Campaign Integration: Configuration Options and Key Considerations

Campaign integration is the sending and receiving of campaign information between Oracle Eloqua and your CRM. Often confused with Closed Loop Reporting (“CLR”), campaign integration can have its own configuration with or without full CLR.  With a few updates to your Oracle Eloqua instance it’s fairly quick and simple to allow Oracle Eloqua to create and update campaigns, send campaign membership to your CRM and pull in campaign information from your CRM. The real key is understanding your campaign membership options and choosing the right one(s) to suit your business needs.

Let’s begin with an overview of the various ways to send campaign membership from Eloqua over to CRM:

• Native Integration – Eloqua detects campaign responses based on defined response activities and creates a corresponding member response in the CRM campaign.
• Manual Campaign Association – Using values assigned to Oracle Eloqua contact fields, external calls associate CRM leads and contacts to a CRM campaign.
• Salesforce Campaign Association App – This app is added as a step on the Campaign Canvas and works for the Salesforce CRM only. It is configured to associate the Oracle Eloqua contact’s corresponding SFDC lead and/or contact with an SFDC campaign.
• Oracle Sales Cloud Integration App – This app is added as a step on the Campaign Canvas and works for the Oracle Sales Cloud CRM only. It is configured to associate the Oracle Eloqua contact’s corresponding CRM lead and/or contact with a CRM campaign.

Native Integration

Oracle Eloqua evaluates contact activities performed on campaign assets. If an activity is defined as a response in Oracle Eloqua, it creates a member in the corresponding CRM campaign. These activities and corresponding CRM campaign member settings are configured in Response Rules. To view and manage Response Rules, click the gear button on the right-hand side of the Oracle Eloqua navigation menu. In the lower left quadrant, click Response Rules.

In this area, you can:

• Identify Oracle Eloqua activities and External Activities that should be considered responses to Oracle Eloqua campaigns
• Define the CRM campaign member status associated with each activity
• Define whether an activity should be considered a campaign response in CRM

If Oracle Eloqua detects an activity listed as a Response Rule, that contact is identified as responding to the Oracle Eloqua campaign in which the activity was performed and a campaign response internal event is created and stored.

Oracle Eloqua uses external calls to create a member in the corresponding CRM campaign. To trigger these external calls, the Oracle Eloqua contact record must pass through the “briefcase step” in Program Builder. This step is generally included in a dedicated campaign update program appended to the main CRM integration program.

The member’s status is determined by the selection made in the Oracle Eloqua Response Rules. If a contact completes multiple response activities in the same campaign, Oracle Eloqua will overwrite a lower-priority response with a higher-priority response. For example, an external activity of “Event Attended” is typically a higher priority than “Form Submitted.”

There are several “essentials” to help ensure the campaign response is generated correctly:

• “Sync to CRM” box checked on canvas
• Presence of a valid CRM ID on canvas
• Response rule assets on the canvas
• Response happening within the Reporting Start on and Ends On date (+12 months)

Oracle Eloqua retains these internal event responses independently, so every response activity performed by a contact will be used to create or update CRM campaign member. This ensures that no data is lost if a contact performs multiple activities in a short period. This also means if the lead does not yet exist in CRM, but successfully gets created at some point in the future, their previous campaign memberships will be sent over at the point they finally reach the briefcase step. It’s important to note that the campaign membership date in CRM defaults to a creation date of when the response is actually sent, so historical membership will not push through with the historical date the membership was captured. This can impact reporting based on campaign membership creation dates.

Manual Campaign Association

For activities that are not defined as Response Rules, data on the Oracle Eloqua contact record can be used to create campaign membership in CRM.

To accomplish this connection, the Oracle Eloqua contact record must have values in two fields. These fields can be populated via form submission, contact upload, or using update rules in the Oracle Eloqua system:

• Last CRM Campaign ID
• Last CRM Campaign Status

The values in those fields dictate the CRM campaign to which the record is associated, and the status of that campaign member.

Oracle Eloqua will use external calls to create a member in the corresponding CRM campaign. To trigger those external calls, the Oracle Eloqua contact record must pass through Program Builder. These calls are generally part of the main CRM integration program, or can be included in a program dedicated to campaign integration.

Since this information is maintained in contact record fields, Oracle Eloqua can only track one campaign at a time. The fields will be overwritten each time values are entered for new campaigns. This makes it possible for campaign information to be lost if a contact performs multiple response activities in a short period. This also means that any historical information on campaign responses will be lost if the campaign value is replaced before being sent to CRM.

Salesforce Campaign Association App

The Salesforce Campaign Association App leverages the Campaign Canvas to update Oracle Eloqua contact record fields and link them with CRM campaigns.

During initial configuration of the app, you can define how Oracle Eloqua contacts are associated to SFDC campaigns. These settings apply to all uses of the app across the Oracle Eloqua instance:

• Associate only the SFDC lead (if one exists)
• Associate only the SFDC contact (if one exists)
• Create two SFDC campaign members – associate both the SFDC lead and contact
• Create only one SFDC campaign member – if a lead exists, associate it; if not, the contact is associated to the campaign
• Create only one SFDC campaign member – if a contact exists, associate it; if not, the lead is associated to the campaign

The app uses the same underlying mechanism as Manual Campaign Association, updating fields on the Oracle Eloqua contact record and using those values to create the SFDC campaign member. However, since the contact record doesn’t have to pass through Program Builder to make the association, we’re more likely to capture all campaign responses. Also similar to manual association though, if the lead does not yet exist in SFDC, the “historical” campaign membership is lost that happens prior to

The app allows customization on a campaign-by-campaign basis – member status can be different for the same activity performed in different campaigns. It is also possible to associate records to different CRM campaigns within a single Oracle Eloqua campaign.

Oracle Sales Cloud Integration App

Similar to the native integration option, the response rules are configured and the Oracle Sales Cloud Integration App includes a campaign actions page where you can create actions to send campaign responses to Oracle Sales Cloud when a response is captured or changes.

What is a true “Response”

Integral to the native campaign membership option is how you define Response Rules. The most common examples of responses are form submissions, event registration and attendance, or other external activities. If you choose to include Email Clicks it is important to think about the impacts of this decision. Unfortunately, you can’t decide which specific clicks are campaign responses and which clicks should not result in campaign membership – it’s all or nothing – meaning clicks to your newsletter article, your call-to-action to register for a webcast and clicking the cancel link on your reminder to attend are all treated by Oracle Eloqua as campaign responses if clicks are defined in your response rules.

Sometimes I have seen clients define Email Sent as a response rule for the purposes of creating a “Sent Email” campaign membership in CRM for sales visibility. An often-unknown consequence of this is losing the ability to leverage the “Responded to Any Campaign” shared filter criteria.  Listing Email Sent in the response rules is essentially telling Oracle Eloqua every email sent is a campaign response (which it is not).

If sales insists on seeing Email Sends as a campaign membership response in CRM, consider using a campaign canvas-based app if available for your CRM to send the Email Sent campaign membership over after the first campaign email goes out and leverage the native integration for all your other types of responses like form submissions and event attendance. This gives you the best of both worlds!

How to decide what works best for your organization

The important thing to note is that you don’t have to choose just one – I have clients that are using more than one option to meet various specific scenarios. You will want to choose a primary method, but as you look to solution for more complex use cases sometimes a combination of approaches will be the best course of action.

When deciding between native integration and manual integration, it’s important to analyze how you define an MQL and a campaign response, and how you build your campaigns. As mentioned in the native campaign integration description, if the campaign is integrated where the “sync with CRM is checked” and the assets are on the canvas, ALL actions defined in the Response Rules can result in campaign membership creation. If I have 3 forms on my canvas and only one is considered MQL-generating or a campaign response, all the forms (including a cancellation form) can result in campaign membership creation.

It’s also important to remember that your options vary based on which CRM you are using.  With the transition away from Program Builder-based integrations to app-based integrations, this will change over time. Your Oracle Eloqua account director, your Oracle Eloqua partner or the Oracle Help Desk will be your best sources of confirming which options are available.

Sometimes custom is the route to success

We all love out-of-the-box, but every business and their needs are unique and often times the answer is some combination of the membership options and possibly even a custom object to save the day. Ultimately, if you can document clearly all the use cases and how you need campaigns and memberships created and sent, an Oracle Eloqua technical architect can help you determine the most effective and efficient route to take.

From what to think about when planning your integration to the key things to look for when reviewing your existing integration to campaign integration options in this post, we’ve covered the major areas related to your Oracle Eloqua integration.

What other questions do you have and what other integration topics are you interested in?  Please leave a comment below to suggest a future post topic or contact us.