There are many reasons marketers, especially in the enterprise space, choose Oracle Eloqua as a marketing automation platform (MAP) for B2B marketing. It was one of the first MAPs founded in 1999, with a wide range of integrations with third-party platforms, and a strong reputation.
However, it’s also known to have a pretty steep initial learning curve. In order to help expedite and smooth out that process, and help even the most seasoned Eloqua users better understand the ins and out of the platform, we’ve compiled some expert tips and tricks to help increase your familiarity and timeliness while creating.
Identify Your Pain Points
Identifying your pain points is the first step in deciding which route is best to fix them. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this can be overlooked, which just makes a list of issues within a platform feel all the more overwhelming to tackle. In Eloqua, common pain points look like:
- Steps that are currently manual, that should be automated, like a thank you email after a form fill out (Create a multi-step campaign to aid this process.)
- Steps in which there are large lapses in time or have poor conversion rates from one step to the next.
- Any general areas where there can be an improvement to increase sales or strengthen customer engagement. Take a look at all technologies and teams involved in the process, and upgrade to a stronger third-party platform or communicate how other teams like Sales can help encourage customer engagement.
Target the exact pain point that is harming your creation process, and begin tackling it one step at a time, either by becoming extra familiar with that step, integrating with a third-party creation platform (like Stensul) or, most effectively, both.
Markku Alikoski, System Architect at ID BBN, recently put it this way in an Oracle user forum: “Build one form of each type first as ready as possible and test it properly. Set up validation and all processing steps needed. Once everything works and is approved by the client, then save the form as a template and use it to create language versions by modifying field labels and validation error messages.”
Segment Your Audience
As good email marketers know, it’s important to send messages to the right people by targeting your different audience demographics. Eloqua makes it easy for users to collect and utilize user data, understand their audience’s behavior patterns, and create refined email segments to ensure the right content is getting to the right people. As well as utilizing segments like job title or location, Eloqua allows creators to make segments based on a contact’s actions, like whether they’ve opened any email in the past three months or visited one of your landing pages.
Lock Object Positioning
When you’ve created objects or text in your emails that you know you want to remain in place, protect them from accidental erasure or erroneous editing by heading to Oracle Eloqua’s Editor Layout Tools — Tool Box icon > 4th Tab = Layout Tools > Position Area. Any locked object will then have to be unlocked to allow further edits, to ensure that any further edits are intentional. And while you’re in safety mode, go to Gear Icon > Permissions to ensure which users have access to viewing or editing your drafts.
Becoming proficient in Eloqua will take time and experience. To make things easier, and increase the speed and efficiency of your email creation process while you’re at it, we recommend using a creation platform in addition to Eloqua. To learn more about how you can create emails more easily in a platform that enforces all of your brand guidelines automatically, request a demo of the Stensul Email Creation Platform. We’ll be happy to show you how other marketing organizations in your industry leverage Stensul and Eloqua for maximum impact.
