After you have your data clean and your initial nurture programs set up, where do you go with Eloqua? This video talks about sales and marketing alignment and “nurturing” your customers (through onboarding and cross-selling campaigns.
Tag: Eloqua
What do you do after your Eloqua SmartStart? Part 1
These are the kinds of plans you ought to have in place before acquiring Eloqua – but what you have here is a great framework for thinking through your first tentative year as a Marketing Automation guru!
Learning Marketing Automation? Dive Right In
The decision to work with a marketing automation program like Eloqua is no small decision. It’s going to involve a tremendous expansion of the skill-set that you possess. It’s going to tax your abilities, and half-measures (adopting it part-way) is not going to get you where you want to go. If you adopt Eloqua, your marketing department is going to need a re-think from top to bottom.
As the Topliners poll shows nearby, the best way to become comfortable with Eloqua is to simply dive right in. (Click on the chart to see a larger version of it).
While “diving in” may make some sense, you have to be careful about what you’re diving into. The process of learning Eloqua, from beginning to end, involves a great deal of effort (which is worth it). The instructions that Eloqua provided at http://growth.eloqua.com provide a realistic road-map of what that journey entails.
Take a look at the list of just first-level of things you’ll need to do to “lay the groundwork” from that chart. I’ll go through these and provide just a few brief words on each of them.
Persona Development: This involves fairly intensive discussions with the sales department to understand who the various people are who are buying your products and services, why they are buying them, and what the process is like to get from “interest” to “purchase”.
Data Management/Standardize Data: Do you have data already? If so, there’s a likelihood that it’s not been “normalized”. If you don’t have data, you’ll need to think through and understand what you’ll need, and how to make sure it’s captured properly.
Naming Conventions and Folder Organization: Eloqua’s folder structure is an important part of classifying your emails, and before you send your first email out, you should have some kind of roadmap to make certain your emails are organized correctly as you continue to build out your program.
Email Deliverability and Best Practices: This is a whole separate science. It’s not as if there’s a dearth of material here; rather, the challenge will be to understand what targets you’d like to achieve, and then figure out how to be selective about which “best practices” you need to adopt.
Increase Email Response Rates: In some ways, this is a subset of the previous item; in other ways, this is a function of testing to achieve the kinds of targets you have set for yourself.
Subscription Preferences and Management: It’s an opt-in world; people hate getting spammed, and users will want to be able to opt themselves into and out of certain categories of information they will receive. Thinking through these categories is going to be vital to your efforts.
Inactive Contact Management: Eloqua charges you solely based on the number of contacts you have in your database. That means, if you can reduce the number of contacts you have, you can reduce the amount of money you pay for your annual contract. But at what cost?
Web to Lead Form Integration: Imagine the process that your potential customers will go through while in your “sales funnel”. You’ll want to learn more and more about them as they move forward. But what do you need to know, and when do you need to know it?
Lead Source Capture: How will you capture the names of individuals in the first place? More and more marketers are popping up big “give-us-your-email-address-now” screens in front of the first visit to your website. Is that what you want to be known for?
Don’t think you don’t need to do all of this. If you have a website – if you hope to use your website as a part of your selling process, then you either need to do all this, and more, or risk having your business become irrelevant to your users.
Consider the broad range of disciplines that are involved in just this list alone. This is merely “laying your groundwork”, before you actually accomplish one thing. The amount of work that needs to go simply into laying your groundwork should be a sign to you that an Eloqua implantation is not going to be a one-time “set-it-and-forget-it” software installation. It’s going to be a way of life.
Introducing 4Segments
4Thought Marketing introduced 4Segments at Oracle’s “Modern Marketing Experience” (#MME15) – this a tool that will revolutionize your ability to create, understand, and share the value of your marketing lists and segments. If you’ve built “segments” in any of the major “marketing automation” platforms (Eloqua included), you’ll love the simplicity that 4Segments brings to the task.
4Segments will enable you to take personalization to a whole new level in your marketing content efforts, as you seek to build the relevance you need to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Contact me for a demonstration of this cool new tool.
Updated: my résumé and LinkedIn profile
I am still: a marketing manager (recently with a start-up software/robotics firm), long-term copywriter, seeking a position as a marketing technologist (Eloqua preferred) on a team dedicated to marketing automation, digital marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and social media.
My current résumé: Bugay-2013-Resume-REVISED-07-01
I’ve also added links to articles I’ve published in the last several weeks:
Understanding Buyer Personas: A Collision of Human and Technology (June 19)
http://acooze.co/capital/buyer-personas-a-collision-of-human-and-technology/
If content marketing is one side of the coin, then could marketing automation be the other? In fact, could we argue that the software came first, and [only] more recently, the set of best practices that have evolved around the software (which became known as content marketing or inbound marketing)?
Define the Human Side of the Buyer Persona (June 26)
http://acooze.co/capital/define-the-human-side-of-the-buyer-persona/
The buyer persona from the human angle: Most likely, you as a marketer will need to work with sales in order to understand who you’re likely to be speaking to. You know what you should do this with as much detail as possible. You may even want to poll or interview some customers.
Buyer Personas and the Marketing Funnel (July 5)
http://acooze.co/capital/buyer-personas-and-the-marketing-funnel/
Of course, to draw a proper map at this point would be an extremely complex task, even in the generic. All that we’ve done at this point is to try to put together the big picture of content management and data analysis, and how they fit together. To get specific would become even more complex than that. We have not yet begun to map data to the various touch-points.
See also: http://acooze.co/content-marketing/
Please follow me @johnbugay
Where are the “marketing automation” experts in Pittsburgh?
This is a serious question. Just two months in to a job search in which I’ve focused on offering my skills in the specialized field of “marketing automation”, I cannot say that I have found any marketing automation practitioners among the ad agencies in Pittsburgh.
I follow some very active discussions about it on LinkedIn and Twitter.
But it seems as if very few people in Pittsburgh even know what “marketing automation” is, and fewer still know how to excel at it.
While things like “marketing automation”, “inbound marketing”, “content marketing”, and “demand generation” are setting the rest of the marketing world on fire, it seems as if very few marketing organizations and fewer ad agencies in Pittsburgh even know what it is.
Take a look at the websites of three of the largest ad agencies in Pittsburgh:
You won’t find “marketing automation” or the other terms on these sites. And yet, it should be “bread-and-butter” for these folks. Especially if they want to consider themselves as “thought leaders”.
“Marketing automation” is as important a discipline as there is now. And yet there are still agencies who are leading with their prowess on “SEO”, even though changing Google algorithims are rendering that discipline obsolete.
Eloqua and Marketo are probably the leading solution providers in this space. Eloqua had an IPO about a year ago for $12 per share, and Oracle bought them in December for $24 per share at quite a premium. Marketo had an IPO on Friday, opening at about $13 per share, and closing at $23.
Neither of these is an earth-shattering amount in the billions, but these are only two of probably several dozen “marketing automation” solution providers who are elbowing each other for market share. Their success portends a trend.
And it’s not so new that folks can’t have heard about it. Especially not if they’re having extremely successful IPOs.
Much of Pittsburgh seems to be sitting out this hugely important technological development.
I received the following recommendation yesterday
Yesterday I received the following recommendation from our “Success Manager” at Eloqua — a person whose job it is to help their clients understand this complex system:
“I had the pleasure of working with John as the Marketing Advisor for his account as he took the lead for his company’s use of Eloqua in late 2012. During our bi-weekly meetings, John would come to the table with thoughtful questions and having done thorough research about campaigns and solutions he wanted to implement. He displayed an intense desire to take segmentation and personalization in the company’s marketing to the next level. He understands that this is a critical component to driving revenue from marketing investments. He dove in head first to learn best practices in marketing automation and how they could [be] applied to the unique business model in which he was operating. I would recommend John to bring his now critical skill set of content + strategy + understanding your buyer + technology to any business.”
This recommendation is from my connection Sarah Hums of Eloqua (now Oracle), and may be found at http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbugay.
I was laid off again yesterday
And today, as they say, is the first day of the rest of my life, again.
Most recently, I was unemployed roughly from June 2009 through February 2010. That was a difficult time to be unemployed. The economy was a wreck, and would remain so for a couple more years. (Some will say it’s not much better, and that’s true).
I’m up early for the day – it’s about 1:50 am as I write. I hardly know where to begin. I’m thinking “Dun & Bradstreet” lists; I’m thinking “Eloqua” – I’m tagging this post “Eloqua” because I consider that to be the primary job skill I’ve picked up in the last few years. My hope is that it’s not an insignificant one.
Eloqua is “database marketing” and “marketing automation” rolled into one. I’m a member at http://www.ritesite.com – which I haven’t used for a while. I’ve been told “LinkedIn” is now a fabulous resource. I’m going to check it out. My hope is to morph this site into a job search site. Whatever that means.
For those of you who have come here, looking for news about my wife and her struggle with CMML leukemia, I guess you could say “no news is good news”. There is no sign of the recurrence of the disease. There are some annoying things going on.
For a while I had a series called “Vampire Bride”. She was getting blood transfusions on a fairly regular basis. As it turns out, with blood transfusions, iron accumulates in your body, and it can be damaging over time. So now they are “bleeding” her – taking a pint of blood out each week, (and I think they need to do this eight times), because the iron levels in her blood are too high. (What about “Geritol”?)
Plus, her immune system is brand new. So she has NO immunities built up. And so, she has managed to catch virtually every cold and bug that has come down the pike this winter.
Very high on my list of concerns will be to provide health care coverage for her. She’s a veteran, and she’s in the VA system, but moving to the VA system would force her to lose her current medical team – Dr Rossetti, Dr Jalil, and their whole group at West Penn Hospital. They saved her life, literally, and Beth is still in need of this ongoing type of treatment. They are familiar with her case. My hope would be to see it through.
On my end, it’s a whole different world. Eloqua is a whole new “job skill”. “Marketing automation” is a whole new world. The world of “social media” is completely new, since the last time I looked for a job.
For now, “job-one” is to craft a quasi-kind of plan, which can go out the door once the bullets start flying.
My (lack of) online presence and how Beth is doing
A couple of people have mentioned to me now that they haven’t seen me online for a while, and they were wondering what was happening with Beth. I have to say, almost nothing was happening, except that she was getting a tiny bit better each day – imperceptibly, almost – and it almost seemed like there was no news to report each day. I guess healing is like that: nothing seems to be happening, and then one day you feel just a little bit better.
Things are improving with her, on most fronts, though slowly. Her BK virus (urinary tract infection) has finally settled down. For this one, there was no drug treatment, but it simply needed to be flushed out. Apparently it was, though it took three weeks-worth of major urinary-tract discomfort. The numbers on her CMV virus seem to be way down, too. (She had been receiving Ganciclovir for this. It was a real danger, and the numbers came in slowly, but they came down). The clot in her arm is still there, but it will likely take two or three months to go away. She is getting a drug treatment to make sure another one doesn’t form. (This is a tricky proposition, because her platelets are low as it is, and the drug that prevents clots is a blood thinner. So she has received some platelets, in addition to the drug treatment). However, the swelling is noticeably down in her arm and her legs, though it is still troublesome.
On top of all these things, the doctors have started her on a physical therapy (PT) regimen, which has her walking, exercising, and gently massaging her arm to try and further relieve the swelling. The walking, they are sure, will help the fluids in her legs to be further reduced. She still isn’t eating right (a factor which contributed to the swelling), but there is another story behind that.
The chemotherapy did a number on her taste buds. So food always still tastes bad. In an attempt to try to get her to eat some protein, I bought her a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. She said she was genuinely hungry for this. So I brought her one, and she ate a few bites. She couldn’t eat more than that, so I ate the rest. After I left the hospital that night, she threw up and started having bad cramps. So now they are checking to see that the GVHD hasn’t moved into her gastrointestinal (GI) tract. (GVHD affects you in three specific areas: skin, GI tract, and liver). My thought is that it was just the Quarter Pounder after her not having eaten anything solid for a while. But they want to be sure.
* * *
Yesterday I made chicken soup (Dad’s famous chicken soup – one of the few things I make that everyone in the house loves). I took a thermos-full of hot fresh soup down to Beth in the hospital, and she absolutely loved it. So I froze a bunch of it in small containers, and I’ll take more down to her later today.
I’ve continued to make almost daily trips to the hospital through these last three weeks while she’s been in, though I haven’t taken time off work as I did for the transplant. This seemed less serious, although, at times, it wasn’t. The viral infections could have been life-threatening complications.
Things are busy at work. And to spin the old saying, “when your wife is on her deathbed, nobody wishes they’d spent more time at the office”. But as bad as she felt, she wasn’t on her deathbed; and we still have to pay the bills. We’re continuing to get a tremendous amount of help from our church (which we don’t want to have to rely on), and some financial donations are coming in. But life will go on, and do not want to continue to be dependent on that kind of help. We need also to focus on being financially responsible in the months and years ahead (whatever happens). So in addition to working, and even working at home (I’m working with a “cloud-based” “marketing automation” program called Eloqua; it’s got quite a lot of capabilities, and in part I’m learning them, in part I’m using them, and in part I’m playing administrator), I’ve been doing quite a bit of running between places.
In addition to that, though, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last month collecting information and submitting it to both Social Security and the VA – Beth will qualify for Social Security disability (I believe); we are less hopeful that the military will consider her illness to be “service related” (although I suppose it is possible, and we intend to keep pressing this issue).
It’s Saturday; since Beth is not tied to the toilet, I can take the kids down to the hospital, and we can all sit and visit in the waiting area, without having to worry about sneaking Dani in. Hopefully, we’ll be there with soup.