5 Considerations When Integrating Oracle Eloqua With Your CRM

Oracle Eloqua is a robust tool for orchestrating your digital marketing activities. The platform’s power is amplified when you have it integrated with your CRM data. Sales data can influence marketing decisions, and marketing data helps the sales team do their jobs better. Eloqua natively integrates with some of the most popular CRM systems, including Salesforce, Oracle Sales Cloud, and Microsoft Dynamics. With Relationship One’s Netsuite Connector app, integrating with Netsuite is just as easy.

This might seem like a no-brainer, right? Of course, you want your CRM and marketing automation platforms integrated! Normally, yes, but it’s not always that simple. Maybe you have some business reasons why you don’t want to integrate. Maybe you don’t have a standard integration, so making the two talk is not a simple click. Maybe you can’t get approval. Maybe you are brand new to Oracle Eloqua, and you don’t know what integration looks like. Companies have many good reasons for not integrating their CRM and marketing automation platforms. As you think about integrating Oracle Eloqua with a CRM, consider these five things:

1. Bi-directional vs. Uni-directional

How do you want your data to flow? Typically, we recommend a full bi-directional integration. This allows both platforms to have data that’s helpful for each platform’s users to see and use. For example, marketers may want to see opportunity data in Oracle Eloqua to send a welcome campaign to contacts associated with deals that have closed recently, or to exclude contacts related to lost opportunities. Another example is if a contact’s first name gets updated in CRM, and Oracle Eloqua should be aware of the updated data. On the flip side, CRM users (sales) want to have visibility of the new leads and engagement activity that marketing is generating from all of that great nurturing.

Yet, sometimes, a bi-directional integration isn’t possible. You might have corporate policies prohibiting Oracle Eloqua from writing to your CRM. You might have spent a lot of time cleaning up your marketing data, and since you know your CRM data is very messy, you don’t want to pollute the work you’ve done by allowing your CRM to write to Oracle Eloqua. Whatever the reason, Oracle Eloqua is flexible enough to accommodate a uni-directional integration. What we see most often for uni-directional integrations is CRM writing data to Oracle Eloqua, but not the converse. However, we have some clients who push from Oracle Eloqua to CRM. Either way, Oracle Eloqua is designed to give you the flexibility you need for your integration needs. If those business needs change down the road, it’s not complicated to switch things up.

2. Standard Integration

Oracle Eloqua has prebuilt connections and/or apps for Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics (on premise or cloud versions), and Oracle Sales Cloud.. These connection points are native tothe Oracle Eloqua platform. In addition, Relationship One offers the Netsuite Connector app that works as seamlessly as these prebuilt connections. Although there are nuances among the various platform integrations, they are generally the same.

Depending on whether you are using a native integration method or one of Eloqua’s new integration apps, Auto Synchs/Imports and External Calls/Actions between Oracle Eloqua and your CRM are used to update, Contact, Account, and Custom Object records in Eloqua. Since the connection is a part of the Oracle Eloqua platform, the ability to efficiently link the two systems is pretty straightforward. You might need a little help from someone who has done it before. Customers typically work with partners like us to ensure their integration is done accurately and tested thoroughly.

The nice thing about these standard integrations with Oracle Eloqua is flexibility. You choose the objects and fields that should and shouldn’t talk to each other, what data trumps what, and at what frequency the talking should occur. Not all marketing automation platforms give you this level of control around what data you’re pushing between systems. For more on that topic, see this document.

3. Non-standard Integration

This is where things can be tricky. What if you don’t have one of the CRMs from the standard list above? What if you want to put data from a homegrown database into Oracle Eloqua? What if you want to combine data from multiple data sources within Oracle Eloqua? 

Oracle Eloqua is flexible enough to handle any of these scenarios. You’ve got options.

Option #1 – Flat File Transfer

The simplest way to do an integration with a non-standard system is to set up a scheduled data export in the form of a .csv file that is pushed out to an SFTP server. Within Oracle Eloqua, you configure an importto grab the file and bring the data into the system. And on the flip side, Oracle Eloqua data can be exportedto an SFTP in the same manner for ingestion by your CRM.

There are limitations with this method. You may not be able to automate a file export from your non-standard system. You may also be limited to exporting the data once per day. But having data that’s a day old is better than having no data at all. For some, this might be all you need to get some sort of integration going when you have non-standard systems.

Option #2 – Use an ETL Tool to Create the Linkage
When you need to go beyond the simple flat file transfer, using an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool to link systems is a great option. By going this route, you open up the possibility of linking multiple data sources into Oracle Eloqua, creating bi-directional syncs, doing data transformation before the data gets loaded, and creating dramatically improved sync times. This method will require a technical resource that understands Eloqua’s API to help get everything set up, but you’ll get maximum flexibility. If you determine that you need to add additional data sources down the road, you can always expand the integration without having to start over from scratch.

4. Visibility

Where do you want your marketing data to go? Which sales representative should get which lead? What engagement activities should be shared with sales, and how will they use it? These are just some of the many questions to address when thinking about how to route data between the systems.

Oracle Eloqua gives you the flexibility to devise any amount of complexity with how data is routed, scored, triggered, and housed within CRM and Oracle Eloqua.

5. There’s Always List Uploads

At the end of the day, if you can’t find a way to do any sort of integration with CRM, there’s always straight-up list uploads. It’s not automated and complex, but it gets the job done. If this is where you’re at, don’t worry. Start there with a goal of moving to more automation. Give yourself a goal (ex: move to a flat file import by the end of the year) and make a plan for how you will move the organization to this point. Own it and champion the cause. The deeper the integration with CRM, the better your marketing efforts will become.

Each integration has to be treated uniquely and should be set up based on the business need. If you have questions about integrating a specific CRM or database, contact us at Relationship One.