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Eloqua is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, specifically referred to as a marketing automation platform. It offers a set of tools to manage scalable digital campaigns consisting of emails, landing pages, forms, and automated processes. Utilizing marketing automation software allows marketers to collect data and digital activity, sometimes referred to as digital body language. This information can then be used for campaign performance analysis. Additionally, marketing automation helps to reduce the time and effort spent on campaign execution.

Let’s say that you, as a marketer, have been tasked to send e-mails inviting prospects to an event your company is sponsoring. This event is four weeks away, and you would like to remind people if they do not respond to the first e-mail within a week before the event date. By using marketing automation, you are able to set up a work flow within a campaign, which would send the first e-mail at a scheduled date and the reminder e-mail at another scheduled date (to those prospects who do not respond to the first e-mail). This can be set up once, turned on, and left to perform the scheduled actions.

Ultimately, by leveraging the power of marketing automation, marketers gain more time to focus on their message and strategy.

This article will cover creating the components of a very simple e-mail campaign. The purpose of this campaign will be to send an e-mail to a group of contacts. We will build the campaign workflow, activate the campaign, and measure our results.

Let us take a closer look at the following two basic elements of our campaign:

  • Segment: This will be the target audience who will be receiving the e-mail

  • Email: This will contain the actual marketing content we are delivering

Because our campaign is very simple, and we know the two elements that will be used, it makes sense to build the elements first, and then build the campaign using them. With more complex campaigns, it can be helpful to design the work flow and add place holders for the assets to understand the overall design and scope of the campaign, before setting up the actual components themselves.

Navigation overview

We’ll start by logging into Eloqua by going to https://login.eloqua.com. This will redirect us to the login page, where you will need to enter your login credentials.

Before creating our email and segment, let us take some time to review the navigation within Eloqua. Once logged in, you will see a navigation bar across the top of the application. Each of the following five icons in the middle of the navigation bar can be used to move to different areas:

  1. Campaigns: This will open Launchpad to create a new campaign or open an existing campaign. Once a selection is made, the campaign editor will open.

  2. Assets: This has several subcategories. Emails, Landing Pages, and Forms are the primary digital assets you can build and manage in Eloqua. Each of the links in the navigation will bring you to Launchpad. Here, you can create, open, or upload new assets for Emails and Landing Pages. You can create, open, or integrate website forms for Forms from Launchpad. After any of these selections are made, you will be taken to the respective editors in Eloqua. Component Library contains separate components that can be used within the primary digital assets. The examples include images or blocks of HTML content that can be used across several assets.

  3. Contacts: This has several subcategories as well. Contacts, Accounts, and Custom Objects, all take you to sections where you can view and manage the respective records in the system. Lead Scoring opens Launchpad that will take you to the lead scoring editor. Segments also open Launchpad, but it will take you to the segment editor. Data Tools and Shared Library offer additional tools and mechanisms to manage contacts, accounts, and custom objects.

  4. Insight: This opens Eloqua’s reporting engine in a separate window. This is where the data inside the system can be analyzed.

  5. Setup: This takes you to the area where you can perform system administration tasks. Here, the fields for objects can be managed, integration with your customer relationship management (CRM) system can be con figured, and many other configurations for Eloqua can be set.

The buttons on the right of the navigation bar allow you to search, access support resources and account information, and log out of the system respectively.

On clicking on the Eloqua icon on the left-hand side of the navigation bar, you will always be taken to the My Eloqua page, which has various containers of links for quick access to different specific assets, campaigns, and reports.

Campaign overview

Eloqua campaigns serve two purposes. Campaigns can provide reporting on the assets belonging to them and campaigns can be used to create work flows for members that are added to them. For example, a campaign can do the following tasks:

  1. Send an e-mail.

  2. Identify whether an e-mail was clicked through.

  3. Send an exclusive offer if the first e-mail was clicked through on a landing page that may have been visited due to the first e-mail or through another source, such as an offline advertisement.

The digital assets that a campaign may include are e-mails, forms, and landing pages. Because landing pages hosted outside of Eloqua cannot be included as assets for campaigns, it is strongly recommended that you host your landing pages in Eloqua. This increases the data captured and available for campaign analysis.

In addition to controlling a workflow, campaigns can also be used to capture and report on metrics. Assuming there is one e-mail, one landing page, one form, and one offline advertisement as part of a campaign, we can carry out the following tasks:

  • Report on e-mail activity, landing page activity, and form submissions

  • We can also potentially report on metrics for the offline advertisement

Summary

In this article, we set up a very basic digital campaign. We created an e-mail using Eloqua’s WYSIWYG editor.

Resources for Article:

Packt

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