The latest meeting of the DC area Eloqua Users was held on Thursday, February 5, 2015 in Reston, VA. We had a wonderful turnout of around 50 Eloqua Users and Oracle staff all eager to share and learn from one another.

The event featured four quick-win presentations by local Eloqua users showcasing what they were capable of accomplishing through Eloqua.

Basant Elhady, Marketing CRM Manager, comScore, Inc presents on Lessons Learned with Closed Loop Reporting (CLR)

First up was Basant Elhady, Marketing CRM Manager with comScore, Inc. (a big thank you for providing a venue for the event). Basant presented on Lessons Learned with Closed Loop Reporting (CLR) and painted their 18+ month journey of planning for Eloqua and CLR through the development phase and CLR implementation. The lessons learned by comScore included:

1. Keep it simple. Don’t try to get overly complex with your reporting right off the bat.
2. Analyze, rinse, repeat. You have to continuously spot check your reports, break down your data and analyze to find out what’s going on.
3. Don’t be afraid to just start over.
4. Get support involved. Whether that means calling into Eloqua support, or enlisting help on topliners or others in your Eloqua network.
5. Talk about some of the important decisions up front, defining what behavior will be counting as having influenced opportunities in your pipeline.
6. Do you have a scalable process for entering Actual Cost into Eloqua?
7. Expectation setting with the team. Figure out what is possible now, vs what might require some planning, budgeting or process changes to get to.

Christine Burke, Digital Marketing Manager and Leah Anderson, Digital Marketing Analyst, at GovLoop present how they use social media ads to grow their Eloqua database.

Next up was the gals from GovLoop, Christine Burke, Digital Marketing Manager and Leah Anderson, Digital Marketing Analyst, who spoke about how they use social media ads to grow their Eloqua database. GovLoop’s goal is to build community engagement which includes growing the lists. Six months ago their Facebook ads lacked brand awareness, they needed higher quality contacts, and they had no explicit opt-in opportunities for lists. GovLoop implemented a new landing page which produced more people in their funnel, but they were not necessarily engaged with GovLoop. They sought out to increase landing page conversion and found their solution with a one-field form which increased their form conversion. During the final phase they added opt-in boxes which solved their goal for increasing opt-in conversion.

The results of their re-design speak for themselves; they cut CPA by 70%, increased conversions by 652%, increased reach by 565% and 70% of conversions opted-in!

Brynne Burgess, Marketing Operations Manager, Rosetta Stone presented on how to get stakeholders to better segment and target their email distribution lists.

Brynne Burgess, Marketing Operations Manager, Rosetta Stone presented on a struggle most Eloqua users have faced – how to get stakeholders to better segment and target their email distribution lists. How many times have you received pushback from Marketing Managers that didn’t want to segment their list or they felt their content was relevant for everyone? Rosetta Stone’s Marketing Ops Team experienced the same issue and had to learn how to pull together the data to show that segmenting was crucial to their campaign success.

The first step they took was to pull together and analyze all of the relevant data. Their results were categorized as the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Good:

• Overall email frequency was much lower than expected
• Their click through rate was in line

The bad:

• Unsubscribe rates were high
• They had some contacts who received a few emails over the year but they had some contacts who received upwards of 30 emails throughout the year

The ugly:

• Unsubscribe rates for contacts receiving between 36-40 emails was 14.2%
• Average unsubscribe rates in Germany was 7.1% and all communications there are purely opt-in

Their analysis was the eye-opener that the Marketing Managers needed and they are now in the process of moving towards change. Their solution includes a nurturing track and continuous evaluation of engagement levels.

J.R. Boynton, Manager, Outreach Systems & Analytics, Center for American Progress & CAP Action, presented on how your CRM could pull data straight out of Eloqua.

Our final presenter looked at how your CRM could pull data straight out of Eloqua with a presentation by J.R. Boynton, Manager, Outreach Systems & Analytics, Center for American Progress & CAP Action. Center for American Progress does a lot of integrations with a goal to display analytics/metrics in their CRM system. J.R. provided us with an introduction to Application Programming Interface (API) and provided real-world examples of data your CRM could pull from Eloqua: Segment Counts and Segment IDs. The presentation also provided valuable notes on how to get started:

1. Use the API Explorer Live Docs
2. Start with the REST API (simpler than Bulk)
3. Use the 2.0 API version
4. Segment counts are unique per user; your API user must queue the Segment to be re-counted

DC Eloqua User Group Meeting Breakout Session

Before breaking for beers and networking, we split up into five interactive sessions to provide the opportunity to share stories, ask questions, and learn from each other. Everyone shuffled around the crowded room and selected from one of the five groups: Integrations, Closed Loop Reporting, Lead Scoring, Social, and Oracle Marketing Cloud. With several Oracle representatives in attendance each group was able to speak freely and receive assistance from Oracle directly.

Visit the Washington DC Area Eloqua User Group to access copies of the presentations. If you aren’t already a member, please join the Washington DC Area Eloqua User Group on Topliners to access the presentations and details on our next session!