Optimizing your Marketing Automation - Batch Mode and Chained Programs

When looking at your marketing automation programs, they can be run in a few different modes in order to better optimize the speed with which they are processed. We spoke about this earlier in discussions of batch mode and Program Builder optimization. In a real environment, however, you may have a few different programs working together.

For example, in moving contacts from a web form to your CRM system, you may want to ensure they are cleansed and normalized in a contact washing machine, scored, and then updated in your CRM system. Perhaps you have a data quality program such as a contact washing machine, a lead scoring program, and a CRM update program to manage some non-standard approaches you use in your CRM implementation.

These programs generally are run in batch mode in order to ensure that they are processed end-to-end in one run. However, if you have a sequence of a few marketing automation programs which are chained together, the worry is that each program might be processed end-to-end, but then the subsequent program execution may not execute immediately, and may have to wait for the next execution cycle.

This can easily be resolved in Eloqua. When you set a marketing automation program to run in batch mode, you are presented with a screen that shows the order in which the programs are executed. By clicking on any program in this list, you can select the order in which it is executed.

If you have three programs, A, B, and C, which must process your contacts in sequence, use this interface to ensure that these three programs do execute in sequence. Rather than needing to wait for a subsequent cycle, each program is executed, in sequence, within one batch mode cycle, and your contacts are processed through all three programs at once.

This quick update will ensure that your contacts move from your web forms to your CRM system as quickly as possible, while still allowing you to maintain separate, very manageable programs that can work together seamlessly.

Marketing Automation and Restricting Send Times

Whereas I think that the idea that you can achieve major gains in undifferentiated email marketing through time-of-day email sending has been overhyped by the industry, I do think that there are specific situations where careful selection of the time a communication is sent can be of value.


There are two general scenarios in which it makes sense:


- if it is best that it arrives to the sender within a specific time window


- if it is best that it appears it was sent within a specific time window


Email, by its nature, is an asynchronous medium that generally does not "interrupt" the recipient, so the recipient is able to work through the emails they have received at a time that is convenient to them. However, other media type, such as recorded voice and SMS (text messaging) are media types that do interrupt the recipient.



In using those media types within a marketing automation system, you'll want to restrict when they can be sent. Likely, you'll restrict them to business hours. When setting communications up in Program Builder, it's quite easy to define when they can be executed.


On the Edit Action page, there is a selection to "Run action at all times". If you set this to "No", you are then presented with a menu of options. You can select the timezone you would like to use to define the execution times, and then a schedule for when the communication can be sent.


The second situation in which you might want to use this technique to manage when a communication is sent is if it is important that it be seen as having been sent at a particular time. The most common situation in which this is relevant is when you are sending an email on behalf of a sales person. This technique can be very powerful in terms of generating response from prospects, but you will want to ensure that the email is sent in daylight hours unless your sales team has a well established reputation for burning the midnight oil.


Although the email industry has overhyped the relevance of time-of-day on results for undifferentiated email, in a marketing automation context, being able to control time of sending can be very relevant in situations where the media type being used should only be received in daytime hours, or in situations where you want the communication to be seen as being sent in daytime hours.

Creatively using SMS/Text Messages with Marketing Automation

Multi-channel marketing can be an excellent way to gain a stronger connecting with an audience. By moving outside of the normal realm of email communication, or emphasizing a message with a combined campaign, the effectiveness of a message can be significantly increased. SMS messaging can be an effective part of this strategy in certain circumstances.
For online events such as webinars, an SMS channel can provide a near-real-time reminder of the event’s start, upping participation rates among existing registrants. For face to face events, such as tradeshows, an SMS campaign can be used in order to drive booth traffic, especially when tied in with a contest for a booth prize of significant interest (perhaps through providing a code each hour that can be used to re-enter a booth draw).

Tying in SMS campaigns within Eloqua is easy. The general structure is very similar to the use of voice messages for marketing reminders that we discussed a while ago. In the Communicate->SMS area, create a new SMS call. Within the call, you can specify the text of the outbound SMS message and the sender number. Note that you can use similar field merge techniques to what you would use in email to insert first names, last names, company names, or any other key data point.

With the SMS call created, you can then either use the call in a batch, by defining a distribution list, and sending to that distribution list, or you can insert the call within a marketing automation program. If used in a marketing automation program, as contacts flow to the step, they will be automatically sent an SMS message. Used this way, SMS messages can be delivered automatically, in the hour or two leading up to an event.

Many B2B marketing organizations are unlikely to find that SMS is a core part of their go to market plan, but used selectively and creatively, it can add tremendously to an existing campaign.

Relational Data, Marketing Automation, and the "Plus" Operator

Relational data can be a key aspect of many decisions you need to make in Eloqua. Whether you are constructing a decision rule in a marketing automation program, are defining a buyer segment for a list, or are building a lead scoring algorithm, you may need to look at relational data.

The most common forms of relational data are event history and purchase history. These are very common data points to have on your prospects, and they are very useful for decision making. However, with relational data, filter rules can get more complex that with simple data like the contact table. Let’s say, for example, that you have a set of data on the event attendance history of your prospects.

You have been running events in cities worldwide, and in each city, you have a business track and a technical track. The data is stored within custom data objects (data cards) as event history. As you have the contact’s email address as part of the registration, you are able to easily connect the event attendance history with the contact record – via email address.

To build a list, you want to find the contacts who attended the technical track of the event in Barcelona. The first step is to build a contact filter to search for the contacts you are interested in. Select “linked data cards” as a criteria type, and by selecting our event series, we’ll have access to the data we need.

Obviously one criteria will be “Event Location = Barcelona” and another criteria will be “Event Track = Technical”. However, here is where things get tricky. If you have these as two separate criteria, and use an “And” operator between them, then this filter will return contacts who attended the business track in Barcelona, but then attended the technical track in Munich. Not exactly what we were looking for.

The way to solve this is the “Plus” operator. At the end of the filter criteria row, where you would select “And” or “Or” for normal querying, you will have a new option of “Plus” for data card queries. By selecting this, a new criteria row is added right underneath your current row. This second condition will act only on the same data that the first condition found.

So, in our original example, “Event Location = Barcelona” PLUS “Event Track = Technical” will only return contact who attended the Technical track in Barcelona.

When you are using relational data, you will often find that the “Plus” operator is extremely useful for querying that data.

Separating your Marketing Database into Active/Inactive

One of the most important goals of Lead Nurturing is to maintain permission to stay in front of your audience with your communications. Data from Marketing Sherpa on content relevance and unsubscribes has shown that many prospects will not necessarily click on an unsubscribe link when they lose interest in your messaging. However, far worse, they may become emotionally unsubscribed, reflexively ignoring and deleting your messages as they arrive.

If you continue a rapid pace of marketing to this emotionally unsubscribed segment, they may at some point click the “this is spam” button, causing you a significant deliverability headache, even if they had originally subscribed legitimately.

The first step in avoiding this situation is to identify the inactive members of your database.

To do this within Eloqua is very easy. Using an Inactivity filter, you can look for contacts who are showing less than a certain amount of activity. A recommended technique is to build a group called “Inactive Contacts”. By looking for contacts who have had no clickthroughs, no web visits, no form submits, and less than a few email opens in the past few months (preview panes may still render an open for someone reflexively deleting your email in a few email clients), you can define a group of inactive contacts.

It’s recommended to regenerate this group every month or quarter in order to ensure that you capture any newly inactive contacts, or allow any contacts showing a resurgence of interest to leave the group.

With this group defined, you can then suppress them against regular email distributions, in order to ensure that they are not communicated to more than they would appreciate. Depending on their level of disengagement, you can target them with special re-engagement offers, or campaigns using other media types such as direct mail or a calling campaign.

The critical point, however, is to identify and monitor the inactive segment of your database. By understanding its size and any trends in its growth, you can begin to understand how your messaging is resonating with your audience, and adjust accordingly.

Setting Up Your Social Media GPS

Today's Eloqua Artisan post is a guest post from Mike MacFarlane, our own marketing operations manager. Mike is responsible for our own internal use of Eloqua, and is one of the best when it comes to innovative uses of the Eloqua platform.

I often get asked "how does Eloqua use Eloqua?" and Mike is the best person to answer that question.

Steve

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

As a Marketing Operations Manager with Eloqua, my goal is to use the app to its full potential. There is just so much functionality available today, I always feel the need to find new and cool ways to use all the tools that I have been given as a marketer.

The most recent challenge I have given myself is to help integrate all of our Social Media efforts into Eloqua that allow us to report on and react to activity that happens on the web. Steve wrote a great post a while back about how to setup Social Media Referral reporting so you can see how much traffic you are driving to your website. This information has been extremely valuable for us and has helped to validate that all the work we have done in terms of spreading our marketing message through Social Media is well worth the time and effort. Still, I thought that we could do more.

Keeping up with the Sales Enablement theme that we have been promoting through the use of our new tool, Prospect Profiler, I thought to myself “Hey Mike, wouldn’t it be valuable to our sales reps if they could see their prospect’s social media activity”? Agreeing with myself, I started to build out an integration between Eloqua and our CRM system that I like to call “The Social Media GPS” - know where your prospect started and where they ended.

The ingredients for the devilishly good recipe are:
- A dash of Program Builder
- A handful of Saved Visitor Reports
- A pinch of ability to create activities within the CRM system
- A sprinkle of data tools for use within Program Builder

The image to the right is what the program flow looks like.

To start, I created a single track marketing automation program with the feeder into this program being a saved visitor report of those that came from Twitter to our website within a hour of the visit. In this case, I am feeding these web visitors into our marketing automation program as Prospects (as this allows me to create unique entries that I can report on later). The key information that I want to map from the visitor to the prospect is:

- Most Recent Referrer
- Last Page In Visit
- Last Visit Date and Time

When the prospect is created within the marketing automation program, I can then see this visitor information stored on its record (seen in the image to the right)

My record then flows down to a step which I run a Match Rule that looks for an existing Contact in our database based on a matching Email Address. The purpose for this match rule is to append the CRM ID that is stored on the contact record and write it over to my prospect. This ID is what is used to uniquely identify the record within Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM on Demand, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM and write information over to it.

After I append the CRM ID to my record, I then flow down to an integration event that will write this activity over to the CRM system. You will notice that I have set this action up as a conditional action.


The condition in this case is that if there is no CRM ID in the associated contact record, I do not want to run the activity call over to the CRM system. If there is a ID, then I want to execute the call to the CRM system.

Once the call is made to the CRM system to create the activity within the associated Lead/Contact record, the sales rep can then see how the website activity was generated. Here is what the rep would see:


(you may need to click the image for a full size view of the record in your CRM system)

So in one snapshot, your sales rep can see:

a) What webpage/blog/online asset the prospect visited
b) Where the visit originated from
c) When the visit happened

The other benefit to this information is that the sales rep can view both the referring and visited page URLs (as shown in the comments). In this case, if I were a prospect, the sales rep could click on the referring URL and actually view my Twitter profile. They could also read over the blog post that I went to (which could be helpful in a call when determining what my interests are).

Just another way that Eloqua can help you read your prospect’s Digital Body Language.

Please feel free to connect with me on Twitter @eloquamike or on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemacfarlane01)

Marketing Dashboards and Time Ranges - A Quick Tip

I use custom dashboards a lot in Eloqua, usually in order to track ther performance of anything I'm interested in over an extended period of time. The performance of the Eloqua Artisan and Digital Body Language blogs are good examples of that - I check in on their performance using a custom dashboard at least a few times per week. We also track in great detail what the sources of traffic are for our online properties in another custom dashboard.



When building and using custom dashboards, one setting that is worth being aware of, and thinking about, is the time range settings. This is the definition of exactly what period of time is included in the dashboard. With Eloqua, you have a rich set of options that you can use to define exactly what timeframe you have in mind.



You can configure this for the standard dashboards in your system in one central place, under Setup->Management->Systems Management->Dashboard Settings, or you can configure the settings for each report in a custom dashboard by selecting Edit under the Actions menu on the report's upper right side.



Each of these will give you a set of time range options. For a dashboard, it's almost certain you will be using a relative range (the period of time up until now) rather than a fixed range (a specific set of days) as you generally want the dashboard to change over time and be up to the current moment.



However, that's where the nuances come in. If you are looking at a daily chart for the last 3 weeks, for example, exactly how you specify that will guide how your data appears for the periods around the start and end of the time period.



For example, if we looked at it literally, we could say that the last three weeks was equal to the last 3x7x24 hours. However, the data for the day at the start (three weeks ago) and the day at the end (today) would be skewed based on the time of day we looked at. If I looked at that data at 6pm, the starting day would only have 6 hours of data in it and the ending day (today) would only have 18 hours of data in it (up until 6pm). In many cases, this literal option is not the best result.



The "Last Full X days/weeks/months" options provide a way around this, by only including full days. There is also an option to "include today" with these if you do want to show the 18 hours of data up until the current moment in the day today, without skewing the data on the start day.



Similarly, a variety of options allow you to report on specific precisions at the week or month level (such as weekdays only, for example), if that is relevant to your marketing analysis.


What is important is that you think carefully about exactly what period of time is of interest to you and then select that option for your dashboards. The options will be available to you to do what you need.

Tracking of your own Social Media Properties

Tracking social media is key to understanding its effectiveness as part of your overall marketing strategy.

Part one of understanding social media's effectiveness is to understand what is driving traffic to your online properties. Tracking inbound referrals gives us a great sense of the flows of inbound web traffic and whether Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, or LinkedIn are driving traffic. It also gives us a great sense, at an individual level of what brought each person to our online properties.

However, part two of understanding social media's effectiveness is understanding how effective your own social media properties are. Tracking of these online properties is a very valuable extension to your ability to understand the digital body language of your prospects across all of your web presence. With many social media sites, however, such as blogs, you often do not have the ability to build a sub directory system to place the scripts into.

In order to get around this, from the standard installation of web scripts, it is possible to rework the tracking scripts to look at a static URL for the rest of the scripts. The scripts will look like they do in the image above, where http://www.yourmainsite.com/ is a static URL that you put the script files on.

With that in place, you then need to put the links to those tracking scripts on your blog. Each blog platform is slightly different, but generally they all allow adding HTML and scripts inline. I use blogger, and the scripts are easily placed inline just before the close of the BODY tag.

I look forward to hearing your comments on how this has worked for you.

Now Here - Conditional and Wait Steps in Program Builder

I got a bit ahead of myself last release, and boldly announced the arrival of two very useful features - conditional steps and wait steps within Program Builder.


Unfortunately, as luck would have it, they were delayed by a release, and my announcement was premature. I'm pleased to announce that they are both part of this current release on June 14th and greatly simplify the building of Programs.



Conditional steps allow you to simplify the creation of a "if X happens do Y" structure. Whereas before it was a matter of building a decision rule that would evaluate the condition X, and then bypass the step if the condition was not met, that can all be embedded simply and quickly within a step. Not only does this make it easier to build Programs, it makes it simpler to visualize their flow.



The flexibility of the full workflow design process is maintained, of course, and if you want to branch down alternate paths (rather than just a single step), you can do so with Decision Rules as you normally would have.



Wait steps, as the name implies, allow you to define a step that pauses Contacts in a Program for a period of time. This was always possible, of course, with evaluation conditions, but now it is greatly simplified as a step for clearer readability of Programs.

Activity Filters With Increased Granularity

With the upcoming release on June 14th, there is now the ability to define an activity based filter that looks at very granular information, such as opens from a particular email, email group, or campaign. This level of granularity extends across all the different criteria that are possible within Activity-Based Filters.



This is a powerful capability, as it allows you to define filters that look very precisely at a person's activity. This can be used for many marketing options. For example:

• To discover a list of people who had clicked through any email from the Newsletter series within the last 3 months, for targeting with a special offer


• To define a lead scoring system that gives 5 points for a Newsletter email clickthrough, but 10 points for a Case Study email clickthrough


• To sub-segment a Contact Group to remove people who had already visited a Hypersite or submitted a specific form

These filters can be used from all areas of the application; in designing feeders to add contacts to Programs, in decision rules within Programs, when manipulating Contact Groups to define a report, or when defining a Distribution List for a marketing effort.

Be sure to experiment with the new granularity on Activity-Based Filters, as many rules can now be expressed with the ability to look at activity at the level of individual forms, emails, or Hypersites.

Who's on the Website? New way to see Company Visitors

With the upcoming release on June 14th, a new and very powerful report will be available. It's called the "Top 50 Visiting Companies", and it shows you what companies are on your site showing interest and activity, but may not yet be known to your marketing efforts (search for "Visiting Companies" in the report console to find it).


Much like the account selling report in your CRM system which shows you the activity, rolled up by company, for known leads, this report shows you a stage further up the funnel.

By aggregating all the visitors at a company, and excluding any visitors that show up from an Internet Service Provider (from home, or from small businesses), this report lets you know where there is buying interest that you're not currently engaged with.

This insight can be invaluable for a field sales team working to understand which companies may be responsive to an invitation to a conversation. The total visitors, total visits, most recent visit, and most recent search terms, can give you insight into the area, depth, and recency of that interest, and gives you a great cue to engage those companies in a conversation. When combined with Prospect Profiler for added insight into each individual, this forms a powerful combination.

If you are wondering what to do with the list of companies who appear to be showing interest, one of the best options is to use the embedded Reachforce capabilities within Eloqua to find a list of names (in the key role) within those organizations to begin communicating with.

Form Resubmits: Doing Two Things at Once

Web forms are one of the most valuable sources of leads, insights, and data for the marketer. Web forms can be used to allow prospects to self identify and request a conversation with sales, they can be used to gate access to valuable content in exchange for information, and they can be used to garner additional insights about prospects.

Passing this data into Eloqua is, of course, a very valuable thing for marketing to do. However, there may be instances where the form submit is used for another action and the data needs to be passed forward. For example, the form might be the start of a download of a free trial, and the information is required for configuring the license key. Similarly, the form might be used for searches within the web site, and the data needs to be passed forward to perform the search.

This dual purpose form use can be done easily within Eloqua. There are four main ways that forms can be handled in which the data is provided to both Eloqua and a secondary system:

1) The form can be submitted to Eloqua, the data captured, and then the visitor’s form resubmitted to another URL (such as a trial download or a search page), which then handles the visitor’s experience itself

2) The form can be submitted to Eloqua, which then posts the data to another server, before handling the remaining processing and the visitor's experience

3) The form can be submitted to the secondary application, and then automatically re-submitted to Eloqua, where the data is captured, and the visitor is presented with a landing page or a PURL page from within Eloqua, to complete their experience

4) The form can be submitted directly to another site, which then re-posts the data, server to server, into Eloqua after handling the visitor’s experience

The first option is the simplest and most commonly used. To do this, simply change the type of the final processing step. Normally, this is a Confirmation Page, but by selecting "Change Type" on the drop-down menu, you can change this to a Resubmit Form step. Configure the step by defining the URL to send the form data to. The identical data that was submitted to Eloqua will be resubmitted to the secondary system, which will complete the web visitor's experience.

For the second option, select the "Post Data to Server" processing step type. This will send the form data to the server you select. You will also select whether you are submitting the data via a "Post" method, or a "Get" method, a technical option that will be familiar to those versed in creating web forms. Select "Post" if you are uncertain, or ask your web master. After the forms is submitted, the rest of the processing and the conclusion of the visitor's experience will be handled by Eloqua.

The third option relies on being able to configure the secondary system to resubmit the form to Eloqua. This is less common as not every system is configured to be able to resubmit form data. However, if it is, this is a similar approach to the first option, but in the reverse order. In this case, configure the form as normal, but the final step would be presenting the visitor with a landing page to complete his or her experience.

The fourth option is much more technical, but does allow for some interesting options. The form is submitted to the secondary system, and the secondary system handles the visitor’s experience from there. However, at the same time, the visitor’s data is submitted, server-to-server to Eloqua. If you are interested in this option, it's worth a discussion with your customer success manager, as the setup of it will involve your technology team.

A key thing to remember in this fourth configuration option is that the visitor’s website cookie will not be automatically submitted as it is with web forms normally. As the cookie forms the core of the visitor’s profile, this is very important. Without it, you will not be able to associate the visitor on the website with the form submit, which prevents using the data for lead scoring or segmentation. With a quick configuration, however, you can easily configure the web visitor’s cookie to be passed in to Eloqua from the secondary server. This allows the seamless linking of the web visitor with their form data, even though there was no direct submit.

With whichever of these four options you select, you can quickly and easily configure a form to be submitted to both Eloqua and a secondary system without any interruption. The flexibility of approaches gives you the ability to accomplish whatever you need, regardless of current configurations and limitations.

Providing Sales Insights into Digital Body Language

There has been so much buzz about Prospect Profiler that I'd be remiss in not talking about it quickly.



Laura Ramos, from Forrester, highlights the fact that Marketing's Number 1 job is sales enablement on B2B Marketing Posts

David Raab from Customer Experience Matrix talks about Prospect Profiler and why Marketing Holds the Key to Effective Selling. He also has a great whitepaper on the subject available.

Our own David Rudolph talks about the symptoms of sales blindness on Funnelvision, his new blog.

Put simply, Prospect Profiler is the most eagerly anticipated release we’ve had in quite some time. It was highlighted when it came out in beta last quarter, and it has been seen fairly widely since then, with many of you using it during the beta process. I did talk about it briefly last release, but a few of the capabilities have been refined, so I want to go a bit deeper in talking about it as it approaches general release.

(*Note after the fact: Prospect Profiler is now, of course, in full general release)

At a high level, Prospect Profiler is an interactive, visual display of each prospect’s digital body language. Embedded in Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM on Demand, or Microsoft CRM, Prospect Profiler allows your sales team to get instant insight into what you as a marketing team are doing to communicate with prospects, and more importantly, what their response has been.

The main screen of Prospect Profiler provides a time chart of outbound communication and inbound prospect interest, and can be broken down by area (email, form, web visit, etc). The top section provides key insights into each area, as well as showing the prospect’s most recent search (on Google, Yahoo, or MSN), to provide crucial insight into their area of interest.

Not to be missed, however, are the secondary capabilities. The Website, Forms, and Emails tabs provide deeper insight into each of those areas. Each form can be presented exactly as the prospect filled it out, and each email can be previewed to gain insight into exactly what caught the prospect’s interest.

For example, when the chart shows a spike in activity for the prospect, a hover-over capability will give you a quick view of what that activity looked like. The spike shown here, for example is 66 page views on a specific day.

When calling a prospect, however, based on that activity, your sales team can benefit from knowing exactly what the prospect was interested in. Guiding the conversation to that interest area is key in engaging them. One click gives your sales team instand access to the details of the web visit and shows exactly what pages caught their interest. This detail of a visit can be very valuable in understanding exactly what each individual is interested in prior to a critical meeting or call.

Similarly, email activity can be viewed in great detail. By clicking on the email activity, your sales team can see the details of which emails have been sent, opened, read, and clicked on. Thumbnail previews give them highlights of the email, and a preview button will show them the exact email that was received, providing unparalleled insights into prospect interest.

Even more interactively, the button at the bottom of the screen, labeled “Setup Web Visit Alerts” allows your sales team to easily set up alerts so that they are notified immediately when a prospect, or even anyone from that company (based on email domain) shows up on your web site. This level of insight into visitor activity has typically been managed centrally by marketing through visitor alerts, but can now be managed by your sales team directly through prospect profiler.

If you are deepening your marketing team’s engagement with your sales team and working to have them better understand marketing’s effect on prospect engagement, and the insights that can be gained from understanding prospects’ digital body language, there’s no better way than through a tool like prospect profiler.

Discovering Contacts in Key Roles with Reachforce

We would all like to have perfect data on all the key contacts at the organizations we are marketing our services to. However, this is often not the case in reality as we all know. Even once we have cleaned the data that we do have, often we are missing crucial contacts, or we are unsure of who is responsible for the area of concern. We may have information on individuals’ titles, but often title does not tell us exact responsibilities.

The great news is that this dual challenge, of missing data and missing information on roles can be solved simply.

Through a partnership with Reachforce, Eloqua is able to leverage Reachforce’s role-based contact discovery technology directly. This allows you to specify a company you are interested in and have Reachforce discover the individuals at that organization who perform the role you are most interested in targeting. For example, if you are looking for the individual who is responsible for network security within an organization, they may have a title of “IT Administrator”, “Network Manager”, “Director of IT”, or may other options.

The connection to the Reachforce service is done through the Data Servcies area of Eloqua (go to Evaluate->Data Services->Reachforce). A “Call Project” is built to define the exact individual you are looking for. You may specify a series of titles that are likely to be associated with the role you are looking for. You can also specify titles that, although sounding similar, are not associated with the role you are looking for. To clarify further, you can specify questions to ask to ensure that you are connected with the right person.

With the Call Project defined, you can then specify how you would like to map the outgoing and returning data on a field-by-field basis. For example, if you were going to pass company information across to the Reachforce team in order to retrieve Contact information, you would map both the Company fields required (perhaps Company Name, Address, etc), and the Contact fields expected (name and contact information).

When the Call Project is defined and the data is mapped, it can be used similarly to any other marketing asset with Eloqua. You can run a batch manually to retrieve a list, or, perhaps more interestingly, you can add the Call Project to Program Builder. This is where the options become interesting. By adding the Call Project to Program Builder, you are able to have a marketing automation program automatically leverage a role-based contact discovery process. If you do not have the correct set of contacts at an organization, you can immediately and automatically have the contacts in the right role discovered.

Note that in adding the Call Project to Program Builder, you should be aware of the types of data being sent and returned. For example, if Company records are sent and Contact records are returned, be sure that your Program step allows both Contact and Company records.

As this is a service outside of Eloqua, there is of course a per contact fee for the execution, but if discovery of contacts in the key roles is required, this is a great service to consider.

Automating the Upload of Picklists

We talked recently about uploading select list values to be used in a form on your website to make the experience easier for visitors. There is an even more powerful technique that can be used to automatically update picklists that are dynamically sourced in another application.

In a similar manner to how we manually updated the picklists, we can use the upload wizard to automatically update the picklists. If, for example, the list of industries you are interested in having in your picklist is defined in a remote system that you want the list in Eloqua to automatically reflect, you can set that up to re-synchronize on a nightly basis.

One of the more common remote sources that is dynamic is a custom report in your CRM system. This creates a .csv export that is current as of the moment that it is called, and can thus be used as a dynamic source. Typical uses might be a list of products, industries, or regions that is maintained in the CRM system.

You can also use API calls to your CRM system in many cases to pull the information you require. In either case, go to Setup->Integration->Inbound and create a new data source. Be sure to check the box for "Can be scheduled for automatic execution", as this is what we'll be doing.

Following the same technique as we did with the manual upload from a .csv file, we’ll pick a source that is dynamic - our recently created source. The upload wizard will pull enough of the report to determine the columns available, which can then be used for mapping into the relevant fields in the select list. You'll likely want to choose the option to delete existing values, or to match on your option value field.

On the last step of the wizard, in the "After Uploading" section, choose that you would like to schedule automatic imports based on these settings. Select the schedule you would like the update to run on. Typically this will be weekly or daily. When the scheduled time arrives, the list will be re-uploaded with the most current version.

That is all that is needed, now your select list will be automatically populated with data from your remote source on a daily basis without you having to do anything.

Uploading Select Lists to Save Typing

In putting together landing pages, you’ll often want to use drop-down select lists to allow your web visitors to choose from a number of options. If you have a quick list with just a few options, it’s easy to enter the values manually, but if you are dealing with a list that is longer than 5 or 10 options, it can be much easier to upload the lists.

To edit or create a select list for your form, choose the Manage Select Lists option from the forms menu, and either edit an existing select list or create a new one. The select list editor allows you to edit or create the individual items in a list one by one. Remember that the Option field represents the data that is submitted when the visitor submits the form, and the Value field represents what is displayed in the select list to the visitor.

To upload a larger list of values, such as options for the visitor’s industry or product line of interest, starting from an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet should have two columns, one for the data value, and one for the name that is displayed. Save your list in a .csv format so that it can be uploaded.

In the select list management interface, choose Upload Values. From here the familiar upload wizard will walk you through uploading your data file. Be sure to map the columns in your spreadsheet to the correct columns in the select list.

Within the upload wizard, you can also select whether you would like to delete all existing values, or have your new values added to the values that are already there.

The select list management interface give you a quick preview of your select list so you can ensure that it is exactly how you wanted it. Remember that you may want a blank or default entry at the start of the list in order to correctly handle the situation where a web visitor does not select a value for that field.


With this completed, your select list is ready to be used in your form. When you choose a field of type “Single Select List” or “Multiple Select List”, you will be given an option to choose your recently created select list. When you create a landing page layout for your form, that select list will appear.

Understanding Buyers Through Internal Search Queries

I’ve talked quite a bit about things you can do with understanding the digital body language of your buyers based on Google search queries. However, there are often internal searches, within your web experience, that can be equally or more valuable. If your website uses an internal search for documents, case studies, or solutions, be sure you are adding the insights that can be gained from that into the view of your visitor’s digital body language.

To do this, there are two possible techniques. Either the search form can be integrated as a normal Eloqua form to capture the data before passing it back to the original search engine, or the search query itself can be captured directly from the query string seen in the URL.

The second technique is more commonly used if there is a hesitation to add an intermediary step between the user and the search results, of if there is a hesitation on the part of the team that owns the search area to make any alterations.

In this case, you can use query strings to track the searches. If the search results are presented in a URL that looks something like:


http://www.yoursite.com/search.php?searchquery=finance+case+studies


you can define a query string to look for the value of “Searchquery”.

With this query string defined, you will automatically capture the search query of each web visitor who performs a search within your site. This can be used individually for lead scoring purposes, or can be looked at in aggregate with reporting to see the aggregate trends in your visitors.

When thinking about understanding your buyers’ digital body language, it’s important not to overlook any potential areas of insight. An internal search engine can be a great source of this insight and it’s easy to track in Eloqua using either form integration or query strings.

This can be used either in overall understanding of buyer trends of the understanding of an individual's digital body language for the purpose of lead scoring or defining of nurturing routines.

Take the Eloqua Challenge

I wrote last week about a fun use of Eloqua by the folks at Accela, who had used the platform for internal employee engagement. It turns out that our own Chad Horenfeldt had put together a similar (although much smaller) quiz called the Eloqua Challenge.

Click here to take the Eloqua Challenge


You may have seen it (or taken it) if you're part of the Eloqua LinkedIn Group, but if not, have a look at it. It's 6 quick questions to see how much you know about Eloqua.

Once you have taken the challenge, you'll be taken to a PURL page that shows you what you got right and wrong, and some additional interesting info about that area.

The Eloqua Challenge is all built using form processing, Hypersites, PURLs, and Activity Driven Content. If you're interested in some of the behind-the-scenes details of how it's built, let me know and perhaps a later post can dig into that.

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.

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.