Management->User Management and select the user you want to configure the visitor alerts for. Select "Visitor Notifications" from the drop-down next to that user, and you can see any notifications that are already configured.

The section of "Who Triggers this Notification" allows you to configure exactly when an alert is sent out. Usually, you will configure it to match the salesperson's territory (by industry, ownership, or geography), and a minimum bar of activity (a few visits, viewing specific areas of the website, etc).

With that configured, your salesperson is able to receive alerts, but they will be generic in formatting. Use the "Notification Content Configuration" setting to select a new look and feel for them, and you can configure any area of the content you wish.

One of the most interesting areas to configure is the subject line. This will provide an at-a-glance view of who the person is and whether they are worth connecting with. Usually, inserting an email address in the subject line is worth doing, as it provides that instant recognition. Also, depending on your sales team's familiarity, you may need to have the subject line provide insights as to the purpose of the email, such as "Hot Lead Alert:".

The data shown in the visitor alerts is, of course, completely configurable. Just choose (or create) a Contact View in the "Data/View Shown in Notification Email" and that will be the exact set of data shown to the sales person. Usually a minimal set of information is best - anything extraneous tends to lead to distraction.

Usually you will want to have your corporate headers or standard messaging to again help the sales team understand what it is they are receiving. Do this under the "Email Header for Top of Email" section once you have selected the "Customize Branding" option.

You can also select whether you want to provide your sales team with a direct link to the visitor activity overview, and whether they should be allowed to configure which notifications they receive.

With that complete, you are ready to go. Your email notifications to your sales teams are completely configured; what triggers an alert, the data in the alert, who it comes from, and what the look and feel of the email is:

As one of the quickest, but most valuable things to set up, I would encourage everyone to set these up for your sales team.

Alerting Sales via a Marketing Automation Program

We've talked a lot about getting real time information to your sales team, and the value of the insight that provides. There are a number of easy ways to do it within Eloqua, each of which fits a specific situation.

The easiest is to set up a real-time web visitor alert for when key buyers visit your website. This triggers automatically off of web behaviour and known data.

Another way is to send lead alerts based on web form submits by looking at the data in the web form and alerting the appropriate salesperson.

A third way is to set up daily or weekly lead reports to be emailed to each salesperson based on all the configuration options available.

In this post, I wanted to introduce another way - based on the configuration of a marketing automation program in program builder. This technique is useful if you want to define specific, and deeper, rules to define when a sales person is alerted - such as only alerting when a certain lead score is reached, or based on more detailed territory assignments.

To do this, set up a step in your marketing automation program to Send Process Member Report to Owner. This will send an email to the "owner" of the contact as they pass through that step. We'll get to how "owner" is defined in a second.

In the configuration options, you have a few different Report options you can choose from, each of which sends a slightly different type of Report. If you just want the details of the contact (your most likely option), just select "Contact Details". Other options send information on the contact's membership in programs and groups, their known colleagues, or other history information on them. A topic for another post (or exploration if you're interested).

To define the "ownership" of the contact, you can build an ownership rule based on any data you have available. In a decision rule prior to the alert step, edit the ownership rules for whichever path leads to the alert step. In this case, it would be the "Yes" path.

You'll then want to either build a new ownership rule or use an existing one. Ownership rules take data that you have available, such as territory, field sales owner, industry, or revenue range, and map it to individual users. The user it is mapped to will be the one receiving the alert.

With this set up, you are all ready to go. When a contact reaches that step, an alert will be sent to them with the information in the default contact view. Very useful for knowing when a lead passed a certain threshold, or a person made it to the end of a lead nurturing routine.

Lead notifications by Territory

Quickly getting information about your inbound inquiries out to your sales team is critical to success. Each hour that goes by decreases the likelihood that you will be able to connect with the prospect.


In many cases, as we have talked about, there is a need to carefully and accurately score leads prior to handing them off to a field sales team. However, there are also situations where you will want all leads to go to a sales team (likely an inside sales team), and speed is the most critical factor.


In this case, with Eloqua, you can very easily do a quick, but effective lookup against a field in the incoming form. Perhaps you segment your inside sales team by geographic region, or perhaps by industry or even product line of interest. In each case, you can perform a simple one-step lookup to determine who to send the email notification to.

From the top menu in the forms area, choose "Manage Select Lists" to build (either manually or through an upload), a reference list that can reference incoming data values and provide an email address to notify.

In our example, we'll be routing leads by geography, so we'll create a Select List that has the Country value in the Option Name field, and the email address we would like to notify in the Option Value field.

With this built, all we need to do is to create an email notification step for the form. When we are asked to configure the recipient's email address, whereas we would normally use a constant value, in this case, we'll select "Form Field" as a source type.

We'll select the value that we want to reference, and then check the "Lookup" option (*). The Lookup option will then provide a set of select lists, and we'll select our "Reps By Country" list that we just created. Now, as the form is submitted, the Country that the visitor chose is referenced against our select list, and from there, an email address to notify is selected.

The lookup technique is a very useful technique in general, as you are able to greatly expand the options available to you when a form is submitted through its creative use.



Note that in this case, if you wanted to send notifications by Country for certain areas of the world, but by State for other areas, you could easily build two similar processing steps, one for each scenario, and have them run conditionally.

(*) Note: The "Lookup" option is not enabled by default, if you require it, please contact your Customer Success Manager to have it enabled.

Sales - It's all about knowing...

One of the best things you can do for your sales team is to set them up with real-time alerts when their prospects are on the website. It's quick and easy to do, and it begins delivering real value right away.

In Eloqua, under Management->User Management, pick a user, and select "Visitor Notifications" from their drop-down menu. Create a new notification for "Your Prospects on Website", and fill in the needed information. You can plug in their email address, specify timing (any time, only during business hours, etc), and choose content type.

Selecting the view of the visitor lets you pick exactly what fields you want to send to your sales team. Things like "Most Recent Search Query" and "Most Recent Marketing Campaign" give you good insights into what their interest areas are, while "Total Visits" and "Total Pages" gives you a sense of how deeply engaged they are.

Then, you set out when you want to send sales a notification. Usually, there are two parts to this; prospects who are "theirs", either by territory, or because their name is in the "Salesperson" field, and prospects who are interested.

The bar for interest can be moved up or down depending on the number of alerts you want to have sent out. Too few, and the sales team will not have a process to react to them, too many and they will ignore them. Talk with the team and fine tune this as you go forward.

Requiring at least a couple of visits, more than a few page views, or the existence of a most recent search query can make sure you only alert for interesting visitors.

What your sales team does with these alerts can vary. Immediately picking up the phone and calling is generally a bad idea, but the awareness they gain from seeing real-time indications of interest can be invaluable. Seeing old prospects come alive again, or interesting searches from active prospects provides valuable insight that helps them guide their sales process.

It's an easy thing to set up, and adds value for your sales team immediately. And who knows, they might even thank you for it....