Using Eloqua emails as social media content

(Guest post from Joel Rothman)

Out of the box, Eloqua allows you to create a link that will send someone to a Social Media site, such as Twitter, Facebook or Linked In. This functionality is great, and very easy to use. But, I have been asked a couple of times how we can create a link to the actual email itself that can be placed used for twitter etc… and there is a pretty easy way to do this, assuming you are just a little bit comfortable with HTML.

Most social sites have a specific URL type that can be used to push someone to the site, and prepopulate the content box with the text that you want. For example, for twitter, it’s this format:



Where you substitute what’s in the “content” are for what you want to pre-populate, with + signs instead of spaces in your text. So, what you need to do is come up with a line, such as “Check out this Newsletter for valuable B2B tips”, that would look like this: (click for larger image)



But wait, it’s missing the URL! How do you get that, you might be asking? Simple, insert this code: (click for larger image)



So, you’ll end up with a link that looks like this: (click for larger image)



And Voila:

Now, a couple of notes. Any personalization in emails will not show. In fact, it will just be blank (ie if you have Dear Joel, it will say just Dear). Also, these links expire after a few weeks.

Now, that URL says now.eloqua.com.. what’s up with that? Can you change that? Stay tuned…

Getting Creative - Hidden Form Submits to Make Links Powerful

In many marketing campaigns, certain links in your email can be very indicative of prospect interest. You may want to use the fact that the recipient clicked on that specific link to trigger a very clear series of actions. Perhaps the click should associate that contact with a campaign, perhaps it should add them to a program, or perhaps you want to notify your sales team directly as soon as the link is clicked.

Whereas all of this can be done by using content tagging and web profiling, there is a much easier way. This is something that Heather Foeh, who writes on Marketing Insights talks about quite a bit, and it's a great technique so I wanted to share it here.

Using a technique called “hidden form submits” you can directly tie the clicking of a link to the submit of a form within Eloqua. From there, all of the processing steps within the world of forms are available to you. The key to this technique is the fact that when a form is submitted, the way in which the data is sent to the web server is the same as the way in which a URL is formed, with each of the fields in the form in the URL’s query string in a Field1=Value1&Field2=Value2 format. If you structure your links in your email in this way, each link will act identically to a form submit.

To do this, first create your form in Eloqua as you normally would. Usually, you would only create a form with one or two fields in it for this technique, definitely email address, and perhaps one more (if you have a “click for Yes” and “click for No” pair of links, for example, you might have one form field for “Answer” also).

Once you have done this, and you have created the form processing steps to do what you want with the incoming data, the next step is to structure the link for insertion into your email. From the form, go to the Integration Details page (button is on main Form details page). You will see a number of fields on this page that give you what you need to structure the link.

The first is the page to submit to. This will be similar to http://now.eloqua.com/e/f2.aspx and is the first part of the link. From there, you will take the other system form fields that are presented there and structure them as name=value pairs. The first name=value pair starts with a “?” and the rest are separated by “&”. This will create a link that looks like http://now.eloqua.com/e/f2.aspx?elqSiteID=33&elqFormName=HiddenFormSample with the site ID and form name representing your form.

The next step is to insert a field that represents the recipient’s email address. This is, of course, different for each recipient, so you will need to insert an email field that will dynamically populate their email address. If you have worked with the HTML behind email fields, you will be familiar with this. The email address insertion code is as follows (assuming you use the standard email address field, otherwise adjust that field name to yours): “&C_EmailAddress=<span class="eloquaemail">EmailAddress</span>”. If you have custom fields, for example our Yes and No options, you will likely want to hard code their values into the link. The “yes” link would have “&Answer=Yes” while the “no” link would have “&Answer=No”.

With this in place, your final link will look something like:


http://now.eloqua.com/e/f2.aspx?elqSiteID=33&elqFormName=HiddenFormSample&C_EmailAddress=<span class="eloquaemail">EmailAddress</span>&Answer=Yes


You can then use the Insert Hyperlink function in the email editor to insert your carefully constructed link into your email, and you will have a link that acts as a hidden form submit.

This technique is a very powerful one as it allows you to get creative with what happens when your email recipients click on links within Eloqua emails. All of the capabilities of the form engine are available to you.

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