SmartXchange - Installing a Template

(Guest post from Miles Thibault, Product Manager for Eloqua's SmartXchange)

Eloqua's SmartXchange template library became available today. SmartXchange templates are marketing assets, such as emails, forms, and even programs; that have been refined and tested by Eloqua and other marketers. They give you better performance in less time.

The rest of this post will walk you through installing one of the Eloqua Best Practice email templates.

1. To access SmartXchange, go to: Setup | SmartXchange



2. This example uses an email template called "BP - Product Offer with CTA, 1 column." Once you've found it, click Use Template



3. Since an email is made of several smaller components, you should give each of them a descriptive name. Once that's done, click Finish. The template is now installed.



4. As an optional step, some templates have tasks that you can complete on the tasks page. Complete as many tasks as you need and click Done.



That's is! In only a few minutes you're ready to use on of Eloqua's best-practice emails.

Getting Bachelorette’s Attention

Today's Guest Post is by Meagen Eisenberg, Director of WW Programs and Marketing Automation at ArcSight.

What does ABC’s The Bachelorette have to do with sales enablement? Getting Ali’s attention on this season's The Bachelorette has some great parallels to successful sales enablement. We can apply a few tips from the bachelors.

Do you Accept this Rose?

We, as marketers, play the wooers to sales mindshare and attention. We want to get noticed, we want to be selected for the date, we want them to fall in love with us (or at least our programs), and we are competing against 25 other guys (well at least 25 other distractions). We want our programs leveraged to further the business. How do we get our sales team's attention and get noticed through all of the noise? Do you run the Roberto (the good-looking one), the Ty approach (the funny charming one with a Southern accent), the Craig (the "bring home the bacon" lawyer), the Jonathan (one-of-a-kind), or the Frank (the intellectual)? I am going to argue that you need all styles to be irresistible. A healthy mix at the right time seems to attract my Bachelorette sales team.

To get my sales team's attention, we started with a program that had sex appeal and charm that targeted their top 100 green field accounts. We created a multi-touch program to make prospects Flip for our campaign, a high-end highly-targeted program with a goal to set up in-person meetings (think 1-1 date with a rose). We knew that an email alone was not going to get sales' or our targets' attention, which led us to use Eloqua's multi-capability software with email, phone, direct mail (FedEx package), PURLs (personalized hypersites) and in-person meetings. We designed a catchy tagline and offer, hot graphics, video and personalized URLs for each recipient. The microsite displayed content based on the recipient's industry, sales rep, and company. We went as far as to include an auto-generated email with copy included to make it extremely easy to reach out to their rep. Click on the "Click to schedule meeting" on the PURL site to see for yourself. Every touch made it as easy as a click to work with a personal sales rep. We got sales excited when they saw the ArcSight branded Flip cams and the response rates! We loved the results we saw in the U.S. and decided to roll the program out worldwide.

What Do Sesame Street and Sales Have in Common? ELMO!

The Flip program was sexy and got sales' attention, but we needed to keep our appeal and get them to use our other available marketing assets – webinars, whitepapers, and events. So we laid on the humor with an ELMO video to get them excited about the power of Eloqua for Microsoft Outlook (aka "ELMO") and all of the marketing templates we had available for them to engage with and nurture their prospects and customers. Just to give you a sense of volume for ELMOs, our largest month was March, and we as a company sent 1,850 marketing created templates and used the tracking feature to send 3,041 emails. You can find the number of marketing emails sent for your own company under menu Evaluate > Reporting > Report Console at Templated Email for Microsoft Outlook Usage, and the number of auto-tracked emails at AutoTracker Emails Sent. And if you want to see which marketing templates are getting the most play, run the Templated Email for Microsoft Outlook Overview report.

For our one-of-a-kind approach, we designed personal daily reports for each of our sales reps. (Everyone likes to feel special and unique.) By creating daily emailed reports for our sales and inside sales team, we give them visibility into the activity in their territory. We also show them the quality of the leads in their region based on what the leads are looking at and how often they are on our website. They can even see what Eloqua terms as the "Unknown" visitor, companies on your website that have not filled out a registration form. Our inside sales team loves to catch the "Unknown" visitors, look the company up in Salesforce.com, and call into the contacts to see if they can find the person with the need we can fulfill - catch them while they are hot. You can find how to create daily reports for your sales team on page 27, and best practices for creating daily reports on page 28 from my February San Francisco Success Tour presentation.

Targeting Your Top Accounts

Do you have sales reps that don't cover a specific territory, but specific accounts instead? For our Strategic Account Managers, we create real-time individual company alerts through Eloqua's Visitor Notification tool (learn more on pages 10-12). Basically, daily reporting and alerts show sales what leads and companies are actively pursuing our programs, what products they are investigating, and how to track, contact and (with the help of ELMO) come across as a thought-leader in the space to our clients.

Show Me the Metrics!

And just when sales think we Marketers are all make-up and glam, we showed off our intellectual side. We hit them with Eloqua's reporting and campaigns module –providing reporting and insight into their territory with daily lead activity reports, the Integrated Marketing and Sales Funnel with stage health (All Responses by Lead Stage [see graphic]), and ROI information, such as Top Campaigns by Opportunities Generated/Revenue report and Influenced/Attributed Revenue and Cost (CPL, CPSO, etc). It shows our organization what programs and campaigns are effective, how we are building out their pipeline, and why we invest our dollars in some areas and not others.

With Eloqua capabilities, you get to be the best of all the bachelors – attracting your sales team's attention and enabling them to find and close the deal – sales and marketing alignment at its best. Our sales team has been very responsive to our multi-touch programs, the use of ELMO, and the daily reports. We have their attention and they engage with us on a regular basis to build pipeline and accelerate the closing of deals. With a multi-style strategy, your sales team can't resist and you will get the rose every time!

Quick Tip: How to Organize Your Email Templates in Outlook

Here's a quick tip for those of you that use Eloqua's plug-in for Microsoft Outlook to provide email collateral for your sales team. Make it easy for your sales reps to choose the correct template by organizing your folders by sales stage (you may also refer to this as "opportunity stage"). By grouping your messages this way, the rep can easily send the right message at the right time and then quickly move on to their next prospect.

Here's an example of how this might look:

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…

Success Tour Destinations in August and September

I learned my lesson in writing post titles last time with my "Success Tour Stops in June" title. No, the tour does not stop, it was just a list of the stops on the tour. In fact, the tour is going incredibly well, and the most recent destinations have been great fun for everyone involved, and have included a growing roster of cities, like our first stop in Los Angeles.

Other stops, including Chicago, Portland, and Toronto have all of course featured a visit from Drake, who just ran a great iPad giveaway contest which resulted in him being seen (and photographed) over 200 times in cities around the world!

The full schedule of Eloqua customer success tour stops is always available on user.eloqua.com, but if you haven't had a chance to go there and find your city, the following stops are coming up in August and September:

Austin, August 11th
San Francisco, August 19th
Washington, D.C., September 2nd
New York City, September 14th
Denver, September 15th
Atlanta, September 21st

Attendance is free, just let us know you'll be there by registering on user.eloqua.com, and we'll see you there. Some great customer stories are shared at each event, and there is often a preview glimpse of Eloqua 10, and a number of other upcoming product innovations!

Follow along with the conversation on Twitter by following the #EloquaTour hashtag.

Hope to see you out at an event.

And the iPad winner is...

A few weeks ago our Eloqua Success Tour Ambassador, Drake, kicked off a contest to give away an iPad. Well, today is that magical giveaway day. It was an incredibly difficult decision for Drake because there were so many creative entries. (If you’re one of Drake’s many friends on Facebook you’ll be able to click the links below to view the photos.)

Drake commented that he really wanted to see the Eiffel Tower and he got versions of his wish in Vegas and on Ellis Island. He traveled as far away as Australia and Hawaii, and all over the US and Canada. He flew on a trapeze with the greatest of ease and celebrated a bit too much at a winery in Napa Valley. He went swimming (which didn’t end well), was burned, umpired a baseball game, golfed, scaled amazing heights, and even braved the protesters at the G20 summit. Drake also made friends with kangaroos, koala bears, sheep (ouch!), roosters, ducks, pigs, cows, dogs, donkeys, and llamas with really bad teeth. He had a bit of peace and music at Woodstock, and a tiny bit of corporate espionage (shhh). And yes, he even managed to play in the World Cup. And all the while he was spreading the gospel of marketing and sales alignment to everyone he met.

Drake is a tired man.

But not too tired to award an iPad! Drumroll please…

The iPad goes to Amy Kolzow! She managed to take Drake to eleven states across the US – impressive! - and even gave Drake several new outfits. But the real reason she won? She cleverly named Drake’s dog “Markie”. A shining moment in Eloqua branding. (Not sure what the connection is? Visit http://markies.eloqua.com for the scoop.)

Newsletter Dynamic Customization using Blind Form Submits

Vince Lockyer, Demand Generation Specialist at Avid was kind enough to send in this excellent (and very detailed) example of using blind form submits to customize a newsletter to the exact preferences of each recipient.

The Avid Spotlight newsletter has a subscriber base of well over a million contacts – from bedroom DJs and home video editing enthusiasts through to network TV news engineers, Top 10 music producers and Hollywood feature film editors.

To ensure our broad range of subscribers get the most relevant content, ADC (Activity Driven Content) is used to pull in sections of news and promotional content targeted towards six different segments.

In this post I’ll show how we used ADC and Email Blind Form Submits to dynamically customize the newsletter. Using this method our subscribers can personalize their newsletter with additional content preferences, and then immediately view the updated email in a web browser.

In the first month over 4000 individual customizations occurred using this method. Not only does it help to ensure people get the news they want, but it means our subscribers can provide us with explicit segmentation data about themselves.

How it works

Avid Spotlight content preferences are stored as a series of six contact fields containing an ‘on’ (form checkbox) value indicating whether the subscriber should be receiving that content. If an ‘on’ value is present for a particular content preference then that content gets pulled into the final email using ADC criteria rules.




An additional set of ADC rules check to see which content preferences the subscriber doesn’t have – displaying blind form submission buttons (right) that automatically add values to the respective content preferences fields.

After the form submission, a confirmation page is displayed automatically redirecting the subscriber to the Web Preview version of the newsletter containing the updated content (below).



Try it Yourself!

http://forms.avid.com/forms/spotlightdemo

Use this form to subscribe to our newsletter (you can remove yourself at any time). You’ll immediately receive the latest newsletter to try out the customization.

The Form

To keep the blind form submission URLs as short as possible, the HTML name of the form is simply called ‘sl’. The form fields are:

• em (Email Address)
• pref (Preference) – Containing the additional content preference code
• sguid (elqEmailSaveGUID) – Used to display the Web Preview
• elq (RecepientID) – Also used to display the Web Preview

The Blind Form Submission

Here is the format of the blind form anchors, using Eloqua dynamic email fields to pull in the email address and Web Preview fields:




Processing Steps

When a blind form submission is received, Eloqua does the following:

• Updates the Contact Field with the relevant content preference (‘on’ value)
• Updates an additional contact field containing the full name (text string) of the content preference (this is used in the confirmation page).
• Updates two more contact fields – RecepientID and elqSaveEmailGUID (also used by the confirmation page).
• Redirects to the Confirmation Page.

After the processing steps, the contact table will look something like this:




The Confirmation Page

This is where the additional content preference is confirmed to the subscriber in a Web Page, followed by a meta redirect to the saved Web Preview version of the email. In order for this last part to work, Contact Table field values have to be pulled into the confirmation page.



Firstly, the page pulls in the name of the content preference and the email address. In our case CEF100441 equals the content preference name field, and C_EmailAddress is the subscriber's email address:



The final part of the confirmation page is the meta redirect, which is in this format:



Where CEF100440 is the elqEmailSaveGUID, and CEF100442 is the RecipientID.
Note: these field names will be different in your instance of Eloqua, and you’ll need to use the ‘Insert Field’ menu item in the Confirmation Page builder to insert the HTML containing the field name.

Eloqua Cloud Connectors

For those of you who are either a bit technical, or who have technical folks on your team, there is now a very interesting opportunity for you to extend the capabilities of Program Builder in any way you choose. The capability is called Eloqua Cloud Connectors, and it is very simple, but incredibly powerful.

If you want to connect to your own custom systems (a free trial system to grab a token, an event registration system, etc), build custom logic (scoring leads based on unique criteria), or run custom rules (determining whether a person lives within a 100 mile radius of a certain city), you can now build that quickly and easily by building your own Cloud Connector.

Essentially Cloud Connectors, available today in your Eloqua instance, allow you to build any step you want in your marketing automation workflow within Program Builder. To do so, there are three simple steps:

- Define the Step in your program as a "Cloud Connector" step. This means that whatever happens in that step will be run by your service, rather than natively within Eloqua.

- Configure the Step with whatever rules, credentials, and configuration you need. This is configured and saved within the service that your build.

- Run the Step have your service call into the Cloud Connector API, find the members of the step, run whatever is needed, and then tell Program Builder that it is complete

It's as simple as that. You can build whatever marketing automation capabilities you need quickly and easily. Here's a quick diagram of how this might work connecting with a Hoovers database as an example:


To begin building your own Cloud Connector, all you need is a user account with access to the Eloqua API, and a creative idea. Here is an Eloqua Cloud Connector development sample guide to give you a walkthrough of how to get started, and sample code for all the steps you'll need to take in building one.

I look forward to hearing what you've built, and if you build something that is available to the Eloqua community, I would be glad to highlight it here.

Eloqua API - PHP SDK now available

As I wrote the title for this post, it occurred to me that there were a lot of three letter acronyms in it, but I can't remove any without changing the message.

David Lanstein at Splunk just posted a PHP SDK for the Eloqua API, for anyone who has been building, or looking to build, API-based projects. It's freely available (Apache 2.0 license), and David mentions on the project page that he is eager to hear any feedback you might have as you build out your own projects.

As this blog is a community for all of us working with the Eloqua platform, please do let me know if there are other resources like this that you are interested in sharing.

David, thank you (and Splunk) for your generous contribution to the community.

Drake Brings you an iPad

If you’ve attended an Eloqua Customer Success Tour recently you may have met Drake. He’s our official “mascot” of Success Tours, and he’s done an exemplary job so far. He recently created a Facebook profile so that you can get to know him a bit better and last week he asked if he could run some Eloqua-related contests on his Facebook page. Of course we agreed. We love a good contest – especially when someone else does all of the work.

Over the next few months you can learn a bit more about Drake and his irreverent take on the art and science of marketing by viewing his Facebook wall posts (they’re not protected, so anyone and everyone can get to know him). He’ll be sharing some reading recommendations and I’m sure he’d love to hear your suggestions as well. Sometimes he might point you in the direction of a good blog post or marketing event. And sometimes he may simply share a good restaurant that he’s been to before or after a Success Tour.

But let’s get down to business and talk about Drake’s first contest. At the San Francisco Success Tour he saw Jill Rowley’s iPad and he’s decided he really needs one for his briefcase. Who can blame him? Since he’s going to buy one for himself he decided to be generous and buy one for a member of the Eloqua family too. But who to give it to? That’s where the contest comes in.

Download this PDF featuring a fantastic likeness of Drake. Print it and cut it out then take a picture of Drake somewhere interesting. Your photo can feature you and Drake together or just Drake alone in interesting surroundings. Post your picture to Facebook, friend Drake (“Drake at Eloqua”) and tag him in the photo. Voila!

On July 5 he’ll choose his favorite picture and send the winner a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad. Yep, it’s that easy. You can even enter more than once, which is highly recommended if you’re traveling. (Hint: Drake would really like to see the Eiffel Tower or some really awesome July 4th shenanigans.) Oh, and in case Drake can’t choose his favorite, he’ll see which photo has the most “likes” to help him make his decision.

Gated Forms - Asking for just the right information

One of the most common questions every marketing team wrestles with is the question of how much information to ask for from prospects as they request your marketing information. Luckily, the answer doesn't have to be static, you can ask for different information based on what you already know and what the individual has already provided.

The technique for doing this is called "gated forms", and is one of the most powerful techniques in the modern marketer's toolbox. You can set up gated forms yourself to work with your Eloqua marketing database.

Essentially, the technique works as follows:
- if you recognize the visitor based on their cookie, either provide them with the asset directly, or ask them just a little more information

- if you don't recognize them based on their cookie, check to see if they are in your database based on their email address

- if you do not have any information on the visitor at all, ask for a longer amount of information

The following diagram shows how this works:


By extending this simple technique further, you can ask for more information at each interaction, while never asking for an overly large amount of information, and never asking the same information twice.

Gated forms are very flexible as a technique, and can be used in a variety of situations - some as simple as just removing a form in front of a web asset, some as robust as asking for unique information of each visitor at each interaction.

To help you get started, here is a guide showing exactly how gated forms can be created and implemented, from the most simple scenarios to the most robust.

Success Tour Stops in June

The Eloqua Customer Success tour is in full swing, with recent stops in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Austin drawing record attendance and great reviews.

Stops are happening around the country, so chances are we'll be in a city near you soon. Come out to meet other Eloqua users, compare notes, exchange ideas, and learn from some of the best marketers around.

You'll also have a chance to meet Drake. If you want to know why you should come meet Drake, you'll have to join us for an event...

The full schedule of Eloqua customer success tour stops is always available on user.eloqua.com, but if you haven't had a chance to go there and find your city, the following stops are coming up this month:

Seattle, June 8th
Chicago, June 10th
Philadelphia, June 10th
Portland, June 10th
Toronto, June 15th
Los Angeles, June 23rd

Attendance is free, just let us know you'll be there by registering on user.eloqua.com, and we'll see you there.

As an added benefit of coming out to the success tour, you'll get a glimpse of Eloqua 10, our new upcoming release. I coudn't put it any better than @travelingshinn did in the San Francisco tour stop:



Follow along with the conversation on Twitter by following the #EloquaTour hashtag.

Hope to see you out at an event.

Justifying Adjustments – Saying Hello…Faster

(Guest post from Amber Stevens)

A few weeks ago, @heatherfoeh wrote about the value of a Welcome Program. This past November, the Eloqua marketing team launched our own version of a 3 touch – 30 day Welcome Program designed to engage prospects during the time when they’re known to be most receptive to giving and receiving info (according to MarketingSherpa study). Initial results were amazing with click-through rates reaching over 20% in some instances. But, like any good marketer, we know there is room to optimize. Here’s what we’ve learned along the way.

Unsolicited hello’s make you seem like a crazy person. This might seem obvious, but we got so excited with the initial results of the program that we started convincing ourselves that it made sense to welcome everyone. Conversion rates plummeted. Using the ‘Email Group Overview Grouped by Contact Field’ report (which is great for slicing and dicing email results) to sort on lead source, I combined similar sources and quickly realized that for us, welcoming acquired names through list builds and our sales team prospecting efforts drove the lowest CTR and the highest un-subscribes.

We stopped doing that.

It’s also important to note that when we run online events or promotions with outside vendors, we send one “bridge” email to follow up on the specific event or action they took, and then feed them into the welcome program. We had considered stopping this practice thinking that perhaps only those contacts who directly sought us out (ie came to the website) should be welcomed, but when we looked at the data, we realized we have great conversions from our 3rd party leads.

We’ll keep doing this.




No one cares about “that guy” or your service pitch. Using the report ‘Email Group Overview’ I could see that conversions drop off drastically on both the second and third emails. Turns out, people LOVE the offers in the first email – but the second and third don’t drive a fraction of the conversions. Even when we swapped offers from a customer story (swapping male for female images had no impact) to our money back guarantee service, the second communication still gets paltry results. I think this has something to do with their buying stage – you wouldn’t necessarily care to learn more about services if you’re just window shopping. The third email achieves higher than average click through rates, but is still less than half as effective as the first email.

We’re going to revise the program and make it one touch – leveraging the highest converting offers (our Eloqua demo, fun intro to marketing automation and Best Practice Videos) – and minimizing other content by providing, but not over promoting.



So, as you can see, saying hello can take many different forms. The first step is to just get started – you can always learn and adjust along the way.

Please post your thoughts or questions on lead nurturing – I’m interested to hear what you’ve seen be successful.

Find me on Twitter @AmberSte

“Stop Light Program” – Filters for controlling Email Frequency

Guest post from Carlos Cerqueira, a senior product specialist on our Premier support team.

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


Have you been enjoying the new Contact Filter options but want some ideas for incorporating them into your Email Marketing, beyond simple segmentation?
A great way to incorporate the new filter options into your email campaigns is to use the concept of Email Frequency or as one of my client’s has coined it: “The Stop Light Program”. This allows you to address issues with over saturating prospects/contacts with emails by automatically having them removed from email sends once they reach an appropriate number of email receptions.

The need to create a program is no longer required but the idea is still much the same: Create a series of Filters based on email frequency ranges that assign contacts a Red, Yellow or Green value. Based on the color assigned to the contact you can then implement these filters into various areas of the application to either block or allow email sends to these contacts.

Prerequisites for Filters

What you want to do is to decide beforehand what amount of email sends should classify a contact to be placed into the Red, Yellow or Green categories. You will need to input those values in your filters when you create them.

There are valuable reports in Eloqua that will help you decide as an organization what are acceptable email ranges to assign to your different colors.

An Example would be as follows:

Red – received over 10 emails in last month

Yellow – received between 4 and 9 emails in last month

Green – received between 1 and 3 emails in last month

A Valuable report is the Email Frequency by Contact Group (which is also a great report to look at on your Contact Group Dashboards) which will show you all the contacts in that group and how many emails they received within a certain time range:



Creating Filters

To create a new filter head over to the Contact Tab and select the Contacts dropdown. Select Create a new Contact Filter.

Once you are in the Contact Filter canvas you can see all your criteria options on the right hand side which can be dragged and configured on your canvas area.

The criteria we are interested in is the “Have been Sent an E-Mail”:


Click and drag that criteria onto the canvas and a configuration window will pop up:


Each color will be its own filter and the email amounts can be altered at any point as your initial ranges may be re-thought.

Additional criteria such as Contact Data may be used to further segment out your contacts to target specific industries, companies or countries, i.e. Adding a criteria to only see contacts that are part of a certain company:

Another good tactic is to incorporate other activity based criteria into the filter such as Opened emails, clicked and E-mail, etc. This allows for granular filtering and also then allows for more flexibility in how you leverage these new filters.

Leveraging the Filters

Now that you have these filters built you want to know how to implement them into your current process to possibly prevent “Red Stop Light” contacts from receiving any emails until they are Yellow or placing your “Green Stop Light” contacts into a nurturing campaign.
Below are some suggestions that might help you decide how you are going to incorporate these filters into your system:

- Master exclude List - If you are experiencing issues where you don’t want any contacts who have received over a certain amount of emails to be emailed at all until they are within Yellow or Green ranges then placing the “Red Stop Light” filter into the master exclude area would be an option. The master exclude list can be accessed by Customer Administrators under the Setup->Management ->System Management tab but be warned that any contacts added to this list are EXCLUDED from any email sends in your system.

- Default Distribution Lists – Another exclusion option is to add the “Red” filter into default distribution list’s excluded area which would mean any NEW distribution lists will automatically have that filter as an excluded asset. The Default distribution list configuration is again only accessible by Customer Administrators and can be found in the Setup->Management->User management tab and from there just click the User Defaults and Settings menu:


- Nurturing Campaigns – What to do with the Red and Yellow filters is generally obvious but there are possibilities for your Green filter where you can combine activity criteria (opens, clicks,etc) as mentioned earlier in the post to pull contacts into a lead nurturing program. This allows you to engage a target audience who you know is interested in your product/service but has not been bombarded with recent emails.

Hopefully this had shed some light on the power and flexibility of our new Contact Filters and encourages you to try and think outside the proverbial box.

Fun with Eloqua and JQuery - Tracking PDF Links

(Guest post from Joel Rothman)

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


I have been tinkering a little bit with jQuery. FULL DISCLOSURE, I don’t know the first thing about .js or .css. All I know is that often when I see something really cool on the web and I ask how it was done, I very often get the response ‘jQuery’. So, I did some digging. It’s basically a javascript library that is light weight, and designed to simplify client side scripting.

If you don’t know what it is, check out http://jquery.com/

When I was looking at all the functionality, I was thinking about ways that my clients could benefit. A relatively simple one was PDF tracking. The ability to track PDF’s is awesome. It allows for in depth lead scoring, as well as targeting and segmentation. PDF’s have always been a challenge, because you cannot embed JS directly into them, so you can’t load your Eloqua tracking scripts. The standard solution is to change the URL of the PDF’s to a file hosted on the clients site, with the URL as a query string. What this allows is for a web visitor to hit an HTML page, that does 2 things:

1. It records the URL and pushes it into Eloqua as a page view

2. It redirects the visitor to the PDF

Now, this system works really well, but you do need to change every URL, and I have actually encountered CMS systems which do not allow this! So, I decided to see what I could do with JQuery.

Now, I am used an older jQuery library (1.3.2), but the same code should work for all. Basically, what it does is when a link that ends in .PDF is clicked, it loads a JS function that fires the URL into the Eloqua site map, then allows people to go to the page. I have tested on all major browsers, and it works well. Some mobile browsers do not have JS enabled by default (think older blackberrys). But, the nice thing is, the PDF still loads fine.

In order to get the code to work, the first thing you need is to load the elqFCS.js file that is included in your elqNow folder, using standard scripts. This can be included along with the standard Eloqua scripts:



And the jQuery script looks like this:







Obviously the line numbers are just there for reference. But, it breaks out as follows:

1. Loads jQuery library

2. Starts script

3. The $ starts the jQuery function. This line is pretty standard, and just defines that something is going to happen on a defined event

4. Again, the $ means jQuery. This reads “when an attribute with a value of PDF at the end is clicked, run the following function

5. This function is the standard Eloqua FCS function, which basically forces a URL into the site map, when the URL is loaded in the brackets. The (this).attr(“href”) portion grabs the URL of the PDF that is clicked

The rest is just closing the scripts. Now, for line number 5, the key is to determine if your PDF links are relative or not. If they are not, then the above works. If they are, you might have to hardcode a domain in, or use a document.location function to grab the URL.

As well, in my samples I always had the function loading in the head tag, but I actually don’t think it matters.

The next step is to try to figure out how to capture right clicks on a PDF, for when people right click and save. I think this is really simple, using the following jquery plugin:

http://abeautifulsite.net/2008/05/jquery-right-click-plugin/

Any feedback? Anybody else doing anything interesting using Eloqua and jQuery?

Identifying Bounceback Hotspots with Analytics

(Guest post from Rob Heerdegen, one of our top Product Specialists in the EMEA region)

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I love reporting! I'm one of those analytical geeks who just can't help but prove how right was my assumption. Sound familiar? This will be right up your alley.

Eloqua is home to thousands of great reports. And then when you combine some of those reports with our segmentation and activity based filters, WOW, you have analytics that keep you and your marketers busy for days!

A client I work closely with in the Financial Industry here in London, UK, was eager to find different use cases for these new filters. Email deliverability is always a hot topic for them. With marketers around the world, they very much leverage Eloqua's decentralised flexibility but put in monitoring tools (proactive and reactive) to keep tabs on the health of the global marketing efforts, centrally.

Here was ONE way they could leverage these filters to be more on top of issues of email deliverability or subscription health by understanding exactly where any issues (such as a high number of bouncebacks) were taking place.

(1) Show me my Data! Building a contact view

Create, or have your administrators create, a contact view, to isolate the field(s) of interest from all of your segmentation fields. See only what you want and need!



(2) Find me all my bouncebacks (or unsubscribes) in the last X days/months by Country... OR Geo region... OR etc.

Country, Geo.Region, Email Address Domain, Job Title (normalised I hope!), etc.

Simply create a new contact filter, with a single criteria 'Bounceback' (or Subscription) and set the time range for something practical, in the past 1 month.




(3) Build me my report!

Go to Reporting and search 'Field Completeness'. Find the report 'Contact Field Completeness by Contact Filter'.

Chose your filter, pick your view, and run!

Drill down on each of the major segments (e.g. Country, Email Domain, Region, etc.) to get the breakdown. Add these reports to a dashboard, or to an email update report!




Quick tip! Want to keep your finger on any hot leads turning cold? Copy your bounceback filter just created and add a contact segmentation field 'Lead Status' = HOT (or whatever your naming convention is) to find and be alerted instantly to any changes to email status of 'HOT' leads.

Separating your Marketing Database into Active/Inactive

Given the new advanced contact filters that were just released within Eloqua, here is a refresh of an older post on the topic of separating your active and inactive contacts. Thanks Chad Horenfeldt for the refresh:

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. You can create a filter and use Activity and Inactivity criteria that will tell you which contacts are not active. If you’re not sure where to start, check out the following article: “Contact Filters - Creating Contact Filters”. In your filter, choose the following criteria:

• Has been sent at least 3 email in the last 6 months
• Subscription Comparison: Contacts who are subscribed as of now
• Has not opened 1 email in the last 6 months
• Has not clicked on 1 email in the last 6 months
• Has not visited the website at least once in the last 6 months
• Has not submitted at least 1 form in the last 6 months

It should look like this:


The last step is to use advanced logic so it looks like the following:




Therefore, all active contacts are those that have been sent at least 1 email and have not unsubscribed and have not performed any activity.

With this segment 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. You could even set up Default Distribution Lists that would automatically suppress these contacts.

Depending on their level of disengagement, you can target them with special re-engagement offers (How To - Create an Automated Reengagement Program) 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.

Priority Mode - Perfect for Fast Follow-Up

Eloqua's Spring release had many interesting new capabilities in it, but among the most powerful is a new "mode" for processing your marketing automation programs that process leads from inbound forms that need to be followed up quickly.

Typical marketing automation programs in Eloqua use "Standard Mode" for processing. This mode means that every 15 minute cycle, each step in the program is processed, emails are sent, data is manipulated, contacts are updated, and then moved to the next step.

This works very well for situations where you are using a marketing automation program to send outbound campaigns, observe online behaviour, and then send another campaign a few days or weeks later. The time increment of 15 minutes per cycle presents no problem at all in this scenario.

However, for inbound leads, who have just submitted a web form, this is not the case. You often want to score them, cleanse and normalize data on them, and then route them to sales for follow-up very quickly. With each step adding time before the lead got to sales, this was a challenge.

Now, Priority Mode solves that problem. Marketing automation programs that are enabled in Priority Mode will run every contact in the program (up to 100 at a time) all the way through the program every time they run, and they will run every 5 minutes.



To enable a program to run in Priority Mode, simply select that as the mode you wish to run it in when you click "Enable Program" and are presented with the choice.

If you have existing programs that take hot leads from your web forms and pass them to sales, you may wish to revisit them and have them run in Priority Mode if it makes sense.

Note that only 100 contacts at at time will run through the program. If there are more than 100 contacts in the program, the remainder will be left for the next 5 minute increment. As this mode is mainly useful for quickly getting leads out to sales from web forms, this is usually more than sufficient (as most sales teams cannot process more than 100 leads every 5 minutes).

I look forward to hearing from you as you experiment with Priority Mode for your programs.

Company Level Lead Scoring - from 4Thought Marketing

Guest post from 4Thought Marketing's Mark LeVell. 4Thought Marketing has been a great "Expert in the field", having worked with Eloqua over a long period of time, and having developed Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and Facebook extensions for Eloqua, among other innovations.

In this post, Mark looks at the challenges and opportunities of company-level lead scoring.

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For many B2B companies, traditional Lead Scoring programs have a weakness in that they typically score on an individual (contact) basis, or sometimes a summed individual basis, but often fail to consider the broader and more complex corporate digital body language that can signify a valuable lead. Today we explore how more complex Lead Scoring methodologies on a company basis, can result in higher quality leads for the Salesforce.

Most Lead Scoring programs start with the premise that there are two ways to look at an individual prospect’s potential value: their Profile Fit (or explicit data) and their Engagement Score (or implicit data). Marketing organizations review the data available about a prospective customer that has been obtained in a variety of methods (form submissions, website visits, webinar attendance, etc.) and then ascribe different weighted values to each of the different data elements. Based on the aggregate value of the activities, a score is calculated which the Marketing team can then use to either pass the prospective customer to the Sales organization as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or continue to nurture through various marketing nurture campaigns.

Why Look at Company Level Lead Scoring
While this traditional approach to Lead Scoring does a very good job of determining if a contact has reached the threshold of MQL in a Business to Consumer (B2C) environment, it does not take into account the notion that in the Business to Business (B2B) environment, very often the value of a prospective lead is actually based on the activities of not one, but several individuals at the target company.

When scoring the potential value of a company as a lead, it is very valuable to look at all activities for all individuals at the company. As a good sales rep knows, different individuals at a company have different interests and different hot buttons. When a rep is reaching out to a prospect, she will target presentations to these people with a message unique to the role each person is playing in the buying cycle.

Similarly, when scoring leads, a Marketing organization would be wise to ascribe different values to different types of activities performed by people in different roles at the prospect organization. If each of these individuals were scored independently, not one of them might reach the MQL level. However, when scoring a complete organization, it is possible to rewrite the Lead Scoring program to view activities across different individuals and different activities, and arrive at a point where the sum truly is greater than the whole.

One quick example will show what we mean. Let’s assume the target market consists of Finance organizations looking for new accounting software. There are several key individuals involved in the buying process: the Finance Manager, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and the IT manager. While the CFO is the ultimate target, the Finance Manager is more likely to become involved early in the buying process. The IT manager will also be involved early in the decision process as well. If the Lead Scoring program ascribed a high value to a CFO title, and lesser value to a Manager level title, this company may linger in the nurturing stage, while the selling company waits for the CFO to visit the site and submit a form. However, if Company Lead Scoring is utilized, it would be possible for the prospect to achieve MQL if both the Finance Manager and the IT Manager do certain activities – where neither of them alone would have reached the MQL level. This would give the sales rep the ability to call on the CFO knowing that much of the early information gathering has already occurred.

Company Scoring PLUS Individual Scoring
Note also that company level lead scoring doesn’t necessarily obviate the need for individual lead scoring, but rather is often best used in addition to individual lead scoring. However the presence of company lead scoring should often cause a company to “raise the bar” for individual lead scores. This may result in fewer contacts passing through as leads, but more companies passing through, and more importantly all the leads passed to sales are now higher quality.

Company Level Lead Scoring is not simply the aggregation of individual lead scores, but rather a set of values ascribed across an organization such that the organization reaches MQL even when no individual would be worthy of that level.

The question then arises, what are the various methodologies to score at the company level, what situations do they each apply to, and how do they compare?

Definition of Terms
So that we can talk about company level lead scoring algorithms we first need to define the various components that may contribute to that. I’ve intentionally only given high level meanings to these labels, and not specific calculation methods because they will be calculated differently depending on the corporate sales model. We’ve added the following lead scoring fields that are similar to the existing Contact lead scoring fields, except that they are determined based on data gathered across the organization

Company Lead Score – Implicit: A measure of the Level of Engagement at the corporate level. This looks at implicit activities at all contacts in the organization.

Company Lead Score – Explicit: A measure of the Profile Fit at the corporate level. This examines demographic information captured about the organization as well as a composite of profile data for all contacts.

Company Lead Rating – Implicit: The weighted rating of the company based on the Level of Engagement score

Company Lead Rating – Explicit: The weighted rating of the company based on the Profile Fit score

Company Lead Rating - Combined: The final lead rating we will attribute to this company – similar to the Lead Rating for a contact, this value will determine if the lead is Marketing Qualified

Corporate Recency: The overall recency of activity within the corporation. Just as with scoring at the contact level recency of activity should also apply at the company level.

At the company level the calculation of recency becomes even more complicated than at the contact level, because recency in some way needs to be evaluated and weighted across multiple contacts. After all, companies don’t visit your website, contacts do. So calculating corporate recency must involve a calculation based on contact recency. And here again, we may choose to apply a weighting by title to which contacts affect recency the most.

We can also automatically apply recency at the company level if we apply it to the individual contact scores before they are rolled up to the company level. However, if we don’t apply recency in some way at the company level, then several contacts from a company that visited you three years ago could combine with a recent scale-tipping visit resulting in an MQL that really shouldn’t go to sales.

Simple Company Lead Scoring
Obviously, scoring at the company level is primarily for B2B situations and Company Lead Scoring can be as simple or as complex as necessary. Often simple is optimal. In a short sales cycle situation, anytime 3 or more people from a single company hit the website within the last 3 months we have an MQL. Done! This Lead Scoring program would simply calculate a Company Lead Score – Implicit and combine it with a Corporate Recency value to ascribe a Company Lead Rating – Combined value.

Another situation where Simple Company Lead Scoring is optimal might be selling services for heating or air conditioners. In this situation simply focusing on a few key titles related to “maintenance” might be best. This program would include values based on contact titles as well as Company Lead Score – ExplicitCompany Lead Score – Implicit to achieve a Company Lead Rating – Combined value.

Complex Company Lead Scoring
A good situation for Complex Company Level Scoring might be a complex sales environment that requires multiple high level purchasers. In that situation, looking for multiple high level titles over a longer period of time (6 months) might be appropriate. B2B doesn’t always mean company level scoring… however complex B2B sales processes would almost always benefit from Complex Company Lead Scoring. This Lead Scoring program might use each of the values defined above, looking at Company Lead Score – Implicit and Company Lead Score – Explicit to calculate ratings based on weighted criteria, including which pages were visited and which forms were submitted by different individuals in the company. After a critical level was reached across the target company, the Company Lead Rating – Combined value would achieve MQL status, and the lead would be passed to the sales team.

Conclusion
Developing a Company Lead Scoring program can bring tremendous advantages to an organization provided it is implemented in a well thought through manner. It requires knowledge of the target market as well as the activities that signal a qualified prospective company Lead. Moving from contact level Lead Scoring to Company Lead Scoring also requires a collaborative effort between the Marketing and Sales organizations and should be reviewed periodically to ensure highly qualified leads are being scored effectively.