Eloqua Experience: Highlights from 2008 - Fred Waugh, Convio

Eloqua Experience 2009 is just around the corner. Coming to San Francisco on Nov 2nd - 4th, 2009, this is the event of the year for any marketer focused on marketing automation and demand generation. We’ll have 3 tracks this year; a “Rising Star” track for those just getting up to speed with campaigning, lead scoring, lead nurturing, and sales alignment, a “Rock Star” track for those who are looking for cutting edge ideas on understanding, communicating with, and facilitating buying processes, and an “Executive Insights” track for those leading marketing organizations and looking to transform their businesses.

Topping it all of is the Markies Gala on Tuesday night, where the industry’s best marketers will be celebrated in 12 categories. If you have not yet written up your Markies submission, the deadline is fast approaching on Friday, October 2nd so you’ll want to submit soon.

In preparation for this year’s event, I wanted to highlight a few of the presentations from last year that I thought were particularly interesting. Not only are the ideas shared in these presentations still highly relevant today, but most of the marketers you hear in these presentations will be back at Eloqua Experience this year as veterans, and you will have a great opportunity to talk with them and get their advice and insights into not just how they re-engineered their businesses as discussed in these presentations, but how they have grown from there in the past year.

Today’s highlight is Fred Waugh, VP Marketing and Alliances at Convio. Convio is a leader in software for non-profits, and as such they serve a very broad base of customers, ranging in size from local food banks to the American Red Cross, and in their focus, ranging from libraries to cancer foundations.

In this presentation, Fred walks through their transition in Sales and Marketing alignment, from a “Field Marketing 1.0” perspective, to their current state. The presentation is rich in metrics, and ways of analyzing the Marketing pipeline.

Some highlights from Fred's Sales and Marketing Alignment Presentation (use the “Chapters” tab to quickly jump through the presentation):

5:03 Marketing 1.0
Fred discusses their previous state, what they were measure on, and how they tied closed/won business back to marketing’s influence.

14:00 Model Sensitivity
Fred looks at the sensitivity that their models had to changes in assumptions on close rate and what that did to drive the need for more leads in Marketing.

20:12 Report Card
A comparison of Convio data to benchmarks from Sirius Decisions

22:21 Pipeline Contribution
A full report of funnel data all the way from marketing through to sales, based on the quarter in which an opportunity was created


I look forward to seeing you all at Eloqua Experience 2009 in San Francisco, and I hope you will all submit your Markie award submissions before next Friday.

Pedowitz Group Ties in Twitter Activity to Marketing Automation

As B2B marketers, many of us are exploring social media. It is easy to understand the basics, but when it comes to integrating social media into other aspects of demand generation and marketing automation, it can be difficult to understand how to begin.


A few weeks back, Mike McFarlane highlighted a way to set up a social media GPS to get CRM visibility into social media activity that refers people to your web properties. This, however, was focused on the "periphery" that is the link between most B2B marketer's web properties and social media.


Now, Pedowitz Group takes this one step further by using their Sweet platform to capture general conversation about you, your products and your brand in Twitter, irrespective of whether this conversation resulted in a visit to your site.


This type of social media engagement can be highly relevant in determining who is a qualified lead when you build a lead scoring system, and who is already actively engaged when you think through your lead nurturing plan.


Essentially, what the Pedowitz Group's Sweet platform does is to capture Twitter activity based on a keyword. The keyword should be your brand name or a product name - something specific enough that it can be definitively identified as a conversation about you. This social media engagement is then captured and passed into Eloqua as a web form submit.



The information in the web form submit includes the keyword, the individual's Twitter ID, and the content of the Tweet that was captured. Within Eloqua, from here, you can do anythign with the web form submit that you would like. One thing that may be of use is to record the Twitter activities within custom data objects so that they can be filtered against for lead scoring or segmentation purposes.


Capturing a link between a person's contact information and their Twitter ID is necessary for some of the filtering to be possible, and there are a variety of techniques that can be used to make sure you capture that link. We'll discuss those in a later post.


Social media activity is highly interesting in its ability to determine a prospect's level of engagement. The Pedowitz Group's Sweet platform provides a great way to incorporate this level of engagement within Eloqua, so it can be used for all your marketing automation purposes.

Quick Tip: Activity Filters based on Campaigns

Activity filters are getting progressively more powerful within Eloqua. As marketers have started using them for lead scoring, lead nurturing, and deeper analysis, the feedback has been clear on where we have needed to extend them.

Back in June, we added increased activity filter granularity to let you build contact filters based on a much more precise definition of what email, form, or content area a person interacted with. This was well received, but for those using campaigns, the need was clear for filtering based on an asset in a campaign.

It's now available, and getting great comments. If you have a campaign, say a webinar or an eBook series, that has a set of emails in it, you can now build a filter that identifies just the emails in that campaign.

Add the emails (or whichever other marketing asset you are looking to filter against) to your campaign as you normally would. If you are doing any A/B testing, and want to also include those results, be sure to include all test version within the campaign.

Then, when you are building your contact filter, select an Activity-based filter, and the action you are looking to filter against. For example, we might be looking for individuals who have clicked through emails in our campaign.

Add your criteria of how many emails, over what period of time you are interested in looking at, and then select Campaign from the "Included in" menu. Select the campaign you are interested in looking at in the search & select menu below.


With this in place, your filter will only select contacts who have clicked through emails in the specific campaign you choose. This makes it much easier to define the rules you need for your scoring or nurturing campaigns.

This was developed based on very clear feedback from you on what our priorities should be, so please keep that feedback coming.

Embedding Facebook into blogs

I wrote a while ago about our B2B Marketing strategy on Facebook, which was to connect on a more relaxed, social level with our customer community, many of whom are also friends. This has worked very well, and we do our best to share the latest event pictures and videos on that site.

The interesting challenge, however, is how to make sure everyone is aware of it as a venue. This is a challenge that a number of marketers I've chatted with have also shared.



There's a simple trick, which I've recently enabled on Eloqua Artisan (if you're reading this in a reader, you'll have to come to the blog itself to see it in action), which is to embed a Facebook gadget into your blog sidebar so that anyone who reads your posts will become aware of your Facebook presence, and can join you there.

It was a simple technique, so I thought it worth sharing here, as it can be of value to any marketer focused on incorporating social media within an overall marketing messaging approach. I personally use Blogger as a platform, so the instructions will be specific to that, but I suspect they are easily transferable to other platforms.

First, add an HTML widget to the sidebar of your main blog layout. Give it an appropriate title, and then add the Facebook embed code to that widget. (content for the embed code is available at this link, but as it's javascript, you won't see anything in a browser).

There are 3 things you may want to change. First, one that you must change, is the Facebook profile ID (highlighted in the image). Change this to your own Facebook fan page profile, which you can find in the URL for your fan page when you view it on Facebook.

You can also change the "width" parameter to set the size of the embedded widget, and the "connections" parameter to change the number of fans that are shown. With that completed, save it, and you are live with an embedded Facebook fan page in your blog, which will help you greatly with awareness of the page.

Sales Enablement and Management

As marketing organizations move beyond just lead flow and more into sales enablement, a number of new opportunities and also new challenges arise. One of the new opportunities that we spoke about recently was the use of marketing content in the sales organization through Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook (commonly known as ELMO).



The advantages are great in that you can provide on-message, on-brand content to your sales organization and allow them to quickly nurture and educate their prospects from an environment that they are comfortable in - Microsoft Outlook. However, this opens up a new question - how do you know that your efforts in enabling sales are successful?



This is very easy to do with Eloqua, as long as you set yourself (or your sales management team) up with the right reports on their team's performance. Now that all communications are trackable, not just for prospects' interaction with them, but also for how sales used them, it is much easier to understand how they are being used.



Let's look at a few of the reports that are available for managing your team's performance. For each of these reports, you can search for all or part of the name in the Reporting Console, choose the parameters (usually just time frame, sometime also which sales person) you are interested in, and then run the report.



For an overview the AutoTracker Email Overview shows you, both in aggregate, an for each of your sales people, how many emails were sent, how many of those were marketing provided templates, and the open, clickthrough, and form submit rates for those emails.

(might have to click on this image to see it more clearly)

Next, you can easily look at which of your content is being used most (and most effectively) through the Templated Email for Microsoft Outlook Overview. This shows, for each piece of content, how many times it has been requested by sales people, how many times they have used it, and how effective it has been with its recipients.

(again, click on the image for a larger version)

You can also see a similar view, but by person, for what each person has done in terms of both requesting and sending marketing-supplied content through Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook. Note that this only includes marketing-supplied content, not emails that have been written by the sales person themselves. Use the Templated Email for Microsoft Outlook Usage report

Another very interesting and insightful report is the AutoTracker Email Visitors report, which shows the visitors to your website who have clicked on tracked emails sent from Outlook. This gives you a great sense of who in your prospect base is showing interest.




If you want to see which of your sales reps have installed, updated, and begun using the Outlook Plugin, the AutoTracker Usage Overview does this well. Not only can you see which version each person has installed, and when they last used it, but you can see the settings they have selected as their defaults, which can be useful in understanding their usage profile.

With the wealth of analytics available on the ELMO product, you can easily see what content is deemed useful, who is using it, and whether it is being effective. This gives you great insight into whether your sales team has adopted the content and tools you are providing to them as they engage their prospects.

Email Content and Sales Enablement - Quick Tip on Security

The recent posts around sales enablement have generated a lot of discussions. One specific topic was the Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook plugin (aka. ELMO to many), that allows you to provide marketing content for sales. The content can easily be controlled at the folder level, so specific folders can be enabled for sales, while other folders are not provided to sales.

However, the discussion surfaced an interesting challenge. If you are keeping your marketing content organized through foldering, based on topics or initiatives, then it may not make sense to use the folders to split content into that which is accessible by sales and that which is not. Luckily, there is an easier solution to this.

Within any folder of emails that is available to sales, you can select whether the content should be kept private from users of MS Outlook (except for the email's creator of course). Under advanced options, just click the checkbox for "Private in MS Outlook" and that email will not be accessible by sales. You can keep a folder-based organization scheme in place, while still maintaining full control over which emails are accessible to sales.

Check-box Confirmations and Web Forms

Today's post on Artisan is another guest post, this time from Ben McPhee, on our Product Management team. Ben is most well known for his recent work on Prospect Profiler, one of our keys to sales enablement, but he is also responsible for our work with the sports marketing vertical where we work with a number of professional sports teams, arenas, and racing facilities.


Ben's work in this area leads to him bringing some interesting requirements to the table, and gives him some unique experiences that are of value to a broader set of marketers. In today's post, he explores the use of validation rules to ensure that a visitor has checked a check-box on a form that indicates that they are of a certain age, or have read the terms and conditions. This is a useful technique for many marketing situations.

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Do you require visitors to agree to particular terms and conditions before you can accept the data they are providing through a form? Do you require a checkbox to be checked before accepting a form submission? Well, you don't need to be an HTML or JavaScript expert to set this up in your Eloqua forms.


Check out the simple instructions below to show you how to do this yourself!



First, add the checkbox field to your form. From the Fields menu on the form, you can list the fields in your form, or add a new field. If this is a form hosted within Eloqua, you'll need to add the field, if it is hosted on your site you will have already captured the field.

For this example, we'll look at a Checkbox field type, but the same techniques can be used on any type of field.





Next, go to the Form menu and select "Edit Server Validation" to edit your server-site validation (the process that runs after the submission of your form to ensure that people have filled in the information you require).


You can set the rules to validate against, the fields to validate, and the error pages to display if the field is incorrect.

To set up validation, first select an Error Page that will be presented to submittors if the info they have provided DOES NOT meet the requirements you set. When you have done this, select the field to validate (the checkbox field you added to your form) and create a NEW validation rule.




You'll be looking for the value submitted by the checkbox field to be "on", so select "Field value in Data Set" as your Validation Type - this is essentially saying, "I'd like to validate that the checkbox has been checked by comparing what is submitted to a list of acceptable submissions".

Selecting this give you options below that you need to configure to define exactly what the form validation should be looking for. Go to the "Form Field Validation Parameters" area of the page to define that list of acceptable submissions. To do this you will be creating a new Data Value Set and saying, "Do not accept a form submission unless the value submitted in this checkbox is in this Data Value Set".


Give your Value Set a name (in this example, "Checkbox- Must Be Checked", and then as your value, enter the value "On". The reason you are entering "On" is because by default, when a checkbox field in a form is checked, the system passes in a value of On or blank, depending on whether or not the box was checked.

With that validation set (of just one value - "On") created, you'll return to the previous page. Make sure that you have the "Set to the default value..." option Un-Checked so that your form submission is not altered.

And you're done! With this technique you can quickly ensure that no forms are submitted unless the right checkboxes are checked.

Quick Tip: Dashboard Pop-Outs

One of the most powerful ways to ensure the your marketing organization adopts a culture of analytics is to focus heavily on building great dashboards. One very quick tip that some users of Eloqua dashboards may not be aware of is the Pop-Out function.

For the sake of keeping your dashboards clean and clear, many tabular reports are automatically truncated to 10 or 15 rows. This is great for clean viewing of an overall dashboard, but can be problematic if you are looking to do a deeper dive into trends that are below your top 10.

If you want to dig in further than the top 10, you'll need to see a full list. Whereas you could easily see this in the report console, there is an easier way with dashboard pop-outs.

Under the "Actions" menu, select "Pop-out Report", and you will pop that report out into its own window, giving you a full screen to work with (useful for larger reports such as visitor lists), and allowing you to go beyond the top 10 or 15 rows.



A lot of thought can be put into what you include on your dashboards, and it's an area that I recommend reading up on. Tim Wilson has a great post on the art of dashboard design and development to get you started on his Gilligan on Data blog.

A well crafted dashboard can give your team great insights into your overall marketing efforts and their success, and when presented to your executive team, can alter their overall thinking about the investments you need to make in marketing.

Better Marketing Analysis Through Dynamic Filters

When you run a report within Eloqua, you will often want to understand a bit more about the data that you have within the report. Whereas you can easily export the data for secondary analysis in a tool like Excel, often the easiest thing to do is to dynamically filter the results of your report to get the view you want.

This is easy to do from most list reports (ie, a list of visitors, or a list of contacts).

In the top menu, under Filter, select "Filter these contacts" and you will be presented with a window that lets you define a filter. That filter is applied dynamically to the report you are looking at, letting you quickly see a subset of your data.

For example, if you had a list of contacts who had submitted a web form for a download, and wanted to understand how effective that marketing campaign had been at targeting CEOs, you might add a filter for "Title = CEO". Note, however, that the need for a contact washing machine becomes very clear in doing this. If we have not managed the data quality of our incoming title data, it will be hard to define a good filter. However, if the data has been standardized and normalized, we can work with a normalized Title field that can be easily filtered.

With the "CEO" filter layered on to our results, we can quickly see whether the campaign has been effective at generating responses from top execs. The filters can be quickly and easily removed or changed, which lets you work with any list report to get a better sense for the data it contains.

Dynamic filters on reports are a quick but powerful tool for getting better insights out of your marketing data.

Experts in the Field - Pedowitz Group's Sweet Platform for 2-way SMS

Many times when we're thinking of marketing automation, we're thinking of interacting with users while they are on their computers - email and the web being the main forms of interaction. However in some situations, your audience is not at their computers, and new approaches are needed.

The Pedowitz Group has developed their Sweet platform for just this purpose. It enables (among other things) 2 way SMS (text message) interaction, so if you have an audience at a tradeshow, a conference, a sports venue, or anywhere they are not at their computers, you can quickly and easily enable them to interact with your via their mobile device.

Quite simply, the Sweet platform allows you to promote a text message address (known as a short code) such as the following wherever you are at:

text TDGARDEN yourname@yourdomain.com to 37619

(Go ahead and try it if you are interested - US #’s only - and the campaign is no longer active so you won't win anything)

This can be promoted at your tradeshow booth, on the big screen at a game, or on a bill-board, however you decide to promote it, and with whatever offer you want to make.

What happens next is where Eloqua gets involved. The Pedowitz Group's Sweet platform captures the inbound messages, and processes them, handling all of the data and subscription management. It then passes those messages to Eloqua as standard web form submits.

Whatever you can do with Eloqua forms or a marketing automation program, you can now do immediately when a person text messages you based on your promotion. Outbound SMS messages can be handled via the Sweet platform, or via Eloqua's SMS capabilities within a marketing automation program - whichever is appropriate.

The possibilities are endless, and quite interesting. I look forward to hearing what campaigns you've run using mobile marketing and text messaging solutions.

Address Validation and the User Experience

It’s challenging to optimize the forms on your landing pages to make sure that you maximize both your conversion rate and the quality of the data flowing into your marketing database. The more fields we require, the worse our conversion rates are.

Similarly, performing inline validation on form data that prevents a submit can be very dangerous if done incorrectly as it will prevent submissions or frustrate visitors. One area that offers great promise to optimize is in the realm of address correction. If you are collecting physical addresses, either to use for direct mail marketing or for management of sales territories, you want the addresses to be correct.

However, we have all had experiences with websites that attempt to force an inline correction of our address and end up frustrating us as visitors.

Luckily, there is an approach that balances data quality with customer experience. Using a built-in function within your marketing automation programs, you can leverage Pitney Bowes global address standards database to automatically correct your addresses. This allows you to let visitors to your website experience a very flexible free-form approach to entering their addresses, but allows you to quickly correct those addresses to ensure that your data is very accurate.

To do this, from your marketing automation program, create a step that is an "Address Correction" step, into which your contacts, prospects, or companies will flow. The action, available under the "Data Tools" set, is "Run Address Validation". Note that this is a paid service, but the per-hit fee is very reasonable.

Within the program builder step, that is all you need to configure. However, if you want to configure the fields that are sent/returned for correction, you can configure them in the Setup area.

Go to Setup->Management->System Management->Add-on Manager to manage the address validation add-on.

Select the Address Validation add-on.

Within the setup interface for the Address Validation add-on, you will see a Task menu in the upper right corner, under Tasks, select Set Field Mappings.



This then gives you the mapping interface for the set of fields that are sent out to the address validation service and returned in a corrected manner. Select the fields from your own marketing database that you would like to use, or use the defaults that are already set.



If you use an address validation service, rather than forcing the user to wrestle with an inline validation, you allow the 5% of new or unknown addresses to pass through without causing user frustration.

Insights on Data Quality from Contact Group Dashboards

Understanding your data is one of the most critical things to do as a marketer. Data is a foundation for everything you do; lead scoring, segment definition, content personalization, lead routing, and marketing analysis. Without good data, each of those tasks will be challenging if not impossible.

One of the most powerful tools in understanding your data is the contact group. It lets you build almost any cut of data that you want. Most simply, this can be done with simple group overlap rules that show people who are in group A, but not group B for example.

A slightly more advanced technique is to combine groups and filters to perform robust group manipulation to create a combination of activity and data as a driver for a group definition. This process can be further automated using a marketing automation program to dynamically create a dashboard based on group membership.

With each of these techniques, you are provided with a one-click dashboard of the group. By selecting "Contact Group Dashboard" from the menu, you get a full suite of interesting reports showing you what is happening with that group and the contacts in it.

One of the most interesting reports in this dashboard is the Contact Field Completeness report. This report shows you, based on a view, how complete the fields are in contacts within that group. Each field is shown as being between 0 and 100% complete, giving you good insight into whether you have data to work with for the set of contacts in your group.

However, more interesting than this, is the results you get by clicking on a field of interest. For example, if we click on the "Title" field (98.2% complete), we can see that the data within that field is from a manual text field as it is obviously free form.

A quick look at this data gives you a good sense of whether it is of sufficient quality to build rules upon.

Using this dashboard to quickly understand your data gives you a very quick sense of where you are at and what areas you need to work on in terms of data quality.

Armed with this understanding, you can quickly tune your contact washing machine to best optmize the data that you have and the data that you need. With cleansed and normalized data, building segmentation rules, lead scoring rules, content personalization rules, and marketing analysis becomes significantly easier.

Lead Scoring for Sales Enablement - Visual Cues in Salesforce.com

We all know that sales people are visual people. We touched on that quite a bit in last week's post on sales enablement. Rather than interpret a list or a number, they would much rather quickly look at a picture to indicate whether a person was qualified as an individual, or hot or cold as a prospect.

This visual orientation is one of the main reasons for the popularity of Prospect Profiler among sales professionals, as it provides this quick, visual view of what is happening with a prospect.

However, even without Prospect Profiler, these visual cues can be extremely valuable to your sales team. Having a visual indication of whether an individual is qualified and/or interested, is something you can configure quickly and easily within salesforce.com or your CRM system of choice, without any additional cost.

To do this is very simple. Essentially, you are building custom formula fields, where the "formula" returns an image that represents what you are interested in displaying.

To get started, go to the setup area, and under Leads->Fields, scroll down to Lead Custom Fields, and add a New field.

From here, you will be guided through a quick wizard to set up the field. The type of field you want to create is "Formula" as we will be applying some logic to the image display, and the output type is Text.

Provide a field label for your field, such as if we are building an image of 0-5 stars to represent how qualified a person is as a buyer (explicit score), we might label the field "Explicit Rating Image".

From here, you are presented with a Formula screen - select the Advanced Formula tab to get started. Note that we are just creating a formula to look at the Explicit Lead Score (which is already present) and return an image. We are not building a formula to actually score the leads, which will have been done in Eloqua, based on the best practices for lead scoring, and passed into Salesforce.com.

There is a small amount of code being used here, but nothing to be overly concerned about, as you can edit an existing code sample in order to build the exact image you require.

When we are looking at the explicit score, it may vary between 0 and 100, so we'll return 0 to 5 stars based on where it sits in that range. The first thing we need to do, however, is to tell the formula which field it is looking at to find your lead's explicit score.


Click on "Insert Field" and a dialog box will give you a list of your fields. When you select it, the internal name for that field is inserted in your code. You'll need to replace the internal name in any of these examples with your own in order to have it work in your CRM system.

For this example, to look at an explicit lead score field called "LS_Explicit_Score" (replace this with your own), and display stars based on the range of values in the score field, the code would be as follows:

IF( LS_Explicit_Score > 80,
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_500.gif", "5 star"),
IF( LS_Explicit_Score > 60,
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_400.gif", "4 star"),
IF( LS_Explicit_Score > 40,
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_300.gif", "3 star"),
IF( LS_Explicit_Score > 20,
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_200.gif", "2 star"),
IF( LS_Explicit_Score > 10,
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_100.gif", "1 star"),
IMAGE("/img/samples/stars_000.gif", "0 star")
)))))

You can see that this also takes into account the range of scores (ie 0-100) you have in your scoring, so it is important to make sure your lead scores don't grow with time more than appropriate, and that the right scoring caps are in place. This ensures that your scores remain cleanly between 0 and 100 as they should.

With this in place, you can then define who the field is visible to, and edit the Lead Layout to add in your field where appropriate. Generally, it is a good idea to drage the field for the images next to the number for the score so your sales team begins to get a feel for the underlying numbers.

This same process can also be followed for the other dimensions of lead scoring, such as implicit scoring (how interested a person is). Follow a similar process, but build your formula off of the implicit score. If you wanted a formula that would use a Consumer Reports style set of partially colored circles to represent the score, the following would work:

IF( LS_Implicit_Score > 80,
IMAGE("/img/samples/rating5.gif", "High"),
IF( LS_Implicit_Score > 60,
IMAGE("/img/samples/rating4.gif", "Med-High"),
IF( LS_Implicit_Score > 40,
IMAGE("/img/samples/rating3.gif", "Med"),
IF( LS_Implicit_Score > 20,
IMAGE("/img/samples/rating2.gif", "Med-Low"),
IF( LS_Implicit_Score > 10,
IMAGE("/img/samples/rating1.gif", "Low"),
IMAGE("/img/samples/s.gif", "no rating")
)))))

Again, you will want to replace LS_Implicit_Score with the name of the field in which you store your implicit score. Continue this process for any other fields you like.

If the field you are building a rule from has a ranking or stage such a Hot/Warm/Cold or A/B/C, rather than a score that comes in a range (0-100), you can use a slightly different way of writing the code, using a "Case" statement, as follows (again, in this example, replace "Rating" with your own field, and the A/B/C values with the values you expect in that field:

IMAGE(
CASE(Rating,
"A", "/img/samples/flag_green.gif",
"B", "/img/samples/flag_yellow.gif",
"C", "/img/samples/flag_red.gif",
"/s.gif"),
"status color")

With this in place, you can easily provide your sales team with the visual cues they need to quickly and easily understand which of their leads are qualified, which are interested, and which require follow-up.

Naming Conventions - A Simple Technique with a Big Payoff

Today's guest post is from Joel Rothman, one of our Senior Product Consultants. Joel spends a lot of time innovating new services and deploying our larger enterprise clients, so he has a lot of experience with how to make a marketing automation deployment successful.

Often, as Joel relates, it comes down to getting the basics right. In today's post, he talks about a simple thing - naming conventions - that can be put in place easily, but will pay many dividends in a larger organization's marketing efforts.

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While not really as sexy as “Contact Washing Machines” or dashboards, a proper naming convention is a simple thing that can have great returns. Better to spend 5 minutes now thinking about it, then a few hours later trying to fix it.

Naming conventions can help you organize your assets within Eloqua to make it easier to find in select lists. It can also help with searching across the platform. And, if you are integrating things like Campaigns with your CRM system, it can help you get the most out of reporting in that system too! I would go as far as to recommend that you use consistent naming conventions across all your systems, if possible.


A solid naming convention could be used for consistency around the application, from Campaigns to emails and other channels.
There is no one size fits all naming convention. Best bet, make it as short as possible, while still be as descriptive as possible. Something like this would work well:

Region/Quarter/Initiative/Type/Name



So, you could end up with something like:

EMEA-Q109-LN-WP-NAME

OR

NA-Q209-LG-WB-NAME

Region/Initiative are things that are very specific to the way you do business, and I have seen them called various things. But, I would always recommend having at least a time frame and a type. For timeframe, it can be yearly or monthly, but I find quarterly usually works best. You also need to think through if it’s going to be the starting date of the planning or the execution. I would recommend the start date for the execution of a campaign. For type, things I normally see are webinar, seminar, tradeshow, whitepaper, direct mail, search engine etc…

Now, this is just an example, you would definitely need to choose a naming convention that fits your business. I have seen clients create spreadsheets that help generate the name for you, which is a good way to promote consistency.

If you are late to the naming convention party, I would say come on in, grab a party hat, it’s better late than never. Pick a date, and move forward with all assets after that date. Because naming conventions are about consistency, it’s not something I would roll out for a subset of assets (like emails, but not forms). Rather, it’s something you probably want to do with as much as you can. I haven’t seen any clients go back and change existing assets that were already executed on to line them up with a naming convention. However, assets that are still being used should probably be renamed.

Getting Started with the Eloqua Web Services API

Aaron Riley joins us this week as a guest blogger. I'm very excited to have Aaron contribute a few posts as he is one of our senior product consultants, and spends a lot of time helping our clients and partner work with the Eloqua web services API.

I hope to feature a number of interesting extensions of the Eloqua platform here in the coming months. Some of the innovations I have seen that extend the marketing automation or multi-channel marketing elements of Eloqua, especially from our partner community, are quite exciting.

If you have been thinking about getting started with the API to build your own extensions, here's Aaron with a quick walk through of how to get started

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Web Services and Demand Generation

Tighter business alignment and decision making requires more integration, automation, and the ability to report across multiple systems. Using web services, you can connect back office systems, CRM systems, databases, social media sites, and other offline media with Eloqua.

At Eloqua, our web services API allows for:

1) Bi-directional integration between Eloqua's marketing automation platform and on-premise or custom CRM systems

2) Connecting marketing automation with social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Linked-In

3) Automating lead nurturing workflow in concert with other web services such as telemarketing or inbound SMS providers

4) Exporting your marketing data to a data warehouse for Business Intelligence (BI) and reporting for more advanced marketing analysis than what is native to Eloqua

The API gives access to the contact, company, visitor, groups, and data card entities, as well as marketing activities. We currently have over 100 clients using the API and have certified partners who can help.

Getting Started

1) Reach out to your Customer Success Manager (CSM) and ask for the API to be enabled. It won't be enabled by default in your instance, but we'd be happy to turn it on for you.

TIP: Access Customer Central for documentation and examples.

2) Create a user in Eloqua and add them to the API User security group.

TIP: Test your user and password.

3) Import the WSDL into Visual Studio 2008 as a service reference.

TIP: WSDL can be found at: https://secure.eloqua.com/API/1.2/Service.svc?wsdl

4) Run the following “Hello World” VB.NET snippet to get you started:

TIP: Customer Central has code samples in other development languages if you prefer

Public Class Test
Public Sub New()

Dim elqService As New EloquaAPI.EloquaServiceClient()
elqService.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = "COMPANY\API.USER"
elqService.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = "********"

Try
Dim result As EloquaAPI.DescribeEntityTypeResult
result = elqService.DescribeEntityType("Base")

Dim entry As EloquaAPI.EntityType

For Each entry In result.EntityTypes
Console.WriteLine(entry.ID)
Console.WriteLine(entry.Type)
Console.WriteLine(entry.Name)
Next

Catch exS As System.ServiceModel.FaultException
Console.WriteLine(exS.ToString)
Catch ex As Exception
Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString)
End Try

elqService.Close()
End Sub

End Class

You are now connected and ready to integrate your marketing efforts with the rest of your business, update your data warehouse, or further your automated lead nurturing efforts.

10 Ways for Marketing to Enable the Sales Team

Marketing and sales often don't enjoy the best of relationships. The great news is that this situation has an amazing opportunity to change. Marketing can, right now, provide their sales team with insights that can make a tremendous difference in their lives and drive bigger commission cheques for them. Nothing changes a relationship with your sales team faster than a larger commission cheque.


Here are 10 things you can do, with Eloqua and your CRM system that will quickly deliver a lot of value to your sales team:

For Their Territories:

1) Territory Traffic Light Dashboard - For each sales person's territory, configure them a "traffic light" dashboard that gives them an instant view of which of their accounts are showing buying interest.


Here's how to build a Territory Traffic Light Dashboard



2) Territory-Based Email Alerts - configure for each rep, automatic email alerts for the accounts they own. This will give them a real-time indicator of buying interest, and let them manage the accounts proactively based on buyer interest.


Here's how to set up Territory-Based Email Alerts




3) Unknown Company Visitors - Show them which companies are on the website doing research who may not currently be known to your organization, give you a great opportunity to initiate a conversation as a buying process starts at that organization.


Here's how to configure a report on Unknown Company Visitors




For Their Accounts:


4) Account Insights and Key Players - Give each sales person a roll-up view that shows, for each of their accounts who the people are who are showing interest and what they are interested in. Armed with this insight, your sales team can quickly determine what the key conversations they need to have are.

Here's how to show sales a report that provides Account Insights and Key Players


5) Configure Your Social Media GPS - Identify social media activities and pass those through to your CRM system so that your sales team can understand which accounts, and which individuals are engaged in social media conversations. By presenting the prospect's social media activity within your CRM system, you enable your sales team to understand new context to the prospect interaction without leaving an environment they are comfortable with.


Here's how to Configure Your Social Media GPS

6) Find Sales the Right Contacts - Integration into role-based discovery services to drive real insight into who can make a purchase decision, not just a raw list of quasi-targeted and out of date names. Often, the person doing the bulk of the research is not the ultimate buyer, so discovering the names of the inviduals in the right role can be very beneficial to your sales team.

Here's how to Find Sales the Right Contacts

For Their Contacts or Leads:

7) Prospect Profiler for Sales Insights - enable Prospect Profiler in order to provide a rich, interactive, graphical view of each individual's interest. This allows your sales team to guide conversations and know who is showing the right level of buying interest.

Here's information on Eloqua's Prospect Profiler for Sales Insights

8) Show Areas of Prospect Interest - Configure your CRM integration to identify areas of your website that a person is showing interest in and highlight those within their concact or lead record in your CRM system. This enables sales to immediately know which topic of conversation will be most warmly received. Be sure to also use graphical imagery to more clearly highlight interest.

Here's how to Show Areas of Prospect Interest to sales in your CRM system

For Your Communications

9) Send-on-behalf-of-Sales - Have your marketing team send outbound email campaigns on behalf of your sales team. Not only does this drive a much higher response rate to the email campaigns, but it also builds upon the salesperson's relationship with the prospect and provides a great opportunity to start dialogs.

Here's how to set up your marketing campaigns to be Sent-on-behalf-of-Sales

10) Provide Sales with Content - provide marketing-created content to your sales teams in their Outlook desktop email environment so they can find great content, personalize it, and send it in a trackable way to their prospects quickly and easily.

Here's how to Provide Sales with Content within their Outlook environment

There are many ways that your marketing team can enable your sales team, and the 10 ideas above are great ones to get started with. In today's environment, it is possible for marketing and sales to have a much stronger relationship than they ever have had before, and it all starts with sales enablement.

Enabling Sales with Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook

Your sales team will be communicating with your prospects. That is unavoidable. It is also the fear of almost all marketing organizations. Will they use the right messaging? Will they take advantage of the right tools and content? Is their grammar and tone appropriate?

Many marketing organizations have legitimate reasons to fear sales-created content, as it is often sloppy, off-message, and outdated. However, sales will complain that marketing content is not easily accessible to them, needs to be tweaked slightly to meet their exact needs, and feels too "marketing" in tone.

Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook is designed to be a balance for that. It allows you, as a marketing team, to provide content to your sales team that is:

- Centrally managed and updated, ensuring it is always up to date

- Available to your sales team where they work, in Outlook

- On message and on brand, but allowing your sales team to personalize as needed

In order to do this, there is a small plug-in for Outlook that is downloaded and installed into each salesperson's Outlook client. To get the plug-in, go to:

Setup -> My Settings -> Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook

and download the plug-in from there. Note that this is part of the sales toolkit, so you will have to have that module.

Download the plug-in, and walk through the installation wizard. You will be asked for you login credential with Eloqua, and once you have configured them, you will see a small toolbar at the top of your Outlook screen.

Clicking on the "Eloqua Templates" button gives you access to the marketing-supplied template library. As a marketing team, you can easily configure which emails you want accessible to sales through this interface by setting that up in the main application.

When the sales person selects a template and downloads it, they are within the normal, familiar Outlook email interface. From here, they can personalize the message as they see fit, and can add their own messaging.

Generally, what we have found is the most effective content for Eloqua for MS Outlook is very plain, natural content, as would be written by a sales person themselves. Highly graphical, rich content often does not end up being used by sales people as it feels less natural.

With the content selected, and edited, the sales person can send to one person, or to a list of people (marketing controls the size of the list they are allowed to send to, generally you want this to be only a few folks, 50 or 100).

When the email is sent, it is of course tracked through Eloqua giving immediate sales ingights into prospect interest levels and areas, unsubscribe preferences are respected, and the analysis is immediately available.

If sales edits marketing-supplied content, or creates content of their own, they can, of course, save those templates in their own personal library for later reuse. Marketing can relax knowing that sales is starting with well crafted, on brand, on message content. Sales can thrive now that they are able to get immediate access to the right content from their natural workspace.

A full suite of analysis is of course available for individual sales people to understand their own effectivenss, and for marketing to understand which sales people are adopting the marketing content and seeing success with it.