ReadyTalk and Eloqua Integration

The vision of revenue performance management is one that we've been talking about for a while now, and I often find myself in conversation where people are asking what it means tactically. What needs to change in the day to day world that we're used to if we are to drive towards the strategic vision of RPM. One of the easiest examples there is webinar integration. Webinars are a core part of most B2B marketers' daily activities. More importantly, however, engagement in an webinar provides very relevant digital body language on buyers throughout their education process.

If you use ReadyTalk as your system for webinars or virtual events, you will be happy to hear that it is the latest addition to our suite of webinar cloud connectors. Now, Eloqua can be used as your marketing automation platform to promote and drive attendance for events, while ReadyTalk is used to run the event itself. The data on who registered and who attended can be seamlessly and automatically moved between both systems.

A prospect who registered but did not attend can be sent a “sorry we missed you” rather than a “thanks for attending” email, while a prospect who dropped off after only 5 minutes might respond well to a follow-up proposing a different set of topics that might be more appealing. Similarly, lengthy attendance combined with engagement such as asking and answering a number of questions is a great indicator of high interest and likely purchase intent.

Specifically, to integrate Eloqua's marketing automation capabilities with ReadyTalk's webinar capabilities, you now have 3 cloud connector steps to use at your convenience:

- Register Attendee: Registers a contact who is in that step of a program with a specific event in ReadyTalk.

- Query Attendance: Looks at each contact in that step of the program and queries ReadyTalkto see if they attended the event and for how long.

- All Attendees Feeder: Automatically pulls a list of all people who attended a particular ReadyTalk webinar and feeds them in to Eloqua as contacts and places them into a group (where of course they can be fed automatically into a program for follow-up nurturing). Again, for each attendee, the information captured includes how long they attended the event.

To get started, you’ll need the Cloud Connector installed in your Eloqua instance. This is very easy to do, see the recent post on Cloud Connector Installation instructions for how to add a new Cloud Connector to your install. The Cloud Connector we’ll be looking at here is available on our repository of interesting connectors: cloudconnectors.eloqua.com. They are free to use, just create an account.

Under Communication, you'll find ReadyTalk: Register, and Query Attendance, while under Feeder, you’ll find ReadyTalk: All Viewers – those are the connectors we’ll be working with, and the ones to install.

Once you have them installed, you can begin using them within your webinar invitation and management program. The cloud connector steps for ReadyTalk integration can be plugged into your marketing automation program at whatever points make sense, so be sure to whiteboard what you want to have happen and use the steps accordingly.

Likely, you’ll want to use a ReadyTalk: Register step when the buyer has indicated that they are interested in attending, perhaps by clicking a link or submitting a form.

You’ll want to run the ReadyTalk: Query step after the event has taken place to see who attended and for how long. That data can be used to guide prospects down unique follow-up paths depending on their behavior.


Now, for each step, you’ll need to configure the Cloud Connector to do what you need. Each connector is roughly the same, but with slightly different options, but once you have one figured out the rest will be simple. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll walk through the ReadyTalk: Query step. Choose Cloud Connector as a step type, and pick ReadyTalk Query from the drop-down below (if you have installed the connector in your Eloqua instance as we discussed earlier). Click the Configure button to launch the configuration UI.

The connector will need to be configured with your ReadyTalk credentials, including the Toll free number, Access Code, and PIN. These are the same credentials that you would use to access your ReadyTalk account normally.

A final setting is where you want to store the returned information, in the contact record or in a custom data object (data card). If you're running many events, you'll want to use custom data objects to keep a full history of attendance.

With that configured and saved, move to the field mappings tab, and choose the contact fields or custom data object fields that you want to read data from or write data to.

That's all that's needed to have full integration between your ReadyTalk webinars and your Eloqua marketing automation. You can go over to the Run Step tab to run the integration manually a few times to make sure it's all working. This shows you the results you will be pulling back into Eloqua or lets you manually run the step to check that it's all configured correctly.



When you're happy with the results, just go to the Credentials tab to click "Enable Step" to enable it to run automatically.


We'd love to hear your feedback on this connector, what can be improved, and what else you need it to do.

Adobe Connect and Eloqua Integration

Integration between Eloqua's marketing automation programs and webinar providers is an area we've covered quite a bit lately. Of course, for those who use systems other than WebEx or On24, the comments have been consistent - great structure, but can you support my chosen webinar provider. We're happy to add another popular provider to that community - Adobe Connect.

Adobe Connect, part of the Adobe family, provides an excellent platform for hosting large or small events for marketing, education, or sales. They also provide a robust way to tie the data on who attended webinar events into your digital body language on each prospect within Eloqua.

Like any other Eloqua Cloud Connectors, the connectors act as steps within Program Builder's marketing automation workflows, so the first step is to whiteboard what you would like to have happen. With Adobe Connect, to ensure that the individuals are uniquely tracked (by email address), you'll want to register them for the event via Eloqua.



This creates a guest user account in Adobe Connect that allows you to see who is attending. After the event has taken place, you'll likely want to pull information on who attended into Eloqua. To do this, there is a Cloud Connector step to Query Attendance.



With the plan set out on the whiteboard, let's look at how to get these Cloud Connectors set up in your Eloqua instance. We looked at how to install a Cloud Connector into Eloqua recently, and you'll need to do that for the steps you are going to use. Find these connectors at cloudconnectors.eloqua.com:

Register Contact with Adobe Connect: to create a user account and register them for the webinar.

Unregister Contact from Adobe Connect: if you want to remove people from the event automatically.

Query Adobe Connect Attendance: to get information on who attended after the event has taken place.

and also

Feeder of Adobe Connect Attendees: to feed in all Adobe Connect attendees directly into Eloqua for nurture and follow-up (without using a program step to query from)

Install any of these connector types you wish to use and then you are ready to add them into your marketing automation program. To add a step, put the step in the program as you would normally, then select “Cloud Connector” as a step action. You’ll then see a drop-down of installed Cloud Connectors below (if you have installed the Cloud Connectors into your Eloqua instance). For this post, we’ll look at just one of the connectors, but the flow is similar for all of them. Select the Adobe Connect Query Attendance connector for the step that looks to see if people actually attended the event.



Click the Configure button to begin setting it up. You will be asked for your credentials, and it will confirm the Program Builder step you’re connecting to, and from there it will go straight into configuration. The Configuration tab asks you for some options on configuring the Adobe Connect side of the connector. Important: you’ll need an account that is part of the Administrator group for this integration as user accounts (just guests) are being created.

If the account you are using is your own, you should see your meetings with the “My Meetings” option selected, but if you are using a system administrator account, you’ll want to select “All Meetings” and save to see your meetings. Also configure where you want to store the information retrieved by Adobe Connect; you can either use fields on the contact record or, better, store the information in a custom data object.



Move to the field mappings tab and select the fields on the contact record and/or in custom data objects that you are interested in using.



That’s all that is needed in order to configure the connector. You can run it manually a few times under the “Run Step” tab or go to the Configuration tab to enable it to run automatically. Follow the same flow for the “Register with Adobe Connect” step, and you now have your Eloqua marketing automation fully integrated with your Adobe Connect web conferencing.



Enjoy, and please keep the feedback coming, we’d love to hear from you what about this integration is working for you, and what you’d like to see us add, change, or improve.

On24 and Eloqua Integration

For those who use On24 as your system for webinars or virtual events, you have probably quickly realized the need for deep integration between On24 as virtual event software, and Eloqua as marketing automation software, to market those events and follow up with registrants and attendees accordingly. The insight to be gained from understanding what a prospect did at a webinar is tremendous, as webinars generally show a wide range of attendance stats among those who register. Large percentages of people who register do not attend at all - often between 40 and 60% of registrants. Among those who do, some may drop off after 5 minutes while others may stay for the full hour. Knowing about this attendance difference is crucial in understanding how to follow up and how to score leads.

A prospect who registered but did not attend should be sent a “sorry we missed you” rather than a “thanks for attending” email, while a prospect who dropped off after only 5 minutes might respond well to a follow-up proposing a different set of topics that might be more appealing. Similarly, lengthy attendance combined with engagement such as asking and answering a number of questions is a great indicator of high interest and likely purchase intent.

Working with this insight, however, requires it to be present within Eloqua's marketing automation system. Only when it is, can lead nurturing and scoring can take advantage of it. Bringing this data in manually would require a tedious continual effort, which would test the patience of most marketers. Eloqua now has a cloud connector to enable this integration and bring the best digital body language insights from On24 into Eloqua. The On24 cloud connector allows three main usage scenarios (each can be used as individual steps within a marketing automation program as you design the promotion, reminder, and follow-up campaigns around your webinars):

- Register Attendee: Registers a contact who is in that step of a program with a specific event in On24.

- Query Attendance: Looks at each contact in that step of the program and queries On24to see if they attended the live or archived events and for how long, how many poll questions or surveys they answered, and how many questions they asked. All very interesting info for subsequent lead scoring or follow-up.

- All Attendees: Automatically pulls a list of all people who attended a particular On24 webinar and feeds them in to Eloqua as contacts and places them into a group (where of course they can be fed automatically into a program for follow-up nurturing). Again, for each attendee, the information captured is if they attended the live or archived events and for how long, how many poll questions or surveys they answered, and how many questions they asked.

To get started, you’ll need the Cloud Connector installed in your Eloqua instance. This is very easy to do, see the recent post on Cloud Connector Installation instructions for how to add a new Cloud Connector to your install. The Cloud Connector we’ll be looking at here is available on our repository of interesting connectors. Go to cloudconnectors.eloqua.com and create an account. Under Communication, you'll find On24: Register and On24: Query Attendance, while under Feeder, you’ll find On24: All Viewers – those are the connectors we’ll be working with, and the ones to install.

Once you have them installed, you can begin using them within your webinar invitation and management program. The cloud connector steps for On24 integration can be plugged into your marketing automation program at whatever points make sense, so be sure to whiteboard what you want to have happen and use the steps accordingly.

Likely, you’ll want to use a On24: Register step when the buyer has indicated that they are interested in attending, perhaps by clicking a link or submitting a form.

You’ll want to run the On24: Query step after the event has taken place to see who attended and for how long. That data can be used to guide prospects down unique follow-up paths depending on their behavior.


Now, for each step, you’ll need to configure the Cloud Connector to do what you need. Each connector is roughly the same, but with slightly different options, but once you have one figured out the rest will be simple. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll walk through the On24: Query step. Choose Cloud Connector as a step type, and pick On24 Query from the drop-down below (if you have installed the connector in your Eloqua instance as we discussed earlier). Click the Configure button to launch the configuration UI.

The connector will need to be configured with your On24 credentials, including the Event ID, Session ID, Client ID, and Key. These credentials must be obtained from On24 team when you ask them to enable the Eloqua integration feed on your On24 account.

A final setting is where you want to store the returned information, in the contact record or in a custom data object (data card). If you're running many events, you'll want to use custom data objects to keep a full history of attendance.

With that configured and saved, move to the field mappings tab, and choose the contact fields or custom data object fields that you want to read data from or write data to. Each data point returned (minutes attended live or archived, poll or survey questions answered, and questions asked) can be mapped to an individual field or left blank if you're not interested.

That's all that's needed to have full integration between your On24 webinars and your Eloqua marketing automation. You can go over to the Run Step tab to run the integration manually a few times to make sure it's all working. This shows you the results you will be pulling back into Eloqua or lets you manually run the step to check that it's all configured correctly.



When you're happy with the results, just go to the Credentials tab to click "Enable Step" to enable it to run automatically.


We'd love to hear your feedback on this connector, what can be improved, and what else you need it to do.

WebEx and Eloqua Integration - Webinars as source of Digital Body Language

Webinars are as much of a core element of most B2B marketer's day to day tactics as anything. They form a great vehicle for educating prospects on a deeper topic than might otherwise be possible, they allow a richer interaction with presenters, and they provide a great interim point to guide prospects towards that is less of a commitment than a purchase.

However, webinars generally show a wide range of attendance stats among those who register. Large percentages of people who register do not attend at all - often between 40 and 60% of registrants. Among those who do, some may drop off after 5 minutes while others may stay for the full hour. Knowing about this attendance difference is crucial in understanding how to follow up and how to score leads.

A prospect who registered but did not attend should be sent a “sorry we missed you” rather than a “thanks for attending” email, while a prospect who dropped off after only 5 minutes might respond well to a follow-up proposing a different set of topics that might be more appealing. Similarly, attendance for the majority of the webinar is indicative of very high engagement, and may be a good factor in lead scoring.

Historically, this has been difficult as this data would have to be brought in manually. Eloqua now has a cloud connector to change that – making us the first marketing automation platform with a seamless integration into WebEx. The WebEx cloud connector allows four main usage scenarios (each can be used as individual steps within a marketing automation program as you design the promotion, reminder, and follow-up campaigns around your webinars):

- Register Attendee: Registers a contact who is in that step of a program with a specific event in WebEx meeting center, training center, event center, or sales center.

- Unregister Attendee: Unregisters a contact who is in that step of a program from a specific event in WebEx meeting center, training center, event center, or sales center.

- Query Attendance: Looks at each contact in that step of the program and queries WebEx to see if they attended and for how long

- All Attendees: Automatically pulls a list of all people who attended a particular WebEx webinar and feeds them in to Eloqua as contacts and places them into a group (where of course they can be fed automatically into a program for follow-up nurturing)

To get started, you’ll need the Cloud Connector installed in your Eloqua instance. This is very easy to do, see the recent post on Cloud Connector Installation instructions for how to add a new Cloud Connector to your install. The Cloud Connector we’ll be looking at here is available on Black Starfish, our repository of interesting connectors. Go to cloudconnectors.eloqua.com and create an account. Under Communication, you'll find WebEx: Register, WebEx: Unregister, and WebEx: Query Attendance, while under Feeder, you’ll find WebEx: All Viewers – those are the connectors we’ll be working with, and the ones to install.



Once you have them installed, you can begin using them within your webinar invitation and management program. The cloud connector steps for WebEx integration can be plugged into your marketing automation program at whatever points make sense, so be sure to whiteboard what you want to have happen and use the steps accordingly.

Likely, you’ll want to use a WebEx: Register step when the buyer has indicated that they are interested in attending, perhaps by clicking a link or submitting a form.


You’ll want to run the WebEx: Query step after the event has taken place to see who attended and for how long. That data can be used to guide prospects down unique follow-up paths depending on their behavior.



Now, for each step, you’ll need to configure the Cloud Connector to do what you need. Each connector is roughly the same, but with slightly different options, but once you have one figured out the rest will be simple. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll walk through the WebEx: Query step. Choose Cloud Connector as a step type, and pick WebEx Query from the drop-down below (if you have installed the connector in your Eloqua instance as we discussed earlier). Click the Configure button to launch the configuration UI.



The connector will need to be configured with your WebEx credentials, the type of WebEx event (ie Meeting Center, Event Center, etc), and the Session ID (from the event details page in WebEx). You can also configure the Session ID to be pulled dynamically from the contact record if you're running a large number of events and want to manage this dynamically.

A final setting is where you want to store the returned information, in the contact record or in a custom data object (data card). If you're running many events, you'll want to use custom data objects to keep a full history of attendance.



With that configured and saved, move to the field mappings tab, and choose the contact fields or custom data object fields that you want to read data from or write data to.


That's all that's needed to have full integration between your WebEx webinars and your Eloqua marketing automation. You can go over to the Run Step tab to run the integration manually a few times to make sure it's all working, or just go to the Credentials tab to click "Enable Step" to enable it to run automatically.



We'd love to hear your feedback on this connector, what can be improved, and what else you need it to do.

Using Voice to Drive Event Attendance

We've all experienced a similar challenge if we've used webinars, seminars, or other events in our marketing. We put great effort into promoting the event, and driving registrations, but on the day of, a significant percentage of registrants fail to show up.

There are many reasons for this, and I talked a bit about using calendar files (ics) to simplify the reminder process by allowing registrants to add the event into their calendars here: http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/using-reminders-to-drive-more.html

Another way to assist in ensuring that the maximum number of registrants attend is to keep the level of interest in the webinar or event high by having the speaker leave a message for registrants reminding them of the upcoming event and giving them a few key points that they can expect to get out of the event.

Nothing is more important in creating a successful event than having content that the participants are interested in, and a compelling keynote speaker or webinar presenter is often the most significant factor. If you have selected a good speaker, the message from them will help your attendance rates.


From the Call On Demand area, select Create Phone Message, and select Recorded Voice as a type. This will walk you through a quick wizard that will let you set up the message. You won't need any specialized recording devices, as your message can be recorded over the phone if you don't have a sound file to upload.


Select the option to make the recording now, and type in your phone number. When you click Start Recording, you will receive a call that will allow you to record you message. Follow the simple instructions on that call, and your voice content is created.


Using the voice content is also simple. You can, from the Call On Demand area, send a voice message in a similar manner to how you would send an email. Or, if you would like to tie the message in as part of a program, you can add it in Program Builder. Add a step of type "Call on Demand: Phone Message" and select your voice recording to have the voice call automatically triggered.

By using Program Builder to automate the voice call, you can have the voice content automatically delivered an hour or two in advance of the webinar, or the day before the event, for maximum effect.

Using reminders to drive more attendance to your events

Anyone who uses events, either online or offline for demand generation or inbound marketing will likely suffer from the same challenge - all the effort you put into promoting the event and driving registrants gets diminished by half on event day as 50% of your registrants forget to show up.

There are numerous reasons for this, but let's look at them one at a time. Just plain forgetting is one of the common reasons, made even more common if you don't do everything possible to ensure your prospects are able to remember.

Giving them a quick and easy way to get the event details into their calendar is one simple way to smooth out the path to great attendance by eliminating one way in which they might simply forget to attend.

In the email editor, click the Insert/Edit Hyperlink button, which pops up the Insert Hyperlink dialog box. Instead of inserting a normal hyperlink though, change the action to "Open an ICS Calendar file". That provides a standard Calendar file that will work with Outlook or whatever desktop email/calendar program they happen to be using.

Click on the Select box to select your ICS Calendar file. If you've already created one, you can find it and insert it, but if not, you can create one in one of two ways. The first option is to create it manually by typing in the event timing and details. This gives you the ability to set times, reminders, subjects, etc.

In the Calendar Entry section, be sure to add in any online event details for your web conferencing provider for the meeting so your attendees have quick and easy access to the information they'll need to join.

The second way to create the ICS file is to have it automatically created from an existing event in the Eloqua Event module. Once your familiar with using ICS files, you'll be able to create one from an event in a similar manner to how we've created it manually here.

With that set up, just drop the ICS link into your email and you're done. When you send out out your "Thanks for registering" email, that link allows them to drop an entry into their Calendar with one click.

Nothing beats a great speaker and compelling, original content for driving attendance at a webinar or seminar, but the more you can help your registrants to remember the details of the event, the better your ratio of registrants to attendees will be.