Gartner’s 2023 Marketing Technology survey uncovered a surprising statistic: among the organizations surveyed, martech utilization had reached only 33%. Meanwhile, the 2020 survey returned a 58% utilization rate. What caused the number to drop by almost half?

The answer involves changes in marketing technology, adoption of new tools, and the capacity of organizations to keep up with both.

Marketing Teams Can’t Keep Up with Evolving Technology

As Martec’s Law puts it, “Technology changes exponentially, but organizations change logarithmically.” Technology evolves at a rapid pace. Meanwhile, humans need time to adjust, adopt new habits, and learn new techniques. This results in organizational growth that lags behind technological advancements. The speed of technological advancement outpaces the capacity of marketing teams to absorb and utilize these new tools effectively.

In theory, the proliferation of digital tools and platforms has the potential to revolutionize marketing strategies. However, the reality for a significant number of companies is quite different. Despite having more tools at their disposal than ever before, marketing professionals are struggling to leverage these technologies to their full potential.

Aside from the challenge of simply keeping up with new technology, organizations have other problems to contend with. Workforce disruptions caused by the pandemic only made it harder to keep pace.

Is It Time to Downsize Your Martech Stack? Maybe

Given these challenges, it may seem logical for companies to consider downsizing their martech stacks as a solution. In an era of economic uncertainty and budget constraints, the imperative to streamline and focus on tools that deliver tangible value has never been more critical. However, it’s essential to recognize that simplification for its own sake may not address the underlying complexities of the digital marketing environment.

The complexity inherent in today’s martech landscape is not merely a consequence of technological proliferation, but it also reflects the broader dynamics of the digital ecosystem. Factors such as the diversification of digital channels, the unpredictability of global events, evolving consumer behaviors, and the intricate web of privacy regulations all contribute to this complexity. These external pressures not only add layers of complexity to the marketing mix, but also demand a nuanced approach to martech management that goes beyond mere simplification.

In navigating this complex terrain, marketing professionals must strike a delicate balance between the allure of simplicity and the necessity of embracing complexity when it serves strategic objectives. This balancing act involves a thoughtful assessment of the martech stack, discerning which tools genuinely enhance marketing effectiveness and which may be superfluous. The goal is not to strip the martech stack down to its bare essentials, but to ensure that each component is effectively utilized and provides a positive ROI.

The Downsizing Process

The journey toward achieving an optimal martech utilization rate is, at its core, a process of continuous adaptation and learning. Organizations must cultivate a culture of experimentation, encouraging teams to explore new technologies while also developing the internal capabilities required to harness these tools effectively. This process involves not only selecting the right technologies but also integrating them seamlessly into the marketing workflow, ensuring that data flows smoothly between systems and that insights gleaned from one tool inform strategies deployed through another.

Of course, the process also involves significant costs. Purchasing the new technology is only the first step. Your team has to configure it to your needs, integrate it into your existing systems, learn how it works, and take time to understand how best to use it. All of this takes time—and every step comes with a cost.

Moreover, the quest for martech efficiency must be underpinned by a commitment to organizational maturity. A sophisticated martech stack, while potentially powerful, can only deliver on its promise if the organization has the maturity to deploy it effectively. This requires technical acumen, strategic vision, governance structures, and a deep understanding of the customer journey. As such, the alignment of martech complexity with organizational maturity becomes a critical factor in determining the success of marketing technology initiatives.

In this context, a simpler approach comes with the recognition that marketing challenges often demand complex solutions. Integrating marketing and sales data, the need to adapt to changing consumer preferences, and the imperative to innovate all introduce complexity into the martech equation. Yet, these complexities are not insurmountable obstacles but rather growth opportunities, demanding a strategic approach that balances the pursuit of simplicity with the embrace of necessary complexity.

As marketing professionals navigate this intricate landscape, the key to success lies in developing a nuanced understanding of both the potential and the limitations of martech. By aligning technological investments with strategic objectives and organizational capabilities, companies can transform their martech stacks from a source of frustration into a catalyst for innovation and growth. This journey requires patience, strategic foresight, and a commitment to continuous improvement, with the ultimate goal of unlocking the full potential of marketing technology in driving business success.

How 4Thought Marketing Can Help with Your Martech Stack Simplification

The challenges associated with martech complexity are both significant and multifaceted, reflecting the broader dynamics of a rapidly evolving digital ecosystem. Yet, within these challenges lie opportunities for marketing professionals to refine their strategies, streamline their operations, and harness the power of technology to create more engaging, effective marketing campaigns. And the team at 4Thought Marketing is ready to help your organization do just that.

We know martech inside and out. When you work with us, you’ll be able to navigate the complexities of the martech landscape with confidence, and turn obstacles into avenues for innovation and growth. Contact us today to get started.

Simply put, lead scoring is a method of assigning numerical values to leads primarily based on their characteristics and actions. The higher the rating, the more likely the lead is to grow to make a purchase. Lead scoring is a powerful function of the Marketo platform that allows users to prioritize leads primarily based on behavioral data. It also enables the alignment of advertising and sales efforts, and improves lead first-class and growth conversion fees.

Lead scoring may be divided into categories: person scoring and behavior scoring.

Person Scoring

Person scoring is primarily based on the lead’s demographic and firmographic attributes, which include name, identity, industry, corporation size, vicinity, and so forth, all normally amassed through information enrichment tools. Person scoring facilitates the identification of the lead’s fit for your products or services.

Behavior Scoring

Behavior scoring is based on the lead’s recorded activities, such as internet site visits, email clicks, form submissions, or event registrations. These behaviors are tracked with the aid of Marketo and mirror the lead’s degree of interest and engagement.

Lead Scoring: Building A Comprehensive User Profile

Combining person and behavior scoring can construct a detailed view of your lead, and can help  segment your leads into specific stages of the customer’s journey. This way, you could tailor your advertising campaigns and sales outreach to the lead’s wishes and possibilities.

Marketo Lead Scoring Best Practices

While managing your lead scoring process in Marketo, you must keep several important steps in mind. Always make sure to:

• Align with sales regarding the definition and qualification of leads. This will ensure that both teams agree on lead scoring goals and standards and that the leads are passed to sales at the proper time and with the right facts.
• Take both explicit and implicit facts into account for lead scoring. Explicit records are what the lead tells you about themselves—identity, industry, and so forth. Implicit information is what the lead suggests to you via their conduct—website visits, email clicks, etc. Both forms of records are critical to evaluating the lead.
• Keep your lead scoring easy and obvious. Avoid using too many scoring guidelines or complex scoring formulas that can contradict each other.
• Review and revise your lead scoring model often. This will help you to preserve your lead scoring model applicable even as your business goals, target marketplace, and client conduct change over time.

How to Install Lead Scoring Software in Marketo

Finally: in order to begin lead scoring in Marketo, you first have to configure the necessary software. The process will look like this:

1. Define your perfect patron profile and client personas. Use this to define the criteria and weights on your person scoring. For example, you could assign higher ratings to leads who suit your goal industry, role, or enterprise length.
2. Define your lead lifecycle ranges and thresholds. This will help you to decide the standards and weights for your behavior scoring. For example, you could assign higher scores to leads who visit your pricing web page, download a whitepaper, or request a demo.
3. Create a lead scoring model in Marketo. This is where you assign scores to different data points using smart campaigns. You can use tokens to make your scoring rules scalable, and use rating degradation to reduce the score of inactive leads over time.
4. Test and optimize your lead scoring version. This is where you screen and analyze the overall performance of your lead scoring model and the usage of reports and dashboards. Consider using A/B testing or client feedback to compare distinctive scoring scenarios and find the preferable option.

Putting Marketo Lead Scoring into Practice

Lead scoring is an excellent way to understand your audience and what they want. When used effectively, it results in improved marketing campaigns and increased revenue. But what if you’re new to detailed lead scoring? That’s where we can help.

Get in touch with our team today to learn more about Marketo lead scoring.

We asked nine experts how a company with an existing martech stack could smoothly integrate marketing automation. Here’s what they told us.

1. Integrate Marketing Automation with Dynamic Reporting

2. Leverage Middleware for Seamless Integration

3. Combine Tools for Personalized Emails

4. Examine Processes for Effective Marketing Automation Integration

5. Use Prompts & Structured Workflows

6. Incorporate CRM, AI, & Social Media

7. Track Campaigns with Call Analytics

8. Choose Flexible Platforms for Two-Way Sync

9. Work Backwards from Your Desired Outcome

Ready to improve your company’s martech stack through marketing automation integration? Get in touch with us today for expert assistance.

Adobe Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, and other marketing users are accustomed to handling and manipulating large amounts of vital data. But in the day-to-day process of working in a marketing automation system, CDP, or CRM, it can be easy to forget that this data and integrations need regular check-ups. Rather than distributing this responsibility to several marketing team members, appointing a single expert to perform this task may be better. This, simply put, is the role of a data steward.

What Does a Data Steward Do?

A data steward plays an important role in data management and governance, as they help the organization leverage its data assets and processes to full capacity and avoid risks and costs associated with poor data quality and broken processes. They ensure the quality and fitness of your marketing data, such as contacts, accounts, and campaigns. They may also be responsible for ensuring the security and privacy of the data that an organization collects, uses, and shares. Their job duties include:

• Defining and documenting data elements, standards, policies, and rules
• Identifying and resolving data quality issues and conflicts
• Monitoring and enforcing data governance practices and compliance
• Educating and collaborating with data users and stakeholders
• Advocating for and promoting data-driven decision-making and innovation

Data stewards also handle time-consuming but critical parts of data management, including but not limited to:

• Data cleansing: removing or correcting inaccurate, incomplete, or duplicate data
• Data normalization: standardizing the format or naming of data fields
• Data enrichment: adding or updating relevant data attributes
• Data integration: connecting and synchronizing data from different sources
• Data analysis: measuring and reporting on data performance and insights

Improving Your Campaigns with a Data Steward

Given how important data is to every step of your marketing campaigns, it’s hard to overstate how important of a role the data steward plays. Ensuring your data is in expert hands will dramatically improve how that data is processed and used . The data steward’s contributions will help alleviate many of your marketing concerns, most notably:

• Deliverability: ensuring your emails reach the intended recipients
• Segmentation: reaching the correct, personalized audiences
• Reporting: generating accurate and meaningful metrics and dashboards
• Compliance: adhering to data privacy and security regulations
• Satisfaction: meeting or exceeding customer expectations and needs

Is Your Marketing Data in Good Hands?

As a marketing professional, you understand the importance of accurate, easily accessible data. But you also know that you don’t have the time to manage your marketing campaigns and handle the massive amount of information that needs to be secured, quality-checked, or funneled to the appropriate places. An Eloqua data steward can handle all of that. All you have to do is find an expert—and we can help with that. Contact us today to learn more.

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.

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.

Elevate your marketing stack to new heights by integrating Oracle Unity CDP with Oracle Eloqua. In this webinar, learn how this powerful duo can supercharge your marketing efforts, offering a seamless, data-driven approach to customer engagement to maximize your marketing spend and drive measurable results.

Speakers:

• Mandy Tsui
  Sr. Manager, Product Management, Oracle

• Mark T. LeVell
  CEO,  4ThoughtMarketing

Get ready to unlock your marketing potential with Oracle Unity CDP and Eloqua

Join us for an engaging live webinar where you’ll:

• Uncover the transformative capabilities of Unity CDP for enhancing customer experiences.
• Discover why Unity CDP and Eloqua duo is a powerful combination for modern marketers.
• Delve into 5 essential use cases solved by the Unity CDP and Eloqua partnership.
• Learn the potent AI/ML capabilities delivered by Unity CDP and Eloqua working in tandem.
• Discover the reasons behind customers choosing Unity CDP as their premier solution

Concrete data in the form of key performance indicators, or KPIs, is compelling evidence that your marketing team’s efforts are getting results. While it may seem like a daunting task to find the right KPIs to prove this, it’s far from impossible.

Today, we’ll look closer at two basic marketing KPIs your company should be tracking and what each means.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) Conversion Rate

Delivering a thousand MQLs sounds fantastic, but not if the conversion rate is very low. When it comes to MQLs, quality trumps quantity.

While you still might set a goal for the number of MQLs that marketing creates, the focus should be on creating quality MQLs. You can determine whether you are delivering quality leads by measuring the number of leads against a conversion percentage goal.

What the MQL Conversion Rate Tells You

A low conversion rate tells you that you first should look at your MQL definition and whether your lead scoring program is set up to deliver leads that fit that definition. You may have too many requirements that an otherwise qualified lead won’t match, driving your numbers down.  Too few requirements and MQL quality declines, which causes sales to spend valuable time sifting through them.

Second, take a look at your nurture foundation. Is it truly engaging your audience, at their pace? You may need to rework some marketing plans.

Finally, how quickly does your sales team follow up? Warm leads can get cold pretty quickly. You’ll also want to know how many leads turn cold and why.

A good conversion rate tells you that your efforts are working. Unfortunately, it won’t tell you which efforts. To find this out, sort the MQLs by lead source and calculate the conversion rate for each source. This will show you which sources consistently convert more than others, and what parts of your marketing strategy need to improve.

Tracking Your MQL Conversion Rate

Once you pass an MQL on to sales, keep tracking it. Note how quickly the lead is accepted, and if it was rejected, why it was. If your workflows are already set up to track lifecycle stages, then you’re good to go. If not, setting this up should be your top priority.

Next, track the actions that the sales team can take. Generally, this is a field on the lead record in the CRM that gives the sales team the option to accept or reject the lead. From this information, you can easily generate a report to calculate your overall MQL conversion rate expressed as a percentage.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) Conversion Rate

The SQL conversion rate measures how often a lead converts from an accepted lead into a sales-qualified lead. At this point, the sales team has created an opportunity for conversion. This metric is arguably even more important to track than the MQL conversion rate.

What the SQL Conversion Rate Tells You

By tracking the leads that make it from acceptance to the SQL stage, your marketing team can pinpoint the campaigns and content making an impact. This lets you identify high-value content. Better yet, you can turn this newly identified high-value content into multiple marketing messages, especially for the early stages of exposure where persistence is key. 

If the conversion rate is abnormally low, it’s time to initiate a conversation with sales to learn why.  It could be the qualification rules are incorrect, or you need additional nurture activities to better qualify for sales-ready leads.

Tracking Your SQL Conversion Rate

This essentially requires the same setup as your MQL conversion rate. In addition to tracking MQLs, ensure you’re also tracking the lifecycle stage and can update the stage as necessary.

Sales should still be able to reject an acceptable lead, as they might an MQL. However, at this stage, the acceptance can be automated. An SQL needs to be associated with an opportunity. This allows your marketing automation platform workflow to change the lifecycle stage to SQL when the contact is added to an opportunity. The final report generated will be the same as the MQL conversion report, with the added choice to filter on accepted leads or SQL stages.

This is an excerpt from our eBook: “Building KPIs That Matter: A Tried-and-True Guide for Marketers”. Download and read the full eBook for free here.

Email marketing: all marketers use it. Eloqua’s functionality is built around it. But if you’re only leveraging Eloqua’s email system, you’re missing out. You can get even more from your Oracle Eloqua instance when you include all your marketing channels – and when you take the time to properly integrate, automate, and measure them. Let’s look at three marketing channels you can start using right now.

3 Powerful Non-Email Marketing Channels to Integrate, Automate & Measure with Oracle Eloqua

1. Social Media & Paid Ads

You know how important your presence on the web is. Apart from getting eyes on your content, what’s most important is to track those interactions in Oracle Eloqua.

Integrate

Capture the content your audience is reading. It is easier said than done, but the effort is worth it. These Oracle Eloqua tools may help you capture specific interactions:

• Enable content sharing on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Facebook
• Capture data from Facebook lead ads to transfer to Oracle Eloqua
• Use Facebook and Twitter widgets (likes, follows, etc.) to promote audience engagement
• Use LinkedIn Form Autofill features for better conversion
• Re-target Oracle Eloqua contacts with digital LinkedIn advertisements

Once you are able to associate social media and paid ads engagement to contacts and track their interactions in Oracle Eloqua, you can better understand and influence your customers’ journey.

Automate

Configure your Eloqua setup to take advantage of the data flowing in from social media and paid ads. Use this input to adjust Lead Scoring and nurture campaigns. Additionally, consider how to get these contacts commenting, sharing, and liking more of your content. Once you have that working without manual intervention, all you need to do is measure the effectiveness.

Keep in mind that your social media outreach should include more than your new leads. Existing customers are a great source of shared content, comments, and likes. Balance your campaigns to provide both current and potential customers with plenty of high-quality content to interact with.

Measure

Not enough companies give measurement the attention it deserves. Social media and paid ads kick-start a customer’s journey. If you aren’t measuring the results, how can you know what works and what doesn’t? This is too important to be left to guesswork.

If a contact interacts with a social media post, and then completes a contact form a week later, do you attribute that social media campaign with the lead? Or at least consider the social media post’s influence? You’re in luck – it is indeed possible to track this user’s journey to see how they found you! Watch this short video for details.

2. Video Marketing

In a Google-dominated world, using video to get your brand, product, or services out to the world is key. Here’s how to approach working with videos in Oracle Eloqua:

Integrate

Tools like Vidyard allow you to see how viewers interact with your video content. You can then store the collected data (such as the video title, watch time, and where the viewer is located) in a Custom Object for later segmentation. This feedback will also tell you if customers tended to click away from your videos and they need an upgrade.

We also recommend including interactions throughout the video. Use opportune moments to encourage viewers to click through for a demo, more details, or other important information. You can configure the responses to these prompts to go straight to Eloqua. These points of interaction will not only help harvest new leads, but they can also prompt you to score and target those leads with the right follow-up message.

Automate

Making a good video takes time and effort. As tempting as it is to pat yourself on the back after your video gets lots of attention, don’t wait! The sooner you follow up, the better.

Use the information flowing in from your video interactions to automate your next actions. For example, if a person watches past a point where the video discusses an important product or service-related feature, configure Eloqua to send them follow-up communication. If they watched to the end or watched multiple times, assign them to a segment to follow up with other relevant content. If they watched the video and are located in an area where you are having an event in the near future, let them know right away. You can then follow this personalized announcement with a general bulletin in the next scheduled email.

Remember to score leads accordingly. Video viewing data is just as important as email clicks and landing page visits, if not more.

Measure

Once you’ve integrated and automated, find out what impact video marketing had on your ROI. Depending on the product or service, it can take many interactions with an individual to convert them into a lead or an opportunity. Has your video created enough leads to justify the cost of creating it? If so, fantastic! Stick with what works. If not, consider how to improve next time.

Once again, measurement is critical here. Relying on guesswork can torpedo your marketing campaign and, in the long term, your general ROI.

3. SMS Communication

With texting as prevalent as it is today, why not try promoting your business with SMS messages? Here’s how to get started with SMS promotions in Eloqua.

Automate

For text message marketing, we recommend starting with automation instead of integration. The best SMS tool in the world won’t help without a properly formatted, working phone number. Start by implementing progressive profiling on your forms so you don’t immediately ask for their mobile number. When you eventually do ask, make sure to also request consent to receive texts from you. Automatically send a text to re-affirm their consent (and include unsubscribe information if they change their minds later).

Remember: text message marketing requires consent as much as email marketing does. Take the time to develop a sustainable plan for capturing consent and keeping your messages legal.

To make sure the telephone numbers you collect are formatted correctly, we recommend setting up a data normalization program in Eloqua. You’ll need to use the phone number and country fields to obtain the country code and phone number format to ensure your text messages go through. A phone formatting app may help simplify this process.

Be careful when segmenting here. Only target contacts with SMS for specific types of communication, such as:

• Form submission follow-ups – if you know they used a mobile device, send an SMS to thank them or send them additional information.
• Form abandonment follow-ups – a text message may get a faster response and motivate the user to finish the form.
• Registration confirmation/event reminders – make sure your events get added to your contact’s calendar.

Integrate

Integration for SMS marketing is relatively straightforward. Find an SMS tool that integrates smoothly with Oracle Eloqua. You’ll want to capture important data like the title of the message you sent, the date it was sent, and any responses you received.

But don’t just monitor customer activity. Keep track of how many SMS communications you send and when they go out. This information can tell you if you are under- or over-communicating with your clients.

Measure

With the integrated and automated data above, you can start tracking the success of your SMS campaigns. Tracking these results will look somewhat different from tracking video interactions or social media likes, but it is still very possible with the right tools.

Go Beyond Email Marketing

Oracle Eloqua has far more potential than just email marketing. Maybe you have the same problem we’ve observed in other companies – marketing channels like SMS or video marketing are ignored or tracked separately, while Eloqua functions only as an email marketing platform. Don’t make this mistake! Tying your marketing channels together allows you to create a unified look at your ROI and to use Oracle Eloqua to its fullest potential. Good news: it’s never too late to get started! Contact us today and let us help you take your marketing channels to the next level.

In an increasingly privacy-conscious world, companies must continually adjust their strategies for collecting and using customer data as laws and regulations change. By necessity, this includes rethinking a major marketing staple: the Call To Action (CTA). Since customers no longer want to hand out large amounts of personal information (and you may not be allowed to ask in the first place), how can you continue using CTAs effectively when you don’t have explicit consent? One answer comes from a concept cemented in the GDPR: legitimate interest.

The legal term “legitimate interest” appears only in the EU’s privacy law, the GDPR. However, the concept is present in several other prominent regulations, each with its take on how legitimate interest is communicated and how long it lasts. A given company’s privacy policy needs to address both. More importantly, the privacy policy must stay within the appropriate legal guidelines for each regulation.

What is Legitimate Interest?

Most privacy laws contain some concept of legitimate interest even if the term itself doesn’t appear. And for our purposes, this principle is the most important. The European Commission defines legitimate interest in this way:

“Your company/organization has a legitimate interest when the processing takes place within a client relationship, when it processes personal data for direct marketing purposes, to prevent fraud or to ensure the network and information security of your IT systems.”

Old-school marketing measures would say that making a purchase or taking advantage of an offer demonstrates legitimate interest to be contacted frequently and perpetually. But a detailed understanding of most relevant legislation shows that’s not the case. Privacy laws are concerned with the customers’ interests above all else—and most customers don’t want to be contacted forever. Nor do they want a barrage of offers on items they haven’t expressed interest in for a while. Instead, they are more likely to respond when the offer is based on recent interactions.

Layering Calls to Action

In a privacy-conscious world, companies can collect many customers’ legitimate interest through “layering” their calls to action. This ensures you’re targeting customers that actually want to hear from you, rather than just sending off mass emails.

One simple way to layer CTAs is to promote them specifically to their target audience. For example, a cybersecurity management firm might publish a blog article about recognizing phishing emails. The article could contain a link to purchase the firm’s specialized antivirus software. Anyone reading the blog is interested in safeguarding their computer, and will be more likely to appreciate the offer.

A second way to layer CTAs is to embed one offer within another that has already been accepted. Let’s continue the example of the cybersecurity management firm. A customer that signs up for their newsletter demonstrates an interest in computer security, and may also be interested in attending an upcoming security webinar advertised in the newsletter. The webinar itself may conclude with a CTA to take a free cybersecurity assessment. This is just an extension of the customer’s interest, and continually accepting CTAs within CTAs demonstrates continued interest—and more importantly, continued permission to be contacted.

Regardless of how you choose to handle your calls to action, make sure to keep your promises! Failure to follow through on an offer will only hurt you.

Different Types of CTAs

Showcasing a call to action is more than just presenting a customer with a link. What form does it take? Is it likely to draw the customer in? Experiment with these tried-and-true CTA formats:

• Strategy session. If you’re promoting training or services, use this session to show the customer how your services will help them.
• Demo invitation. Invite the customer to watch your product in action. This approach is best for highly engaged leads that are very likely to buy from you.
• Free trial. Let the customer play with a product or service on their own before making a decision.
• Series of emails. Offer to send the customer a series of emails specifically focused on something they’re interested in. This gives the customer engaging material, and you a lead to nurture.
• General marketing offer. If all else fails, go for Plan B and simply ask the customer if they’re open to any and all future communications from you. You’ll retain a lead, but you’ll have to continue working to narrow down their interests.

Managing Customer Preferences

Customers deserve to know that you respect their preferences. But this raises the question: how can you keep track of everyone’s marketing preferences? Can you respond effectively when they express a preference and prove to your customers that you’re following the law?

That’s where a specialized privacy compliance software comes in. 4Comply, a creation of 4Thought Marketing, is designed to keep your marketing campaigns in line with the applicable regulations and prove to your customers that you’re doing your best. Privacy software helps with several critical functions:

• Centralized consent: This system keeps track of which customers provided explicit consent and those who didn’t, but whose actions satisfy legitimate interest.
• Permissions. Permissions tracking ensures that you use customer data in compliance both with legal requirements and with customer preferences.
• Legal activity history. A permanent legal activities archive keeps track of every consent-related activity. Any customer that asks why you’re emailing them can be shown that they responded to a call to action.

Customers are more aware than ever of their rights to privacy. Likewise, privacy laws have more teeth and can cost you more for violations. An all-in-one software solution that monitors all your activities is an invaluable addition to your arsenal.

Structure Your Offers for a Privacy-Focused Audience

Privacy laws are designed to protect customer data, not hinder businesses. You can still maintain a lucrative marketing strategy while staying well within the guidelines. However, you must think more strategically about your approach.

With new restrictions on advertising, companies have had to learn to balance zealous marketing with a healthy respect for customer privacy. Correctly understanding legal and practical guidelines for sales tactics can be time-consuming. However, with the right approach, the results are more than worth it.

Is your system optimized for new legal requirements? We can help you find out! Get in touch today for a privacy assessment to keep your marketing strategy in the clear.

Modern business demands a lot from professionals. Systems like Eloqua work wonders to lighten the load, but sometimes they need a little help—especially where dirty data is involved. We work to provide the additional boost Eloqua needs to keep our customers in business. Here’s how 4Thought’s suite of Eloqua apps improved lead generation for Sophos.

About Sophos

Sophos provides comprehensive cybersecurity solutions for almost 400,000 businesses in more than 150 countries. Based out of the UK, the company has four other locations around the world. Their customer list includes such diverse clients as the Diocese of Brooklyn, the Washakie County School District, Del Monte, People’s Independent Bank, and many more. Sophos also offers a family version of their cybersecurity software for individual subscribers. But whether Sophos is marketing their products and services to fortune 500 companies or a local family, they rely on lead generation as much as any other company. And unfortunately, customers aren’t making their job easy.

Problem #1: Dirty Data

Sophos uses multiple free trials offers to generate new customer leads from anyone willing to fill out a short customer-facing form. There was certainly no shortage of interested parties submitting these forms. According to a 2017 survey, most B2B companies report that 66% or 2 out of 3 free trial users end up converting once their trial expires. Quality leads through free trials were and continue to be a valuable asset, to companies as a whole and to Sophos in particular.

However, much of the information submitted in these forms were unusable. People might provide an invalid email address or even list their name as “Mickey Mouse”. Far too much of the data coming from these forms fell into this category of “dirty data”. And if it wasn’t caught in time, the unusable information made its way to the sales team, who then had to spend additional time sorting genuine contacts from tire kickers.

Receiving fake data is surprisingly common, especially in the privacy and security fields. “People are exceptionally apprehensive about giving their personal details because they are in the security space,” said Corey Lysohirka, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at Sophos. “In our industry, people are less likely to provide us with their personal information.” While expected, the influx of unusable information was certainly a problem.

The Sophos team did their best to isolate dirty data once it entered their system. Their Eloqua setup included nearly 400 rules to locate bad information but lacked a straightforward and automated method to delete it.

Problem #2: Poor Lead Flow

Like many companies, Sophos works hard to promote its products and services at public events like trade shows and webinars. These marketing events can result in many new contacts and potential leads. However, contacts from events require near-immediate follow-ups to prevent the conversation from going stale. Sophos’ lead processing system segmented the contact data in Eloqua and marked them to be processed as leads, but that’s where it stopped. Eloqua’s Program Canvas only allows contacts to enter workflows at midnight each night. This caused lengthy delays in getting sales-ready leads into the sales team’s hands and caused the leads to go cold. Sophos needed a solution.

The Solution: Data Filtering & Lead Acceleration Apps from 4Thought Marketing

Corey first noticed 4Thought Marketing while examining the Eloqua cloud app catalog. Impressed with the range of apps and capabilities he saw, he requested that Sophos get in touch with them. From there it was a simple process to find the right apps to solve the problem.

4Thought has developed a suite of apps that extend Eloqua’s functionality and further streamline the marketing process. The first app considered was the Contact Garbage Indicator. This app screens every contact entering Eloqua and singles out potential bad data. This bad data is then held for manual review to prevent false positives. Once the data has been reviewed, the Contact Garbage Indicator empties its data storage and continues to filter incoming contacts.

The Contact Garbage Indicator works in tandem with another app from 4Thought Marketing, the Contact Deleter App. This app does exactly what its name implies—it purges bad contacts routed into it. The Sophos team is especially fond of this one. The team simply has to drop the object into the canvas and then, as Corey puts it, “You just route every garbage contact record that you want to be deleted out of Eloqua to that object and the app simply deletes the garbage record.”

But while both of these apps root out bad data that has already made its way into the system, legitimate customer contacts still need attention as potential leads. Sophos uses the Contact Cloud Feeder app to accelerate lead flow in Campaign Canvas. Instead of having to wait for overnight processes to transfer lead data between programs, the team set up the app to check for newly added contacts every 5 minutes. The app then begins processing, getting leads into the hands of sales reps faster. The process is fully automatic and fits right into their current Eloqua setup. No need to refresh segments, and no need to wait overnight for programs to refresh!

Results: Improved Quality & Processing Speed

With their new setup, Sophos’ data intake has never been better. The Contact Cloud Feeder App kicks off the cycle of processing incoming contacts as leads. The Contact Garbage Indicator then examines each lead for possible dirty data and filters it out. Finally, the Contact Deleter removes the bad data from the system entirely. With all the administrative work done automatically, Sophos is free to focus on generating and nurturing new leads without worrying about bad contacts.

The Sophos team is also exploring live email validation. When someone fills out a customer-facing form, the website will quickly verify that the domain for the provided email address actually exists, otherwise, it will not allow the form to submit. In the long term, Sophos plans to use this validation system to further filter bad data.

Write Your Own Success Story

Sophos has managed to drastically improve its data quality and lead flow with 4Thought Marketing’s suite of Eloqua apps. Dirty data is not a problem unique to them, however. Virtually any company could find itself dealing with bad contacts. Why not give our apps a try and streamline your marketing team’s workday? Contact us today for more information.

The Eloqua Upload Wizard from 4Thought Marketing is a game-changing tool for companies seeking to enhance their lead generation efforts. By streamlining the process of importing data, it can drastically reduce the time required to process new leads. This was especially true for Catalent, a global healthcare company who needed to improve the process for importing leads from their content syndication partners.

Challenge

Like many businesses, Catalent collected lead data from customers who opted in to communications. The challenge arose when the data arrived from their partners, each in different formats and each using different data standards. This forced the Catalent team to continually repeat a lengthy manual process to apply data standards and prepare the data for import into Oracle Eloqua. Even then, Eloqua’s default list upload feature would often accept data that did not conform to their standards, further complicating the issue. The company soon turned to 4Thought Marketing for help.

Solution: The Eloqua Upload Wizard

4Thought’s team had the solution: the Eloqua Upload Wizard cloud app. The Eloqua Upload Wizard is designed to address data management challenges with its ability to handle large volumes of data with ease. The tool can also identify and address errors in uploaded data to improve the system over time.

 The Upload Wizard was designed with these benefits in mind:

1. Enhanced efficiency: The Upload Wizard allows organizations to manage large volumes of data more efficiently, reducing the time required to process and analyze data lists.
2. User friendliness: Uploading data does not require specific Eloqua training to use. Any user can upload files with simple training, distributing the work to multiple employees.
3. Customization: With extensive customization options, the Upload Wizard can adapt to the specific needs of each customer.
4. Error management: The tool helps in addressing errors and improving the system over time, minimizing troubleshooting efforts and making the resolution process easier.
5. Easy implementation: The process of developing requirements for the Upload Wizard is relatively straightforward, especially for organizations with a well-defined standard operating procedure (SOP).
6. Scalability: As data volumes continue to grow, the Upload Wizard is designed to scale with the needs of an organization, ensuring that it remains a valuable tool in the face of increasing data management challenges.

Results: More Efficient Lead Generation for Catalent

With the Eloqua Upload Wizard, what used to take Catalent’s marketing team up to 30 days can now be accomplished in just a few hours. This allows them to act on leads more quickly, get them to sales sooner, and close deals faster to gain a competitive edge in their industry.

One team member described her positive experience with the Upload Wizard, saying, “Due to having the Upload Wizard, we’re able to tackle data uploads with ease and in record time.” She also highlighted the app’s troubleshooting capabilities. “As I receive notifications of errors in the file, I can update a table or picklist with the correct value. Now the troubleshooting has minimized tremendously, and the resolution is much easier.”

For more details on the Upload Wizard solution, watch our recorded webinar where we talked with several members of the Catalent team.

Make your workday easier! Contact our team today to learn more about the Eloqua Upload Wizard.