The Eloqua Campaign Canvas is your key asset helping design & deliver a more tailored & personalised Customer Experience (CX). However, continuing to ‘send emails’ as you always have, e.g. with your previous email systems, will not deliver the results you’re likely expecting.
It’s starts with a paradigm shift, a new way of thinking.
Speaking with a new Eloqua user recently, they were seeking advice on how to use Eloqua to deliver their annual national roadshow registration campaign. The annual roadshow consists of eleven events in ten cities delivered over a three week period with 1,000+ attendees from across the country.
Example
My first question was “Do you have a confirmed list of attendees from 2019, with email addresses?”. The answer was yes. I suggested we at least create two Segments, the first to those who attended (not simply registered) in 2019 and acknowledge their past attendance in the 2020 invitations. Moving forward, capturing attendance as an External Activity will make this Segmentation process easier in 2021.
In place of diving head first into the next campaign and doing what you’ve always done, Stop. Listen. Think. Ask Questions. Then move forward.
Stop
Last week I was building a Segment, applying filters and looking closely at the contacts that made up that Segment. I noticed that my marketing audience was made up of a mix of CMO’s, Marketing Directors and Marketing Managers. This was visible from the Job Category contact field.
This got me thinking…
A single message to this audience would be better suited to some Dynamic Content that would enable me to tailor headings, email subject lines and calls to action.
This is what I mean by stop. Make time to understand your audience, the flow of you campaign and the CX you want to deliver.
Listen
Before you race off and send one email to 120,000+ contacts, talk to your stakeholders. Listen to what they have to say. What are their expectations of the campaign? Simply sending an email may not help meet their objectives. What’s their desired end state?
Listening includes the need to ask some clarifying questions. However, these questions should be framed in such a way as to help you uncover more about the campaign so you can maximise Eloqua’s functionality. Your colleagues don’t know what they don’t know, it’s your job to ask good open-ended questions to get them talking.
Think
Think through the discussions you’ve had with your stakeholders. Are there Eloqua assets that could be re-used? Are there other campaigns to think about including e.g. always on campaigns like “Update My Details”, “Preference Centre Invitations” etc? Consider providing opportunities for people to subscribe to regular communications.
Is there value in adding campaign members to Shared Lists to help with inclusion or exclusion from concurrent or future campaigns? What about personalisation? Will you be using Eloqua Signatures? Do Field Merge defaults need to be thought through to suit this campaign?
Ask Questions
Once you’ve gone away and thought through the above and have a solid idea of the content and the main calls to action, you will be in a position to design your Campaign Canvas. The audience or Segment needs to be at the heart of what you design, how can you make the CX as seamless as possible?
In Summary
The one aspect I find the hardest about my role is to help people make the paradigm shift from simply sending emails, to thinking through the CX and then adapting the campaign to suit.
Don’t plan the campaign in isolation from your target audience. Use Eloqua’s segmentation capability to build an audience based on expressed and implied interests i.e. profile data and their Digital Body Language™.
A smaller, more targeted list of people will generally deliver a better result than emailing anyone with a heartbeat.
