Think Outside the Inbox: Expanding the functionality of Oracle Eloqua

Two things I really enjoy about my job are:

1) Working with the Oracle Eloqua platform allows for unrivaled flexibility. You can make Eloqua do things that no other marketing automation is capable of. This is great because it allows organizations to really use the platform as the central hub for all marketing activities.

2) I work with a diverse group of clients that cut across industries, product lines, and business practices. This means I get to hear from a lot of really smart marketers on any given day.

One of the things I’ve been hearing a lot as I talk with our clients is the desire to be multi-channel or omni-channel. Savvy marketers have realized that, while elaborate email campaigns are great, there’s more that can be done. How much more effective would your marketing efforts be if you were able to reach people through different mediums and throughout different points of their day? Wouldn’t that improve your chances of closing a deal? Fortunately, Oracle Eloqua can handle so much more than just emailing marketing. It supports integrations with third party applications, with ease. I’ve put together a list of tools that will help you think outside the inbox to enhance the functionality of Oracle Eloqua and improve the buyer experience.

Social Media: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook – you know what they are. Oracle Eloqua has great apps on their AppCloud that allow users to easily incorporate the use of social channels into their campaigns:
• Tweet Sender App
• Social Sharing for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+
• Social Sign On for form downloads

Direct Mail: What about sending an old fashioned piece of snail-mail to your contacts? When done in conjunction with a well-designed email campaign, direct mail can be really effective. PFLink has designed a great plugin for Oracle Eloqua that allows you to trigger direct mail directly from a campaign. You can even customize the mailer with field merges and PURL’s. It’s a modern way of going old school.

Text/SMS: Everyone is on his or her cell phones these days. Funny thing is, less-and-less time is spent using the phone as a phone. Personally, I dislike talking on the phone. I would much rather communicate via text message. Even if it takes twice as long to have a conversation, I prefer a text to a phone call 10 to 1. Twilio allows marketers to send contacts a SMS or MMS. Relationship One has a Twilio SMS Connector App which allows you to shoot your contacts a text while you are also reaching them in their inbox.

Telemarketing/Telequalification: As much as I dislike talking on the phone, sometimes a live conversation is called for. This is where telemarketing/telequalification comes in handy. Many organizations will keep this function in-house as part of the sales team. But, what if you don’t have an in-house team? How do you get the benefit of a massive staff of people to call on lukewarm prospects without hiring tons of inside sales and business development execs? You outsource it! A company that I like to refer marketing organizations to is called OppSource. OppSource doesn’t have an app or plugin that hooks into Oracle Eloqua, but there are other apps that can set them up to get your lead data onto their callers’ screens (e.g. using the SFTP Exporter app to transfer the data to a SFTP server for them to ingest).

Online Advertising: When you’re out browsing the web, there are ads everywhere. How do your ads stand out? Are they compelling enough to take a potential buyer away from whatever they were doing in the first place? Enter Bizo. Hyper-targeted ads to the needs and interests of the browsing buyer. You can create a system that allows you to utilize the robust segmentation functionality of Oracle Eloqua to deliver ads that mirror your email campaigns. So, if someone doesn’t engage with your email, they have a chance to be reached while online. The concept is so great that LinkedIn recognized it as the way of the future and recently bought Bizo.

Visual Storytelling: Emails, landing pages and websites are all great, but they often lack the core concept of guiding someone through a narrative. What if you could guide someone down a journey in a way that was compelling and interesting? What if you could show people only the small sections of a document or video that was relevant to them without having to slog through reams of irrelevant material? What if you could get data on every piece of content someone engaged with and where people are dropping off? LookBook designed a platform that allows you customize the content experience for your prospects and then drops all the data into Oracle Eloqua so you can further refine content, impact lead scoring, and create improved segmentation. It’s pretty slick.

Video: Video has become the go-to medium for people to consume content. Whether it’s a cute cat video, an online web series, or a 3-minute product demo, people love watching videos. Once you have your videos in hand, where are you going to put them so people can see them? YouTube might be great for that video you shot of your cat getting scared by the vacuum cleaner, but it may not be the best platform for your professional videos with all of the ads and other distractions. And, Google gets all your data while you get nothing. The folks at Vidyard have a solution. Host your videos within the Vidyard platform and get tons of data on what people are watching, where they are dropping off, how they are sharing the content, and a bunch more. This data can be fed back into Oracle Eloqua for use in segmentation, personalization, reporting, lead scoring, etc. You can even gate videos with forms at various places within the video. Vidyard is a dramatic improvement over YouTube for the modern marketer.

Web personalization: Customizing email and landing pages is easy with Oracle Eloqua. Between field merges, dynamic content, filters and segments, it’s never been easier to deliver a personalized email message. But what about your website? Get Smart Content has developed a killer product that allows you to dynamically change out the content on your website based on who people are or where they’re located. You create a segment in Oracle Eloqua and push that information over to Get Smart Content. Then, when someone visits your site and they’re in that segment, they get a specific viewing experience. Same website, different content based on who and where they are.

Webinar: Webinars have always been a great way for marketers to uncover new, interested prospects. There are a ton of webinar tools out there, but few of them are as easy to use, and integrate as well with Oracle Eloqua, as ReadyTalk. With Ready Talk, you get a mountain of data: registrants, attenders, view length, answers to follow-up questions, and a lot more. All of this is put into Oracle Eloqua so you can automate your entire webinar process – promote, host, and follow-up. You can also use the data to improve segmentation and influence lead score. It’s my favorite webinar platform out of all the ones I’ve used.

All of the tools on this list can be integrated with the Oracle Eloqua platform. Some I’ve used personally, others I hope to start using soon. All of them are pretty sweet. When you need to add functionality to Oracle Eloqua, start by checking out these tools. Then, if you need support in strategizing how to best incorporate them into your campaign, connect with us.