The Evolution of Marketing Measurement

One of the panels at Eloqua Experience that was very much worth watching was the panel discussion between Paul Teshima, Eloqua's SVP of Customer Success, and three of the industry's top CMO's and marketing leaders - Chris Boorman of Informatica, Drew Clarke from Cognos/IBM, and Tom Miller from ADP.

Some great insights came out of this panel as they each showed how they are measured, how they measure their teams, how they build their marketing dashboards, and what they are doing about measuring new media and the effects of social media.

The conversation is divided into parts so you can skip to the section of most interest to you. I hope you enjoy the insights from these leaders as much as I did:

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 1: Paul Teshima introduces the panelists and the topic of the marketing metrics that matter and building the CMO dashboard.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 2: The four key elements of marketing analysis are introduced - Campaign ROI, Funnel Health, Strategic Segment Analysis, and Benchmarking - and a discussion on "How are you measured today?" starts.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 3: The question of "How do you measure your marketing effectiveness?" is discussed by the panel, and the three marketing leaders show their own dashboards (Chris Boorman and Drew Clarke)

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 4: (continuation) The question of "How do you measure your marketing effectiveness?" is discussed by the panel, and the three marketing leaders show their own dashboards (Drew Clarke)

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 5: (continuation) The question of "How do you measure your marketing effectiveness?" is discussed by the panel, and the three marketing leaders show their own dashboards (Tom Miller)

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 6: Open questions regarding percentage of pipeline that marketing is expected to contribute, and how data is maintained across the entire lifecycle of a lead in the marketing process.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 7: Open questions on measuring buzz from social media and its effect on search and SEO, as well as measuring brand equity vs revenue.

The Evolution of Marketing Measurement Part 8: Open questions on measuring influences of marketing in deals rather than just sourcing.

Building a Tweetboard - Social Media at a Live Event

(Another guest post from Mike MacFarlane, who may be better known as @eloquamike)

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

In the Eloqua community, we just celebrated our 2nd annual Eloqua Experience conference in San Francisco. It was an absolutely amazing event and one of the highlights was the conversation happening on Twitter.

In Steve’s previous post about creating social media buzz at an event, he mentioned something about our “Tweetboard” – a large screen showing a live stream of conversations happening on Twitter in relation to Eloqua Experience. We set this up primarily so that those who were at the conference could see that they was another conversation happening online.

Setting up a Tweetboard is really easy and can be by using a small snipit of code provided by a website called Hootsuite and Eloqua Hypersites (and maybe a little design instinct).

First, you need to create an account at http://www.hootsuite.com/. Once you have gone ahead and done that, you will be presented with a screen (that looks a lot like the popular tool TweetDeck). In the top right hand corner, there is a search button that you can use to enter in what key words or hashtags you want to search against:


(note that if you are querying multiple terms, you will need to use an “OR” statement)

Once you have setup your search query, you will want to create a “Saved Column”:


Once your column has been saved, you can generate some source code in which you can add to your blogs, website, etc. Simple select the “Embedd” button (which looks like <>):


You will then be presented with a screen that will give you options to help customize the look and feel of the feed:


Once you have all your setting in place, simply select “Grab Code” and copy and paste the generated source code and place onto your blog, website, etc.

In my case, I took the code and placed it into our Eloqua Hypersite. We wanted to add a little branding and messaging to it, so I create a header image to sit above the feed that had the Eloqua Experience logo, as well as instructions on how to joing the conversation. The end product looked like this (you can also still see it live here):

Cultural Translation and Data Management

There is always something interesting to learn when looking at marketing data. In looking at the raw data for the “Title” field within a client’s marketing database, we saw an interesting trend. The usual data was there; “VP of Marketing”, “Vice President of Sales”, “Dir. Finance”, etc, and it certainly made the need for inline data management obvious. However, there was another interesting trend that was more confusing. A reasonable portion of the fields contained values of “Mr”, “Mrs.”, “Herr”, or “Frau”.

Digging in to the data to see who it was that submitted this data, it became obvious that these were mainly from Europe. A quick chat with our European best practices team confirmed what we were beginning to suspect; the field on the landing page was asking for “Title”, and whereas in North America this is interpreted as “Job Title”, in Europe, it can just as easily be interpreted as “Salutation”.

Paying attention to data, by using reports like the Contact Group analysis dashboards can give you insights into problems, opportunities, and cultural differences before they are allowed to continue and become problematic. Data, in general, is often an overlooked, but critical area of any marketing dashboard strategy. Likewise, thinking about how questions might be misinterpreted in geographies, social groups, and industries outside of your own can allow you to find ways of phrasing questions, or approaches to marketing problems, that are more effective.

Many Ways to Win at Eloqua Experience

It’s exciting to be at Eloqua Experience 2009, and I can already feel the buzz in the air and am enjoying watching the conversations on Twitter under the #EE09 hashtag. Monday is the official start of pre-conference training which was filled to capacity. I’ve seen some of the new material, including some great sessions on marketing automation and social media, that are brand new and look well worth attending.

On Tuesday, the official conference starts, and not only is there a great agenda of content from today’s best marketers, but there is also a vibrant partner campground with each partner showcasing some of the incredible work they have done over the last few years. If that wasn’t reason enough to visit, many of these partners are also offering fun contests and competitions to give you a chance to win some fun prizes. A selection of the contests I have heard about include:

DemandGen Bingo

DemandGen is running a game of Bingo, where “callers” announce, via SMS, Eloqua or partner staff to find and identify. Each person to sign up gets a unique Bingo card, and the first person to create a line or a diagonal wins a prize.

Not only is it a fun contest, but it is all run on the Eloqua platform, so you’ll have to ask the DemandGen team how it was built.

Learn more here:

http://home.demandgen.com/forms/bingo

Astadia RockStar Contest

You don’t have to be in the RockStar track to participate, just drop by the Astadia booth and try your hand at RockBand for a chance to win.

While you’re there, be sure to chat with the Astadia team, as they have an incredible breadth of experience in creating unique marketing campaigns and tackling some complex marketing operations challenges.

Learn more here:

http://app.en25.com/e/es.aspx?s=362&e=dc3bceaa-e37a-4161-92e2-4a71d8be4ac0




Pedowitz Group SWEETStakes

Built on their SWEET platform, the Pedowitz group is holding a SWEETstakes. Enter to win, and at the same time learn about what the SWEET platform can do for you in terms of integrating social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn into your Eloqua Marketing Automation.

Details on the contest are a bit scarce at this point, so you'll have to ask the Pedowitz team what you can expect. While you're doing so, be sure to ask them about the campaigns they have run using social media.

Text 37619 EE youremail@yourcompany.com in order to play

Learn more here:

http://www.22sweet.com/

and of course...

Capture the Experience

As mentioned last week, Eloqua is hosting a Capture the Experience contest where you can win a Kindle just by capturing your perspectives on the conference. Upload your thoughts, pictures, or videos to the Eloqua Facebook page and you could win a Kindle.

The more the community "Likes" your pictures, the better a chance you have, so get them up early so they can be shared and found.

The winner will be announced on the last day of the conference.

I'm not going to close out by saying that "we all Win by learning" or anything like that, as that is just a touch cheezy, but I am definitely looking forward to seeing everyone at Eloqua Experience over the next three days. Have a great time, and don't hesitate to ask anyone at Eloqua if there is anything we can do to make your experience better.

If I've missed any contests, promotions, or interesting activities that are happening in the campground, please accept my apologies, and please add them to the comments below so everyone knows where to find them.

Custom Activity Tasks in CRM Integration

Guest post by Mike MacFarlane





Recently, Steve wrote about the various options for marketing automation/CRM integration – the integration between marketing and sales data. This got me thinking about how we at Eloqua use our integration capabilities with various CRM systems to help enable our sales team by passing over relevant, actionable information that we as a marketing organization can report on. One of the things we take a lot of advantage of are "custom activity tasks" that I can configure to do, or write, anything I need into Salesforce.com, our CRM system.

A while back, I wrote about setting up your Social Media GPS – showing a salesperson if a visit to your website (or Eloqua tracked page) was a result of click through from various social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. This process was built on Eloqua’s ability for a marketer to create a simple activity task that fires over to the CRM once the activity occurs. This has been a great win for us at Eloqua, as we can now report and track social media activity within our CRM system in combination with what we are already reporting on in Eloqua (check out how to track Inbound Referrals in a past Artisan post). But this process can be used for many other functions in relation to what activities/action someone takes.

At Eloqua, we use this process in combination with our Lead Scoring program. Whenever someone is fed into our scoring program (either through a form submission or a website visit), they are scored and we will automatically create a task that is assigned to the appropriate salesperson that contains all the scoring details and explicit information.

To access the often called “Integration Tab” in Eloqua, simply click “Setup/Integration”


For the sake of keeping this brief and to the point, I am purposely by-passing a few steps here, but you can find all the documentation you need to do this within Eloqua’s Customer Central.

Simply select if you want to create/update an object in your CRM, then select the object you want to use (note that if you are “creating” an record within an object in your CRM and you want to update that record later on from Eloqua, you will want to store the CRM ID within a dedicated Eloqua contact field):


Next, you will need to choose which fields from your Eloqua database you would like to use to populate fields within the task record in your CRM. Notice that the mappings screen is broken out into two sections: the left hand side are the fields that reside on the object in the CRM – the fields on the right are the fields that exist in your Eloqua database. Simply drag the Eloqua field you would like to use and drop it into the object field on the left hand side. This screen will also highlight fields that are “required” in your CRM (if you have fields that are required to create a record in an object) and alert you if you have not mapped values to those fields.


If you have done this successfully, you will see the Eloqua field name show up in red and in italics:



Another option that you have is to hardcode values into specific fields OR you can combine hardcoded values with Eloqua fields. A really good example of this would be in the Subject line of the task (this is what the salesperson would see initially when they receive the task). In this example, I want to make it obvious to the salesperson that this task is related to lead scoring, so I am going to construct my subject line to read “FIRST NAME LAST NAME just went through our scoring program”. Here is how it would look in the field mapping screen:


So when this call fires to the CRM, the task will pre-populate with the first and last name of the person that just went through the lead scoring program.

Once I have completed my mappings, I can then use the built in External Call tester which allows you to test the call you just made before you decide to push it live. Eloqua will show you the data that exists in the object before the call fires and what data exists after the call fires.

Once you are fully satisfied with how your new External call works, you can add it into Program Builder as an Integration Action to fire when someone hits that specific program step.

Capture the "Experience" and Win!

Next week we’re celebrating marketing excellence worldwide at Eloqua Experience, where the world’s best marketers will come together in San Francisco to share their experiences and discuss the future of marketing. Great content for both rising stars and rock stars will be presented by experts in the field, and the learning opportunities will be further enhanced with training on the first day.

But, the point of it all is the “Experience” itself. Talking with other marketers, exchanging ideas, challenging assumptions, borrowing approaches, and making new connections. We want you to share your experiences so everyone can get a feel for the event, so we are launching a “Capture the Experience” contest to add some encouragement to share.

Take pictures, shoot some video, or write about your Experience, and you can win a Kindle. All you have to do is share your pictures, videos, or posts on the Eloqua Facebook page and you are automatically entered to win. Judging and winner announcement will happen on the final day, but the more that the community likes the Experience you have captured, the more likely you are to win, so take your photos, shoot your videos, and get them onto Facebook early.

Follow along on the Twitter hashtag of #EE09 to see the Experience captured from the perspectives of everyone else at the event.

The contest is open to clients, partners, and industry analysts - anyone but Eloqua employees - so be sure to bring your cameras to the event.

We look forward to sharing a great Experience with you!

Making your Email Content Searchable

Success in natural search optimization has a lot to do with the quality and frequency of the unique content you publish. As marketers, we often spend significant effort creating content that goes into emails, the landing pages they drive people to, and the marketing assets that these lead to, and we are not left with as much time as we would like to create content for blogs and other online properties that are searchable.

However, this does not have to be the situation. With Eloqua, it is very easy to repurpose any of your email content to make it publishable and discoverable by search engines. (see Eloqua's own feed of interesting content for an example)

The first step is to create an RSS feed that you will publish your content into. In the communication area, under Communicate-> Feeds, create a new RSS feed, and call it something like “Marketing Events and Promotions”. This is where we will keep a running feed of all the marketing content that would be interesting for people to discover in a search. Be sure to select that this is an internal feed (a feed that his hosted within Eloqua) rather than capturing an external feed (such as from a Blog's RSS Feed as we talked about previously).

With this feed created, but empty, our next step is to feed content into it. We are creating a lot of content in email, but this content does not get found by Google as it does not generally end up hosted on the Internet in a way that it is linked to and discovered by Google. We’re going to change that by generating a publicly available feed of email content that might be interesting.

For each email that is interesting and non-promotional; new whitepapers, notices of events and webinars, thought leadership articles, or case studies, the email that you use to announce it can be added to the RSS feed we have just created. To do this, from the email editor, select Publish to Fee from the Content menu. Select the RSS feed you just created, make sure the title and description are accurate (it will default to the title and description from your email) and click Publish.

Now, the email is linked into the RSS feed. The feed will show the title and description of the email, and the link will guide the user to a hosted landing page that is the exact content of your email. The feed itself can be very useful for internal constituents, like your sales team, who are interested in knowing what marketing communications are happening. Adding the feed to a web desktop such as iGoogle, or an RSS feed reader, gives a very quick and easy way to stay on top of the communications that are happening.

However, this feed can be used to create a web friendly, hosted portal that highlights the events and promotions your marketing team is running, and makes them all immediately searchable by Google. Simply build a landing page on an Eloqua hypersite, and insert the RSS feed into it. By adding a style to the feed, and some creative around the feed, you can create a more accurately branded experience. Make sure that this page is linked to from somewhere, such as your main web site, so that it can be found by the search engines, and all the content within it will be found by them.

Now, each email that you send out can be dropped into the RSS feed and will appear on your landing page without any extra work on your behalf. You gain the search benefits of creating a rich, consistent flow of content, without having to duplicate effort or write any new material. Of course the more interesting and non-promotional your material is, the more likely it is to have other people find it interesting and link to it, which further increases its search friendliness.

When the article in the feed is clicked on, or crawled by Google, the full content of your email shows up, cleanly formatted and fully searchable by Google:

Social CRM meets Marketing Automation

Much of our conversation around marketing automation tends to focus on the new revenue side of the business. Understanding digital body language allows us to understand which prospects are ready to buy, and which need to be further nurtured. However, the same concepts apply to the understanding of existing customers.

Understanding which customers are engaged with your knowledge portal and online community in order to learn more, which are struggling, and which are advocates allows you to use similar principles in order to better guide all of your customers towards success and ultimately renewal. I wrote recently about the ideas behind renewal marketing and social CRM, and the opportunity that it provides us to focus on maximizing customer satisfaction.

Since that time, I’ve had a number of conversations with the folks at Helpstream (who power our Customer Central online community), and we have a strong collaboration in the works. Recently, the Helpstream team announced the ability to integrate marketing and social CRM by adding Eloqua tracking to any pages (or all pages) within a Helpstream-power portal that you would like.

By doing this, activities within the social CRM community can be used as part of your lead nurturing strategies to guide your communication based on what level of engagement an individual has, or as part of lead scoring algorithms for looking at renewal or upsell.

If you have both Eloqua and Helpstream, it is worth ensuring that you are receiving the insights into your customers’ engagement with your social CRM system by integrating Eloqua scripts into the portal.

Lead Scoring, Update Rules, and Comparisons

As you get deep into lead scoring and begin to implement some of the lead scoring best practices, you might run into situations where you need to make a comparison. For example, if you have an existing lead score, and want to re-score that lead when they visit your website again, but you only want to keep the highest score, you need to be able to compare a new lead score against an old lead score.

To do this in Eloqua is quite easy, and leverages the ability for update rules to perform basic mathematical functions. (If you haven't looked at update rules in a while, it's worth having another look as both the capabilities and the user interface have been enhanced; drag and drop ordering and new update actions)

If, for example, you want to see if a new lead score is greater or less than an old lead score, you would create a field called "Lead Score (New)" for the new lead score and "Lead Score (Delta)" for the difference between "Lead Score (New)" and "Lead Score".

With those fields in place, create an update rule to find the difference. Select "Lead Score (Delta)" as the field to update, and then for the update action, select "Numeric Field Calculation".

Note that the contact field types MUST be numeric for this option to exist, as this will be working with the fields as numbers.

When you have selected that update action, you will then need to select the fields to operate on, and the operation to perform. To find the difference between the new and the existing lead score, select "Lead Score (New)" minus "Lead Score".

That's all you need to do, and when this update rule is run (usually in a marketing automation program), it will calculate the difference for you.

This delta value can then be read by a decision rule to see if the new score is higher (>0) or lower (<0)>

Easily Offending Most of the World - Data Validation Errors

I'm a huge fan of clean data, anyone who has read this blog for long knows that. However, clean data can never trump customer experience. Many times, simple tactics that you use to manage your incoming data can have large and unintended consequences.

The example that prompted this post was a Zip Code validator on a web form. The form did not specify country, and it was for the download of a whitepaper, so it was not something that seemed likely to be restricted to only viewers from the United States. However, the Zip Code field had a validation javascript on it, and required a Zip Code that was correct according to US standards.

I'm from Canada, and we have Postal Codes that use numbers and letters in a A9A 9A9 format, so clearly this did not pass the test, and I received an error alert. I dashed off a quick note to the site owner, and then filled in the only Zip Code I have top of mind - 90210.

This is an interesting example, as it highlights a mis-match between the user experience on that web form, and the quality of the data. Bringing the data management in house into an inline data management process like a contact washing machine is usually the best bet, while minimizing the burden placed on web form visitors. For address information, using address validation to balance the user experience can often be better than restrictive forms.

In thinking about the experience of your landing page visitors, be sure to balance the need for quality data with the need to deliver a great experience to your visitors.

Prospect Profiler - As an AutoHotKey Shortcut

In the second post in a two-part series on Prospect Profiler, one of our keys to sales enablement, Ben McPhee continues exploring the topic he introduced in his first post; Prospect Profiler as a stand-alone. This time, Profiler is accessed as a AutoHotKey shortcut from within your email client.

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

Option 2: Take a shortcut from your email client!


This is REALLY cool. We don’t officially support or have any direct integration with this software, but if you run AutoHotkey®, you can easily jump from your email client (e.g., Outlook) straight to a contact’s Prospect Profiler record with just the press of a few buttons.

Click the following link to download the custom AutoHotkey script that we wrote: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=58ec0aca75258a2ac79b87b207592a1ce04e75f6e8ebb871

When you are prompted, Save the file to your desktop. Once it is saved to your desktop, select it and drag it into your Start Menu > All Programs > Startup. Drop the file there so that the file runs every time you start up your computer. Having this script run on startup allows you to always use a hotkey combination to view a Prospect Profiler record for a contact.


Once the script has been ‘installed’ successfully, the next time you start up Windows, you should see an AutoHotkey icon appear in your toolbar:


Now all you have to do is the following:

1. Select an email address from your email client (make sure you select the entire email address, rather than the address book display name):


2. Copy the address: CTRL + C
3. CTRL + SHIFT + Z: This runs the AutoHotkey script
4. Select “Yes” to the prompt confirming that you want to look up the activity for the contact with the email address you copied


Your internet browser will now automatically load up with a view of the Prospect Profiler for the contact you identified! Going forward, all you need to do is copy an email address and then hit the hotkey combination above and you can load up an activity overview of your lead or contact in seconds.


Again, if you have not already logged into the Eloqua application or stored your user credentials with the Profiler, you will be prompted to enter your company name (no spaces), your Eloqua user name and your Eloqua user password. Make sure you select the “Remember Me” option, then log in.





Note: If your user account does not have access to Prospect Profiler (it is an add-on product offering), you will get a message to this effect. Contact your CSM if you are interested in Prospect Profiler.

Prospect Profiler - without a CRM System

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.

In this post, Ben revisits Prospect Profiler, and looks at ways in which it can be used in stand-alone manner, without relying on being embedded in a CRM system as it normally is.

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

No CRM system? No problem. While Eloqua’s Prospect Profiler is most effective in the context of a Lead or Contact record, we recognize that context may not always be ideal or available. There will be instances in which sales reps would like to simply see a contact’s activity without having to navigate through a CRM system and other instances where reps have not been provided a CRM tool at all.

Focused on making both marketing and sales as successful as possible in as many scenarios as possible, we want to let you know about some alternate routes/shortcuts your reps can take to get to Prospect Profiler and acquire a more in depth understanding of their prospect’s interests and behaviors.


Option 1: Just get on the internet and go to it!

Go to http://prospectprofiler.eloqua.com/
If you have not already logged into the Eloqua application or stored your user credentials with the Profiler, you will be prompted to enter your company name (no spaces), your Eloqua user name and your Eloqua user password. Make sure you select the “Remember Me” option, then log in.

You will then be presented with a search bar – going forward, when you go to the URL above, you will be automatically taken to this search interface. Type in the email address of the contact whose profile you wish to view (notice that once you type in the ‘@’ symbol you’ll get a list of possible contacts from which to choose), then hit Search.


The page will then load that contact’s profile with all the standard features of the Prospect Profiler – hover-overs, drilldowns, previews, etc.

Option 1B. If you’re a Mac user, set up a dashboard

In case you’re a Mac user, we thought we’d point out a quick and easy trick so that you can have quicker access to the great information available in Prospect Profiler.

Open Safari and navigate to http://prospectprofiler.eloqua.com/

Login to the profiler using your Eloqua login info (make sure you select the “Remember Me” option)

Choose "File" and "Open in Dashboard..."



A purple bar will drop down from the top of your browser window - click on the "Add" button at the right end of that purple bar.

You'll now see prospect profiler living on your OS X dashboard making it instantly accessible at the click of a button (or swipe of your mouse if you're using expose)


Styling Tip: You can change the style of the dashboard frame by clicking on the small "info" button located in the bottom right corner of the Profiler dashboard.

With these techniques, you can make Prospect Profiler, and the insights it provides into prospect buying behaviour, available anywhere, without needing the context of a CRM system.

Note: If your user account does not have access to Prospect Profiler, you will get a message to this effect. Contact your CSM if you are interested in Prospect Profiler.

Eloqua Experience: Highlights from 2008 - Paul Rosien, Greg Forrest, Concur

The third in our series of highlights from last year’s Eloqua Experience comes from Paul Rosien and Greg Forrest at Concur. Concur is the leader in employee spend management software, and is also the home of one of the most innovative marketing teams we have the pleasure of working with.

In the campaign that was highlighted in their presentation, an entertaining viral B2B marketing campaign drove lots of interest and engagement, while a carefully structured free trial and nurture campaign moved business travelers and their organizations through to being buyers.

At Eloqua Experience 2009, you’ll have a chance to connect with marketers like Paul and Greg, and see campaigns like theirs highlighted in the Markies Gala on Tuesday night. The Concur campaign might fit into a few of the 12 categories, including “Most Creative Marketing Campaign”, “Social Media Marketing Award”, and the “Best Lead Nurturing Program Award”.

I hope you enjoy their presentation – a highlight of the 2008 event

Some highlights from the presentation if you want to use the “Chapters” tab to skip ahead (once the audio has loaded):


1:25 Key Challenges
Needed a unique experience that would bridge the gap between the “end user” – the business traveler – and the buyer, a C-level executive.

3:28 Deployment
Concur created an ad campaign that used the viral element of true tales of business travel to engage with the audience and drive traffic

4:40 Ad Campaign
Some very bold creative that highlighted the crazy stories shared by business travelers – especially for the C-level executives who were targeted

6:01 Microsite
The True Tales of Business Travel microsite was both where the stories were shared, rated, and commented on, and the point to where all the Ad campaigns drove people. Great example of community-generated content in a B2B marketing scenario.

10:40 Tying it Together with a Free Trial
This was the main driver that transitioned people into the lead funnel. A free trial was heavily promoted alongside the Stories campaign in order to draw in the business travelers who were intrigued by the stories

12:54 Mature Campaign
Combining tips and tricks with awareness of whether the individual had logged in and used the product, a maturation and nurturing campaign guided the user and showed value that could be passed to the buying executive in the trial user’s organization.

15:50 Results
The Concur team got some great results out of this campaign – over 106,000 stories were viewed, and 900 people signed up for the trial edition and passed on to the sales team.


Remember, Eloqua Experience is in San Francisco on Nov 2nd - 4th, 2009, and is the event of the year for any marketer focused on marketing automation and demand generation. Hope to see you there.

Eloqua Experience: Highlights from 2008 - Nic Zangre, Aquent

Continuing on the theme of Eloqua Experience 2009 that we started recently, I wanted to continue with a highlight presentation from Eloqua Experience 2008 that remains very relevant today. Nic Zangre from Aquent would clearly be in the theme of this year’s “Rock Star” track (see the agenda for more details) with his detailed presentation on data management and advanced approaches to sales and marketing alignment.

If you’ve taken Sales and Marketing Alignment to a new level, as Nic did, don’t be shy about submitting it for consideration for an award at the Markies Gala on Tuesday night, where the industry’s best marketers will be celebrated in 12 categories. An entire category is dedicated to Sales and Marketing Alignment, as it is such an important topic. Remember, the deadline is fast approaching on Friday, October 2nd so you’ll want to submit soon.

In this presentation, Nic draws on his experience at both Fast Search and Aquent, in order to provide a very deep and hands-on presentation about data management, and the nuts and bolts of lead hand-off to sales:



Some highlights from the presentation if you want to use the “Chapters” tab to skip ahead (once the audio has loaded):

4:45 The CRM Engine
Nic’s perspective on the lifecycle of lead flow from marketing to sales, and the feedback to marketing in terms of successful results and the levers available to you.

7:15 Symptoms of Engine Trouble
How does data quality affect marketing and sales results
Can you identify segments and territories effectively?

13:40 Right Tools
Looking at which Eloqua tools work for which data challenge you might be having
- Decision rules
- Contact Groups and Filters
- Deduplication Rules
- Data Tools (validation, update, match rules)
- Multiple Program Feeders


16:20 Garbage In, Garbage Out
Nic looks at dealing with duplicated data, and managing a clean database from that point forward through data validation

20:59 Salesforce.com Dashboards
Aaron Rothschild looks at some sales dashboards that can be based on marketing activity once a good marketing process is in place.

27:10 Sales Needs
Nic explores territory distribution and advanced lead routing in order to handle lead allocation by geographic territory, especially in cases where territories or sales staff have changed

28:35 CRM Update Program (through to CRM Cleanup at 40:00)
A deep dive into the way that leads are identified, matched to territories, routed, and sent over to Salesforce.com. This is a very interesting and deep section that looks at a very robust process for lead handoff and management. If you are looking at advancing how you think about sales and marketing alignment, this is a great section to watch in full.

41:55 Results
Some very compelling, real, and clearly measured results from Nic’s work.



Remember, Eloqua Experience is in San Francisco on Nov 2nd - 4th, 2009, and is the event of the year for any marketer focused on marketing automation and demand generation. Hope to see you there.

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.