Email Marketing Automation

Oracle Eloqua Pros and Cons | Sitecore Integration | Eloqua Series | Part 8

January 28, 2023January 28, 2023 nikkipunjabi 1 Comment

Our Eloqua Series is coming to an end, where we’ll discuss Eloqua’s pros and cons as well as the integration with Sitecore CMS.

Eloqua is one of the leading email marketing platforms. Below are the Pros and Cons of Eloqua.

Pros:
API Integrations – Eloqua Rest API integration is incredibly straightforward to set up and customize with any system. The main approach for the integration should be Forms, as I stated in an earlier blog post. There are two types of integration with Eloqua, one for the Sitecore Forms and the second for System forms or fixed forms like registration, login, newsletter subscription, etc,. In our case, we have a Sitecore Submit Action called “Submit to Eloqua” that is linked to Eloqua. We construct a form on Sitecore Forms, and the exact same form is built on Eloqua. We then connect the two forms using the Sitecore Submit Action, passing the correct Eloqua Form ID and other fields in the necessary JSON format. And for System forms obviously, we need Developers to set up a one-time configuration.

Bulk API Integration – Earlier I created the utility to transfer the users in Bulk from the SQL database to Eloqua. It was really easy to understand and implement the Bulk API Integration. This is used to send large amounts of data to Eloqua. I also created a scheduler that runs every day at midnight and sends the daily new users to Eloqua.

Oracle Eloqua Reports to Google Spreadsheets | Eloqua Series | Part 7

December 21, 2022January 25, 2023 nikkipunjabi Leave a comment

Nowadays, we always look for ways to automate. This blog post explains how to automate the process of exporting the Eloqua reports to Google Spreadsheets and share them with different stakeholders.

In Eloqua Series – Part 5, we created the reports using Oracle BI, in this blog post you’ll see how can you send that data directly to Google Spreadsheet and also create Data Studio Dashboards.

By making use of the scheduler within the Oracle BI tool you can send the required report by email. You might not have heard about Microsoft Power Automate – but using Power Automate you can send that report to Google Spreadsheets or Google Drive or Microsoft Onedrive and you can do a lot more processing and automation by using Power Automate.

10 Email Marketing Best Practices | Eloqua Series | Part 6

November 30, 2022December 14, 2022 nikkipunjabi Leave a comment

This blog post is very interesting and useful for everyone who sends bulk emails. Here I’m describing some of the best observations and practices we have seen and followed for all the email marketing campaigns that we dispatch. In addition, email plays a very substantial role in getting a user engaged, interacting with, and converting into a buyer.

Mobile First – In this digital era, everybody is shifting towards handheld devices. 85% of the traffic on the website/emails is from the Mobile Phone. Always look for creating Mobile-friendly email. Also, many email marketing platforms do provide an option to show/hide content based on Desktop/Mobile. Do make use of that feature, A/B Test, and create mobile-first emails.

Email Campaigns | Oracle Eloqua Series | Part 2

August 1, 2022December 14, 2022 nikkipunjabi Leave a comment

The main reason you go with Eloqua is Email Campaigns which is obvious. A campaign allows you to give your contacts an engaging, personalized, and unique experience. In this post, we’ll see different types of Email Campaigns and what kinds of scenarios you can play around with on Eloqua.

You need to keep the following things in place before sending an email:

Email:
- Header
- Email Body
- Footer
Email is associated with the following:
- Email Preference Center: To allow the user to provide more preferences to get their interest, country, and so on.
- Newsletter Unsubscribe: This is a mandate by default for all newsletters.
- Email Group: To define to which group the user will be unsubscribed. With email groups, you can classify emails for different audiences and allow subscribers and unsubscribers within those specific newsletters, or you can use it for different brands. This has to be used very carefully. If I unsubscribe from one brand I should still receive an email from other brands from the same Eloqua instance. We have a proper strategy in place defining when and in what case we need to define an email group. If you are going to start working on Eloqua then you need to define the ground rules of creating an Email Group in the beginning. Email groups can also be helpful to create reports.
- Segment – To define to which audience this email should reach. Segmentation is a very important topic and needs a detailed understanding of how you can make use of your data to properly define the segments. Our email campaign requirements dictate the types of segments we create for different audiences. In order to send an email campaign, it is necessary to determine what the requirements are ahead of time. For example, we create a specific segment to send a monthly newsletter to a certain audience, the different segments for sending an email based on user interest, and so on. Recommend you to go through the Eloqua guide for segmentation and if you have any queries you can reach out to me.
  If you are already familiar with segmentation on Mailchimp then you can easily understand this on Eloqua but one thing to keep in mind here is that Mailchimp allows you to store the same email address in multiple audiences while on Eloqua it doesn’t work that way. In Eloqua, an Email Address is a unique identifier for each contact. And you create segments based on your user data and to which brand (Email Group) they are subscribed.

Oracle Eloqua – Marketing Automation Review | Part 1

July 21, 2022December 14, 2022 nikkipunjabi Leave a comment

As a result of this blog post, you will gain a better understanding of how Oracle Eloqua works as well as what some of its advantages and disadvantages are.

Having worked on Eloqua for over 4 years now, I hope my experience with the tool will help you better understand it. Moreover, I am an Oracle Eloqua CX Marketing 2020 Certified Implementation Specialist.

I would like to clarify that Oracle Eloqua is a Marketing Automation tool and not a CRM. Often, people claim Oracle Eloqua is a CRM tool, but it is not.

Around 25+ of my colleagues are responsible for creating and writing emails directly on Eloqua, which I think is a very good point. Our team is responsible for segmenting, grouping, and sending B2B/B2C emails to the right people. Email communication is handled entirely through Eloqua, including transactional and marketing emails. Day-to-day, we do a lot of stuff using Eloqua, including a lot of automation and reporting. In the upcoming blog post, I will describe it in more detail. Some features on Eloqua are extra cost features, so we do not use them.