There’s great power in understanding the way people are engaging with you through their digital body language. Evaluation Periods in conjunction with the Eloqua Campaign Canvas and Decision steps provides the insight you need to understand a person’s digital body language.
I remember when I started using Eloqua 10, I found the interface so easy and powerful. It can do a huge range of things. One important function, amongst all the many functions, is the evaluation step when analysing people’s digital body language.
For example, you send an email, you wait for 3 days and then you want to check to see if they’ve done something. That “something” could be did they open an email? did they submit a form? did they click-through on a link?
The “evaluation period” is the amount of time in the past that you want to check to see if someone completed a step. It’s critical to ensure the flow of people through a campaign.
Insight Through Digital Body Language
The Eloqua Decision Steps enable you to review a person’s behaviour during a campaign and then act in a specific way. If they didn’t open an email within a set period of time, you will want to send them a reminder. This is usually a repeat of the first email, you may want to edit it slightly to acknowledge that they could be busy i.e. “It looks like you may have missed my first email…“
Did they Submit a Form? This is a another way to measure their engagement and act accordingly. Keep in mind you’re able to send an email using the Eloqua Form Processing Steps as well – this is generally something you would do when you want to acknowledge their specific engagement e.g. a confirmation email for an event they’ve registered for or a thank you email when they’ve submitted a form to access a white paper or video content.
The Campaign Canvas in concert with Form Processing Steps enables you to deliver a personalised level of engagement based on the person’s digital body language.
Over time, you can then segment people based on their digital body language, review this in context of recency and automatically engage with them. This can then be used to target individuals based on their readiness to hear more from you. A careful review of people’s digital body language gives you insight beyond the basic profile data most companies have of their contact data base.
The evaluation period is set against a “Decision” step on the Eloqua 10 Campaign Canvas. In the example above, the period is set to “0”. This doesn’t help, you need to set the period to be at least the same for the time frame you have on the wait step in the previous step e.g. if you’re wanting to know if the contact has opened the email at least once in the past week (as above) I would usually have an evaluation period for the same amount of time, 1 week.
Use the Evaluation period during Event Registration Campaigns
If your event invitation goes out 30 days before the actual event taking place, that’s the time period you want to use for the “Evaluation Period”. You have no control over when a person opens an email, clicks through on a link or submits a form. You may want to sent the invitation on the first of the month. If your evaluation period is only 3 days, you will miss someone who opens the email on the 15th of the month.
The Evaluation Period will help progress people through your campaign based on their digital body language and importantly you will then enable Eloqua to direct them based on the campaign canvas that you’ve designed.
