Why Delete Eloqua Contacts?
It’s a good idea to clean up your Eloqua contact database every so often. Over time, many contact records are created, and not all contacts are created equally. Oracle charges per contact, so deleting Eloqua contacts that you never use from your list is a good financial strategy.
There are several additional reasons to delete contacts, including:
- The law! Privacy regulations like the GDPR require companies to obtain consent before processing (read “storing”) data. If you don’t have consent in one form or another, you might be required by law to delete contact information.
- Hard bouncebacks waste space: Once a contact has been flagged as a hard bounceback, it only takes up space in your records. You’re much better off simply deleting it.
- Reduce Cost: A leaner contact list means reduced subscription costs.
- Deliverability score: Reaching out to long-inactive contacts increases your changes to get flagged as spam, resulting in a lower deliverability score and in ALL of your emails being less likely to reach their destination!
- Faster processing, better metrics: Removing inactive contacts will speed up processing times, improve your metrics (since you won’t be sending emails to uninterested contacts), and provide you and your management team with a better view of your pipeline.
- Remove SPAM and test records: Use segments to identify spam domains and test records and remove them automatically.
Deleting Eloqua Contacts
You can either delete your contacts manually, or implement an automated process. The manual approach requires continuous effort and monitoring, and of course, there will always be the chance of human error. Topliners has a detailed outline of the steps required for a manual approach.
On the other hand, automation presents a far simpler process. 4Thought Marketing created the Contact Deleter with Archive cloud app which removes unwanted contacts automatically in the background. Simply set it up, let it run, and watch your database clean itself up. This app gives you the upper hand to delete any part of your contact list based on criteria that you define. You can have different instances of the app running to deal with different groups of Contacts you wish to delete. Best of all, this app not only deletes the Contacts, but it also creates an archival backup on your SFTP server. Just remember to check your archived record periodically to make sure you don’t accidentally delete contacts you want to keep.
What About Related Custom Objects?
If you have custom objects related to contacts you’re deleting, these custom objects likely need to be deleted as well. Fortunately, 4Thought Marketing’s suite of Eloqua apps includes these solutions:
Why Archive Your Deleted Contacts?
If you ever require the deleted data for unforeseen situations, it’s always good to have an automatic backup system. This archive also ensures you can prevent legitimate contacts from being accidentally lost forever.
Clean Up Your Eloqua Contact List
It’s easy and cost-effective to get started with the 4Thought Marketing Contact Deleter app. After a simple installation process, this powerful tool can quietly run in the background to keep Eloqua clean.
Our Cloud Apps are available individually or in groups, and are simple to implement directly from within Oracle Eloqua. Find out more or get a demo and see for yourself.
