Custom objects are a simple yet powerful part of Eloqua that can enhance the ways that you’re able to connect with your customers. While they may seem daunting if you have never worked with them, custom objects (often abbreviated as COs) can become your best friend as your marketing automation needs increase.

Why Use COs Instead of Contact or Account Fields?

When getting started with Eloqua, it can be tempting to want to store all customer data on the contact and account records. But this can cause problems as your business needs change over time. As your company grows, you’ll need to store more customer data and be able to reference it quickly. Today, we’re looking at four advantages that COs offer over contact or account fields.

1. Eloqua Custom Objects Can Hold a LOT of Data

Out of the box, Eloqua provides 62 contact fields and 18 account fields, and you can create up to 250 custom fields each for contact and account. This sounds like a lot, and it is. But you’d be surprised how quickly the custom fields fill up as you begin adding the data points that your company needs.

COs, on the other hand, can have up to 1,024 fields each. There is also no limit on how many COs you can create in your Eloqua instance. The only limitation is on the number of records across all your COs, which Oracle caps at 25 million.

2. COs Can Accommodate Data That Has a Many-to-One Relationship

You will often need to capture multiple records for a single entity, such as when a single customer purchases multiple products from your company. Using account fields to capture this information could work. However, if each product has a large number of data points associated with it that also need to be referenced in Eloqua, that quickly eats into the 250-field limit.

COs provide an elegant alternative because they can hold multiple custom object records linked to a single account or contact. You can use filter criteria to select the correct CO record for a particular campaign. Custom apps or add-ons, such as our Many-to-One Email app, can also help augment the capabilities of a many-to-one CO relationship.

3. Custom Objects Can Store Historical Data

Contact and account fields are ideal for storing relatively permanent data such as contact or business information. However, they are less well-suited to storing information that changes frequently. For example, when tracking campaign attribution, you can easily set up your system to overwrite the Last SFDC Campaign ID field, but what if you want to be able to see more than just the last touch campaign interaction?

COs enable you to store historical data, which is extremely useful for things like campaign interactions, event information, or form submission data. You can then draw on the historical data for lead scoring, segmentation, and more when you go to build a new campaign.

4. They Can Scale With Your Business Needs

As Eloqua instances grow, they increase in complexity. Having a data architecture plan in place ahead of time can save you numerous headaches down the road. COs are a great tool to keep your data organized. You can even set up a CO structure that mimics the data table structure of your CRM so that integrations are tightly aligned.

The Value of Eloqua Custom Objects

The beauty of COs is in their capacity and their flexibility. While it can be tempting to want to store all data on the contact and account records, especially if you are less familiar with custom objects, COs are often the better option. Incorporating COs into your Eloqua data structure now can save you lots of headaches down the road as your Eloqua instance continues to grow.

But for those less familiar with custom objects and everything they can do, we’ve got you covered. Our team is ready to provide the training and support you need to get the most out of your Eloqua data. Contact us today to learn more.

Eloqua custom objects (abbreviated as CO) provide a simple and flexible way to store additional data, such as purchase history or areas of interest, for segmentation and personalization. To maximize how the data can be used, Eloqua users may want to copy or move data between a contact or account record and a linked CO record, or between CO records. That’s where 4Thought Marketing Cloud Apps come into play. We’ve built a variety of apps that expand Eloqua’s functionality and give your team tools to enhance your data manipulation options, streamline integration, and supercharge your marketing campaigns. Let’s look at a couple of examples of how our apps can help. 

Storing Current Status in an Eloqua Custom Object

Often an outside system, like a purchasing or CRM system, sends transactional data to Eloqua—for instance, a record of a product renewal transaction. Eloqua will store this information for future use in nurturing, segmentation, or reporting campaigns. However, you might also like to see and filter on the most recent status of a product renewal. In this case, transactional data will be difficult to use, since there will be multiple transactions for the same product—and you only need the most recent status.

In this case, you might want to build two CO tables, one for the ongoing transactions and one for the current status. Incoming data would feed the transaction table. But how do you populate the current status table?

4Thought Marketing has built an app for that purpose—the CO-to-CO Updater. In this example, you would be able to take data from the transaction record and populate data in the second CO table to record only the current status. If you use COs frequently, the CO-to-CO Updater app has a long list of potential uses.

Handling Multiple Products of Interest

In a related process, let’s say that you have an integration process that feeds your contact record with current product interest. This particular contact has shown interest in several of your different product lines. Since your integration is feeding your Eloqua Contact record, how would you create a series of CO records that show the breadth of interest from this individual?

The 4Thought Marketing cloud app Contact to CO Updater is just the solution to this problem. By using this app, you would be able to create CO records linked to the contacts, one for each product of interest. In this way, you can segment this contact based on multiple product interests or lack thereof. For example, you could build an upsell campaign for everyone showing interest in Product X, but not in Product Z. Or you could build a campaign for everyone showing interest in both Product A and Product B. The applications are endless.

Sending Recent Products of Interest to your CRM

Finally, let’s say that you have an integration that feeds your CRM system from Eloqua with the most recent product interest. You also have a custom object that stores multiple product interests accumulated over time. If you want to send the most recent data, you would either need to build a new integration for the most recent CO record, or you could just move the data from the CO record into the contact record, and continue with your integration. This can easily be accomplished with our CO to Contact Updater app.

Expanding Eloqua’s Capabilities with Cloud Apps

We have run across dozens of real business use cases that require data manipulation that is not easily accomplished with Eloqua’s out-of-the-box functionality. But we believe in getting the most value out of Eloqua. Our cloud apps are designed to build on Eloqua’s existing capabilities to make your job easier and more streamlined than ever.

Our clients have used Eloqua Cloud Apps and custom objects to demonstrably improve their revenue and customer engagement. For instance:

• A global health care company and a global distributor used the Eloqua Upload Wizard Cloud App to make data transfers more efficient and get leads to the sales team faster.
• Sophos, a cybersecurity provider, used several Eloqua cloud apps to filter out bad data from uploads, allowing the team to focus on legitimate leads.
• Fluke used several of our cloud apps to integrate Shopify with Eloqua, increasing both their email open rate and transaction values.
• First Tech Federal Credit Union used custom objects to create personalized email campaigns and increase customer revenue, as well as optimize data imports.

In addition to the cloud apps discussed above, 4Thought Marketing offers apps like the CO Form Submitter, the CO Deleter, and more to take your custom object development to a new level. And if our existing suite of apps doesn’t quite meet your needs, don’t worry—we can build a custom cloud app for your Eloqua instance.

Contact us for more information and a price list of all our apps.