Eloqua’s often-overlooked page tagging feature is a powerful tool you should definitely be using. But why is this feature so important? Besides obvious benefits like webpage categorization, well-done page tagging can improve the sales process, from customer segmentation to lead scoring. Let’s take a closer look at several top benefits of page tagging.
1. More Accurate Lead Scoring
Page tagging allows you to categorize each webpage based on its place and value in the sales process. For example, you can observe when customers move from lower-value to higher-value pages and thus progress a prospect through the sales funnel. These patterns will help you plan the ideal customer journey and revise your website as needed to make it happen.
2. Easier Categorization
Along with information such as the funnel stage, consider adding general categories to each web page’s tags. Category tags might include:
Case studies
eBooks
Nurture
Upsell
This tells you at a glance what categories on your website get the most attention, and which play the more important roles in the customer journey.
3. Funnel Stage Tracking
Tagging each page with its appropriate sales funnel stage offers another form of customer segmentation. For example, focusing on visitors who made it to pages with tags such as “upsell” or “nurture” allows you to give special attention to the people most likely to purchase, leading to more accurate lead scores. You’ll be able to track their journey through the funnel nearly in real-time.
4. Target by Product/Solution
Finally, with product/solution tags, you can easily identify cross-selling opportunities and build your segmentation strategy around them. For example, a customer buying a new phone might want a case, screen protector, or other accessories. A well-constructed page tagging system will show you what products they might be interested in for your segmentation strategy.
Get Started Creating Page Tags
Eloqua’s page tagging capabilities can significantly contribute to your marketing and sales efforts. With their potential to increase the quality of your lead scoring, website design, and future marketing strategies, they are well worth your time.
Ready to start adding page tags to your website, but not quite sure where to begin? Get in touch with us for professional help.
Among its many features, Eloqua offers one function that often goes overlooked: page tagging. In a previous article, we looked at how page tagging can improve customer segmentation and lead to more effective marketing campaigns. Today, we’d like to look at a few practical ways to start creating page tags in Eloqua.
Eloqua offers four unique methods to create and manage page tags:
Manual
File upload
Auto-tagging
Meta-tagging
Additionally, before starting any kind of page tagging, remember to track your web pages through Eloqua. Untracked pages will not show up as options to tag, and for this to work, every single page on your site needs at least one tag.
Manual Page Tags
Anyone new to page tagging will likely start with the manual method. Within Eloqua, you can create a tag and assign it to individual pages or to whole folders of web pages with just a few clicks. Save your work, and you’re done! While manual tagging is the easiest solution, it is the most tedious and may not be your best option.
File Upload for Page Tags
The file upload method requires a little work ahead of time. Create a spreadsheet with two columns: one for each page URL you want to tag, and one for the tags you wish to apply. You can apply multiple tags using this method if you separate them with commas. Next, upload your spreadsheet to Eloqua using the Upload Wizard and determine how you want these new tags to be handled (for instance, if they should replace any old tags or simply be added on). Eloqua will then assign your new tags, and you’ll receive a confirmation email.
Auto Page Tags
For a dynamic website that continually adds or removes URLs, manual page tagging or uploading spreadsheets isn’t a viable solution. That’s why Eloqua offers an automated system.
With the auto-tagging method, you can assign a group of tags to a particular URL and any URLs added underneath it. For example: if you assign a group of tags to example.com/products/toys, Eloqua’s auto-tagging rules will assign that same group of tags to example.com/products/toys/board-games and to example.com/products/toys/rc-vehicles. This allows you to easily add or remove URLs without losing your tags.
To set this up, create an auto-tagging rule within Eloqua and double-check the generated preview for any issues. You can also manually create exclusions at this stage if you need to. From there, save your work. Eloqua will automatically run the rule and tag new pages every time your sitemap updates.
Using Meta Tags
Finally, virtually every website includes meta tags to help improve SEO and search results. These tags can also be used to generate and assign page tags. This method works best when you want to automatically tag pages that don’t necessarily follow a parent-child structure and thus don’t fall under the default auto-tagging system. If you have a well-constructed taxonomy for your website, this may be the best solution to create Eloqua page tags.
Within Eloqua, you can create a meta-tagging rule and configure the system to crawl your website as you wish. Double-check the generated preview and save your work. From there, your job is done. Eloqua will crawl your website once a day (or as often as you tell it to) and generate new page tags according to your specifications.
Conclusion
With Eloqua’s user-friendly interface and extensive capabilities, page tagging is a straightforward process that can produce excellent results. Take the time to see what Eloqua can offer you. You may just be surprised by the results!
Ready to assign page tags, but not quite sure how to get started? Email us for quick, expert help.
Lead generation and demand generation may sound like two terms for the same activity. In practice, they can be similar. However, the differences are critical for any marketer to understand. Let’s compare lead generation vs. demand generation and see how they differ, and what that looks like practically.
Marketers must consider demand generation to be the bigger picture and lead generation to be one element of the wider demand generation function.
Demand generation is the process of increasing awareness and demand for your company’s service or product. The focus here is getting your brand name out there and drumming up interest in what your brand has to offer.
In other words, demand generation is bringing new visitors to your business or website. The goal is to establish your target audience, get them thinking or talking about you, and build trust with them through thoroughly planned content and interactions.
One common method of demand generation is creating ungated content, meaning customers don’t have to commit to anything to access the content. Examples of this can include:
Blog posts
Case studies
Interviews
Infographics
Press releases
Social media posts
Resource pages
Videos
This content aims to increase the brand or company’s profile and attract attention to your brand. You can establish trust and make a connection with your target audience through engaging content. That will encourage them to come to you.
Lead generation requires a particular skill set as it is all about conveying interest to leads and guiding such leads through the funnel. It could be described as a way to funnel through eventual buyers of your service or product. Its purpose is to capture personal data.
Remember that lead generation strategies are utilized to obtain names, email addresses, and phone numbers, hoping that some of these people will convert into qualified leads. Hence, gated content is the main priority here, meaning people must sign up and share their contact information to download or get a piece of content.
The most typical types of lead generation content include:
Comparing lead generation vs. demand generation efforts is essential to tracking the impact of your B2B sales process. These strategies involve applying research, creating credibility, and speaking to consumer challenges through your content. Well-produced demand generation content offers solutions and makes connections among your target audience, resulting in more leads.
Demand generation marketing techniques let you reach a big audience with impactful messaging in different ways. The goal is to raise visibility for your digital presence, solidify you as the thought leader, and keep your business front of mind. Demand generation thus fits well into the research and prospecting part of the sales process.
Meanwhile, lead generation strategies enable better access to set up a first sales consultation or product demo to interested parties. It also keeps the sales pipeline filled with qualified leads you can move throughout the sales process. Identify where those leads are in the sales funnel and personalize the approach according to their interest level. That will help you close more deals and establish better long-term client relationships.
What you need to bear in mind about lead generation and demand generation is that they are both essential to your B2B marketing strategy. They are made to work well together, along with lead generation supporting the work finished by demand generation.
Other organizations may concentrate on lead gen to get contacts and email addresses to hit sales targets. However, the ideal approach is to deploy both lead generation and demand generation at the same time. This is because you cannot produce leads to your fullest potential or sustainably if there is no demand in the first place. People must know who you are and the products or services you provide.
Similarly, demand generation requires the further push of lead generation. Or else, all the hard work to get people interested in your brand could lose all its value if you cannot convert them into leads.
Lead Generation and Demand Generation: Better Together
So, should you pursue lead generation or demand generation?
Realistically, you should pursue both. Without demand gen, you will have trouble getting leads into your funnel to convert a significant number into customers. On the other hand, you may end up attracting poor-fit customers who won’t help in your efforts to grow your brand and business without quality lead gen strategies.
With strong inbound and organic marketing processes to bring awareness to your site and excellent lead generation practices to sort through for best-fit customers, you will be well on your way to huge growth.
How 4Thought Marketing Can Help
Determining what your prospects want and what they need to conquer their challenges will help your sales efforts. Deliver information that backs your solutions up and shows validity in their success. Those ongoing lead generation and demand generation efforts drive quality engagements for qualified leads and continuously connect with new prospects.
At 4Thought Marketing, we are well-versed in B2B sales and can guide you on the tools, strategies, and techniques essential to flourish in your B2B sales process. Get in touch with us today to get your marketing strategy on the path to success.
When most people think of marketing, what they’re really thinking of is conventional marketing: an approach that begins by generating as much attention as possible and narrowing down to potential leads based on that. This approach is the most common today. And it certainly works to a degree. But in more recent years, a different strategy has begun to make itself known: account-based marketing (ABM). Let’s look a little closer at both.
Conventional Marketing Funnel
Conventional marketing starts by casting a wide net and trying to get your products and services in front of as many people as possible. From there, marketers narrow the audience down to potentially interested people. Nurturing begins through automated emails, personalized offers, and similar methods. Finally, sales joins the process downstream to turn these interested targets into conversions. Sales then reports back to marketing on which leads were good and which didn’t work out, and marketing can alter their future plans accordingly.
In practice, conventional marketing means spending a lot of time mass-producing content and showing it to everybody without knowing for sure if they’ll be interested. Sales isn’t involved until the nurture stage or later. And of course, because you’re starting with such a huge group of only potentially interested people, not every lead will be a success.
Account-Based Marketing Funnel
Account-based marketing takes the conventional marketing funnel and flips it on its head. Marketing and sales have a partnership from the beginning in ABM as both work together to identify and focus on their target audience. They grow the list of potential clients through careful research. Once they have a completed list, the nurturing and personalized marketing campaigns begin. Any leads that don’t work out are crossed off the list. Meanwhile, every target that responds with interest or conversion stays on as a future opportunity.
In practice, account-based marketing involves sales from the very beginning so nurture begins early. This also allows marketing to produce targeted materials for a specific audience rather than generic advertisements. The process also produces far fewer leads to track and nurture. Since both sales and marketing can focus their attention on a small group instead of trying to please a massive audience, they are more likely to win leads and gain long-term customer relationships.
ABM’s Advantages Over Conventional Marketing Methods
So why can ABM lead to more successful campaigns than conventional marketing? There are several key reasons. First: as stated above, both sales and marketing can target key accounts through ABM, resulting in more personalized (and thus more effective) marketing. Second: sales is involved from the very beginning, not just marketing, so everyone’s in the loop from the start.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly: ABM builds on demand that already exists. Conventional marketing focuses on generating demand. Account-based marketing focuses on locating demand and meeting it.
The Current State of Account-Based Marketing
For now, most companies stick to conventional marketing as the default method. Most businesses start out trying to “read the room”, so casting a wide net seems like the better option. Some may hire a consultant to narrow down the client base. But even with a consultant’s help, it’s very rare for a business to start with account-based marketing right off the bat.
But ABM is gaining some traction. Its proven methods and increased lead production certainly earn attention. As customer and company behavior alike continues to evolve, account-based marketing is expected to become the norm over the next decade.
Conclusion
Which is better: conventional marketing or account-based marketing? That’s arguably the wrong question. Both have their place. Sales and marketing teams should take the time to consider a variety of factors before drastically changing their advertising strategy. But if your company can spare the resources, account-based marketing holds a great deal of promise.
Oracle Eloqua is a market-leading marketing automation platform that helps companies generate leads that convert. Named a leader in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Marketing Automation Platforms, it enables your team to craft and send personalized emails, integrate seamlessly with other systems, track customer activity, and plan future campaigns—all within a robust but easy-to-understand visual interface. Eloqua integrates with leading customer relationship management systems, including Oracle Sales, Microsoft Dynamics, and Salesforce. Most importantly, Eloqua makes it easy to create and manage email campaigns that generate revenue.
But Eloqua’s capabilities don’t stop there. Marketing automation experts know that sending too many emails or emails that don’t match customer interests runs the risk of being marked as spam and never seen by the customer. Fortunately, Eloqua users have an easy solution.
Avoid These 3 Common Email Campaign & Marketing Automation Pitfalls
Customers delete corporate marketing emails or mark them as spam for a variety of reasons, but three stand out as the worst offenders: 1) they receive way too many emails, 2) the emails come too often, and 3) the flood of emails don’t contain relevant information. Oracle Eloqua can help you address each of these problems.
The first two problems can be addressed with Eloqua’s email scheduling system. This allows you to space out the emails so the customer won’t feel overwhelmed. Follow-up or reminder emails can also be scheduled with enough time in between to avoid harassing the customer. This way, your contact doesn’t feel overwhelmed by the volume of emails they receive.
So now you know your customers won’t get a dozen identical emails from you every day. From here, you can address the third problem: lack of relevant information. With Eloqua’s activity tracking and segmentation functions, you can send each contact information relevant specifically to them and their interests. You can also avoid sending information they don’t want to receive.
Tips for Creating Effective Email Campaigns with Oracle Eloqua
With Eloqua’s built-in functions, running an email campaign from start to finish has never been easier. Here are some critical components of running effective campaigns to keep in mind:
Customer segmentation: Segment your customers and prospects based on past interactions and user preferences. Form a clear picture of what your customer wants.
Collect customer activity data: Observe how your customers respond to each marketing campaign and use the information to target communication based on interests.
Create personalized, dynamic emails: Eloqua allows you to create dynamic content, so your communication includes timely and relevant data, not just a generic, general-purpose email. Your customers deserve emails tailored to their interests.
Maintain professional standards in your email design: Emails should help customers instantly recognize your brand and appear uncluttered and professional.
Tell a story with lead nurturing: Based on customer interest, tell a story through a series of customized emails that go to the right person at an appropriate time.
Review generated data reports: Review data collected to create detailed, customizable reports highlighting the information you need to make informed decisions.
Long-term lead management and quality assurance: With each campaign you run, Eloqua collects data to help you improve future campaigns. Better customer interactions can increase brand awareness, consumer engagement, and sales figures.
Oracle Eloqua Gives Email Marketers an Advantage
Eloqua’s extensive capabilities make email marketing easier than ever. Whether you’re trying to decrease customer unsubscribes, increase your profits, or both, Eloqua has you covered. You can be sure that your promotional emails will actually make it to your subscribers’ inboxes.
Want to see what else Eloqua can do? Get in touch with our team of marketing automation experts today to find out.
It goes without saying that different people have different interests. But marketers who want to get as much promotional material out as possible, as quickly as possible, might not give this fact the consideration it deserves. Prioritizing audience segmentation for marketing is the foundation of a successful campaign.
Why is Segmentation for Marketing Such a Big Deal?
On the surface, creating a single mass marketing campaign designed to appeal to everyone sounds much easier and faster than segmentation. Just get the word out, right? However, a broad advertisement can only do so much. Your customers want products and services suited for them specifically —and to provide that, you need to know your audience.
Segmentation for marketing separates your potential audience into groups, or segments, based on shared characteristics. These characteristics can include:
Job title
Geographic location
Purchase history
Expressed preferences
Engagement with previous promotional material
Etc.
Organizing your audience like this allows you to give potential customers what they want or need. With specialized advertisements created for each segment, you can more effectively market your products and services to an interested audience.
Modern Marketing without Segmentation, aka Spamming
Modern marketing technology allows companies to send millions of emails with just a click. But without proper segmentation, those emails go out to literally everybody on your organization’s contact list. And given the volume of advertising companies tend to do, that’s a LOT of emails every week, if not every day. Consumers have an unflattering nickname for this kind of marketing: spam messages.
Even unintentionally spamming your customers will impact how much they trust you. Aside from the fact that your messages will look suspicious (and maybe even be flagged by the recipient’s inbox), it also reflects a lack of care for your customers. You are doing the opposite of what the modern customer wants, which is to be empowered to get the information they want because they’ve told the company through their choices and action what they want to receive. Likewise, the customer wants to not receive other information as a result of poor segmentation.
Privacy Laws: The Result of Broken Customer Trust
The new wave of privacy laws is, in part, a result of broken customer trust. Corporations abused the data they collected, and consumers pushed back. Without a healthy respect for your customers’ privacy, reflected in part through segmentation and heavy personalization, you are destroying the trust people have in your company.
How 4Segments Can Help
Advanced marketing automation software shouldn’t have to work alone. For truly effective marketing, pair your system with a powerful segmentation tool that displays the data in a clear, visually distinct format. 4Segments fits the bill perfectly.
4Segments allows you to visually create customer segments and build campaigns around those segments, ensuring you target only the right audience. Even better, this software is designed to pair not only with your marketing automation system but with our privacy compliance software, 4Comply. Maximize your marketing efforts without putting yourself at risk! Contact us to learn more.
Marketers know that Oracle Eloqua Custom Objects (COs) can do quite a bit when used correctly. As an Oracle Partner company, we get a lot of questions about what you can do with the data stored in COs. And we have good news! Eloqua’s Program Canvas, introduced in 2016, gives you plenty more options than previous out-of-the-box functionality.
In the Eloqua Program Canvas, you can add Custom Object records to a program and choose from a list of decisions or actions to impose on the data. For instance, you can compare the value in a single field to create a decision tree. You could perform a few basic updates. You can even completely delete a record when it’s no longer needed. But why stop there?
Using Oracle Eloqua Custom Objects in the Program Canvas
Eloqua users are very creative. In our own observations of clients that take advantage of Eloqua systems, we’ve seen marketers:
Perform calculations on fields within or across records
Compare the value of two different fields within or across records
And that’s not even a complete list! Our clients have managed to pull off some amazing feats with Oracle Eloqua Custom Objects.
Expand Oracle Eloqua’s Capabilities with Cloud Apps
As impressive as that list is, there’s likely plenty of other functions that you want that you didn’t see. That’s where Cloud Actions, Cloud Decisions, Cloud Apps, and Cloud Connectors enter the picture. Using Oracle Eloqua’s development platforms and API capabilities, sharp developers can create apps to expand the Program Canvas’s functionality even further and allow for even more creative choices.
Here at 4Thought Marketing, we have several favorite Oracle Eloqua cloud apps. And we’re proud to say we’ve made quite a few ourselves! (Check out our list of in-house created cloud apps here.) If you feel that you have tried everything Oracle Eloqua has to offer in its current state, but still can’t meet your business goals, get in touch with us. We haven’t yet found a CO problem that we can’t solve.
Contact us today to see which of our cloud apps is best suited to help you take full advantage of Oracle Eloqua Custom Objects.
Businesses prioritize finding new leads and new business. The marketing department works overtime to attract interest, sales pushes to close the leads, and both celebrate their success at capturing new business. They then quickly move on to hunting for the next sale. This can certainly help the company’s profits. But what’s wrong with this picture? Both sales and marketing have forgotten a key part of long-term success: customer nurturing.
Outside of regular communications like subscription renewal offers, how often does your organization reach out to your customers? If this only happens rarely, you could be turning customers off with your inattentiveness. Dissatisfied customers tend to look elsewhere for what they want. Not only does this make it far less likely that you’ll keep them as a lifelong customer, but it could also mean that they’ll permanently switch to a competitor with effective customer nurturing in place.
Customer Retention is Cheaper – and More Profitable
The numbers speak for themselves:
Approximately 53% of marketing dollars are spent on customer acquisition, an impressively high number for a rather unimpressive return, according to Bain & Company.
According to the Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer can cost 5-25 times more than sustaining an existing one.
Research by Gartner shows that 80% of your future profits will come from just 20% of your existing customers.
Bain & Company highlights that increasing customer retention rates by 5% will increase profits by up to 95%.
In spite of the significantly better payoff of customer retention efforts, approximately 53% of marketing dollars are spent focusing solely on acquiring new customers, according to Bain & Company. While this is a lower number than before, it still misses the point. Neglecting current customers for new ones will not help your long-term profits.
But what form can effective customer nurturing campaigns take? Let’s look at a few examples.
4 Types of Customer Nurturing
1. On-boarding
On-boarding campaigns introduce the customer to your products, services, or company after they make their first purchase.
You may want to do this, for example, with someone who purchased a new software package. Here’s what this might look like:
A “welcome to the family” message
An overview of the purchased software
A list of the software’s more advanced features
An invitation to join the online support community
Your goal with an on-boarding campaign is to make the customer feel like they’re part of your company, product, and community. This engages, retains, and makes them happy.
2. Renewal Campaign
This type of campaign suits companies that sell products that last through a particular amount of time and must be renewed. These products could include:
Cloud software
Insurance policies
Maintenance contracts
Product warranties
The list goes on – if your company sells anything that requires renewal, this type of nurturing campaign fits in with your goals.
Effective renewal campaigns should generally begin three to six months before the actual renewal date. Encourage early renewals with reduced prices or other incentives. This allows you to show a vested interest in keeping the customer around, instead of appearing to care only about getting money from them.
3. Product Education & Engagement
This type of campaign is similar to on-boarding. However, while on-boarding is geared toward familiarizing customers with the company and product/service, an education and engagement campaign is more targeted.
This is a series of emails that specifically educate on a certain subject. Examples can include:
A five-part email series on maintaining a newly purchased appliance
Tips and tricks to get the most out of your new software
Cosmetic/decorative tips to improve home renovations
Rarely used but helpful features of a recently purchased computer
Customers often appreciate tips, tricks, and updates on current events.
4. Customer Survey
Any survey is better than no survey. Even if most of the recipients simply delete the survey email, they will usually enjoy the thought that your company cares enough to send them a survey and that you value their opinion and state of mind regarding your products and services. In this case, “it’s the thought that counts”.
A Net Promoter Score survey can measure customer loyalty and identify potential areas of improvement for your business.
The Critical Role of Customer Nurturing
The numbers speak for themselves: customer retention and nurturing not only cost less, but also bring in more profits. Constantly prioritizing new leads and new sales costs more money and doesn’t have as high of a return rate.
By carefully nurturing your customers and keeping your brand integrated with their lives, you can turn them into loyal, life-long purchasers. After all, if they bought from you once, they’re more likely to buy from you again. Someone who just learned your company exists isn’t nearly as likely to spend money with you yet.
If you aren’t yet using nurture campaigns, now is a good time to start them. If you already use them as part of your marketing strategy, remember that they need to evolve with your market and now is probably a great time for a message and content review.
Ready to take your customer nurturing strategy to the next level? Get in touch with our team of experts and start improving your profit margin today.
February 13, 2026 | Page 1 of 1 | https://4thoughtmarketing.com/marketing-automation/page/14/
