Data quality is crucial for every organization. It affects almost every part of your marketing activities, from email deliverability and lead conversion to revenue generation. And you cannot accurately target and personalize your campaigns without complete and accurate data.  You can dramatically improve data quality by eliminating dirty data before it enters your system.

However, Eloqua marketers face many challenges using the built-in Eloqua list upload process:

1. Eloqua does not perform data validation for list uploads
2. If multiple marketers are importing data, the chance for poor data quality can increase
3. Multiple imports may be required for list uploads to fully update Eloqua

Let’s examine each of these issues in more detail.

No Validation of Incoming Data

Eloqua does not validate data as it’s imported into the system.  This means several things:

• Dirty data, which would optimally be kept completely out of the system, is potentially allowed in.
• Compliance laws like GDPR are not applied. It may be illegal to import some contacts. And these contacts are best kept out of Eloqua.
• Fixing dirty data is often easier while it’s still in a spreadsheet! And often mass changes are faster in Excel.
• After uploading dirty data, your integrations can quickly spread the bad data to other systems, or trigger unwanted data errors.

The Upload Wizard Cloud app from 4Thought Marketing solves all of these data import issues.  Any bad or non-compliant data can be stopped right at the point of entry, without slowing down importing of your good data.  And only contact records with bad data are “rejected” and provided to the marketer for further review.  As a result, they only need to check the data that needs correcting.

Multiple marketers importing without validation can result in very dirty data

For many organizations, multiple marketers perform data imports.  And often they are in different offices, geographic areas, and even time zones.  As a result, it’s even more important to systematically remove dirty data as part of the upload process.  The benefits include:

• Uniform application of validation rules by all team members regardless of location
• Protects from importing non-compliant data regardless of who performs the import
• It reduces management/oversight headaches. “You didn’t clean your list again, Joe!”

Remove the need for multiple uploads

With Eloqua, you may need to upload a file more than once.  For example: First to add the contacts to your system.  Second, associating those contacts to a marketing campaign.  And third, associating them to a custom object. Having to upload the same list multiple times is tedious and inefficient.

However, with the 4Thought Marketing Upload Wizard, all of those are minimized to a single, clean contact upload.  In that single upload, you can:

• Add contacts to multiple new or existing shared lists
• Associate contacts to external marketing campaigns/activities such as trade shows or conferences
• Link contacts or upload part of the data to custom objects

…all, while simultaneously validating data quality!

Conclusion

The Upload Wizard Cloud App from 4Thought Marketing helps Eloqua marketers improve data quality by eliminating bad data at the source.  It removes bad data automatically for every employee using the tool regardless of location.  Specific versions for GDPR or other compliance regulations are also available. All of the Upload Wizard Cloud Apps automatically protect and apply appropriate rules and notifications. And it reduces the time it takes for you and your colleagues to improve data quality at the source.

Another added advantage is that data can be imported by non-Eloqua users, thereby potentially empowering folks in sales or other marketing departments to import data, without risking the overall quality of your data.

Contact us for more information about the Upload Wizard. We offer a wide range of Eloqua Cloud App add-ons to improve and extend your Eloqua capabilities.