W. P. Carey is one of the largest diversified net lease REITs, specializing in the acquisition of operationally critical, single-tenant properties in North America and Europe. It primarily engages in sale-leasebacks, where a company sells its real estate to an investor (like W. P. Carey) for cash and simultaneously enters into a long-term lease.
As the company grew, its integrated communications team began looking for ways to further optimize and automate marketing efforts to increase reach and efficiency. One step the team took to achieve this was to integrate its MarTech stack.
Problem 1: Data Quality
W. P. Carey has used Oracle Eloqua as its primary marketing automation platform for over ten years. As a result, the company had a decade of old data cluttering up its system. The first challenge was performing the required housekeeping to clean up contact data.
Problem 2: Eloqua Expertise
The Integrated Communications team also noticed that when reaching out to the platform for support, they were met with different representatives, each of whom required a detailed background explanation of W. P. Carey’s system before they could help. Consequently, this process made support tickets take longer, posing a challenge as the team did not have a designated expert on call who understood Eloqua and W. P. Carey’s system to quickly address challenges.
Problem 3: System Integration
The primary reason W. P. Carey partnered with 4Thought Marketing was to assist with a system integration project. W. P. Carey uses Salesforce as its CRM and Eloqua for marketing automation, but hadn’t integrated the two tools yet. This resulted in disconnected contact databases, created a gap in reporting, and limited the team’s abilities to email contacts and tenants. Without their own backend Eloqua knowledge, the team sought an experienced agency to support the integration.
The Solution: Partnership with the 4Thought Marketing Team
Following a thorough evaluation, W. P. Carey decided to establish a partnership with the 4Thought Marketing team.
The 4Thought team quickly integrated with W. P. Carey’s team to help address their challenges. First, they focused on data quality, clearing out the old contacts from W. P. Carey’s Eloqua instance. Next, 4Thought fully integrated Salesforce with Eloqua, allowing W. P. Carey to engage with contacts through Eloqua marketing campaigns and record responses in Salesforce.
Kelly Mulvaney, Digital Marketing Manager at W. P. Carey, says this simple change was revolutionary to her team: “We could now track the entire contact journey from start to finish, create reports with just a few clicks, and enhance our overall marketing automation strategy.” The saved time allowed the team to focus on other important projects, like the W. P. Carey blog newsletter (distributed via Eloqua).
The 4Thought team also provided a primary contact that supports W. P. Carey, so the marketing team always knows who they should contact for questions or to discuss strategy and plan future improvements. Most importantly, the marketing team enjoyed near-immediate responses to questions or requests.
What’s Next for W. P. Carey?
As the company moves forward, the Integrated Communications team plans to use the newly reworked MarTech stack to make landing page and email creation more efficient, as well as take full advantage of Eloqua’s ability to connect contact data to campaign activity. “We look forward to developing evergreen lead generation campaigns and an improved lead score model,” said Kelly. “Most of all, I’m excited to have an optimized framework in Eloqua that I can share with the rest of the company as a huge timesaver.”
Write Your Own Success Story with 4Thought Marketing
Do the challenges faced by W. P. Carey sound familiar? If your marketing team needs better systems integrations or an on-call Eloqua expert, we’ve got you covered. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.