Oracle Eloqua Campaign Configuration Excellence Benchmarks

Digital marketing has become invaluable when it comes to the success of a company. It enables visibility on the market and to potential clients.

Gaining exposure implies a broader range of people that may choose a company’s products or services. And this generates more revenue.

In the last decade, marketing has started to focus heavily on the digital world, with more and more campaigns being deployed in digital formats. Online marketing has become so paramount that any company missing out on a robust digital presence is at a severe competitive disadvantage.

Creating and managing digital campaigns is entirely different from traditional marketing. Although some foundation concepts still apply, the tools and knowledge vary significantly.

Along with MarTech systems’ growth, marketing automation helps create, manage and streamline digital campaigns more efficiently. Adding a marketing automation platform such as Eloqua to a company’s MarTech stack facilitates collecting essential customer-driven information, faster and more comfortably, significantly impacting decision-making processes.

However, the most significant benefits revolve around marketing automation platforms simplifying some of the most time-consuming modern marketing tasks. In this sense, Eloqua automates lead generation processes, skyrockets personalization, and creates a central hub where digital campaigns can be created and managed.

To launch successful marketing automation campaigns, though, you need the right tools, knowledge, and expertise to make any challenges in campaign production more comfortable to manage, turning them into valuable opportunities.

Oracle Eloqua is one of the most powerful enterprise MarTech tools, making digital marketing efforts considerably more manageable. It is a marketing automation platform that allows you to reach an impressive number of prospects autonomously.

Creating the most effective marketing automation campaigns naturally implies aiming for configuration operational excellence. Following industry best practices and gaining extensive Eloqua know-how increases campaigns’ performance, leading to improved results generated through optimal resource allocation.

This article will guide you through several benchmarks for operational excellence in configuring highly successful Eloqua digital marketing campaigns.

Read on to uncover valuable information on specific campaign types, industry best practices for campaign intake and configuration, performance measurements, such as KPI analyses, or drafting useful campaign operational reports. Let’s dive in.

Common campaign types

First, let’s look at the most common campaign types you can create in Eloqua to attract, engage and delight your customers, at all stages of their buyer journey.

Powerful marketing automation platforms such as Oracle Eloqua support the creation of multiple campaign types. Depending on your specific needs and business requirements, you decide what kind of campaign you want to create.

Single Email Campaigns are basic campaigns, deployed for simple email necessities. These campaigns can be used when there is a need to communicate swiftly with your consumers through emails. For instance, you can provide your consumers with price offers, service notifications, or simple invites very quickly and easily.

Multi-step Campaigns are more complex than single email ones. This type of campaign includes more steps and decisions that can be included in the campaign creation process’s workflow. You can opt for elements such as email, landing pages, decision steps, and custom actions. These deliver a higher level of personalization than the one present in a single email campaign. Due to the high customizability, these types are perfect to use when you need specific marketing needs to be met.

A/B Testing Campaigns are an incredible tool when in the arsenal of digital marketers. This type of campaign can be used to learn more about your audience and target market. It gives you the ability to see inside your consumers’ mindset and spot cues that have to be used in your campaigns to generate a more positive response from your business audience.

Nurture Campaigns are an emotional type of campaign that marketers typically use to establish an emotional bond with audiences. Email nurture campaigns imply sending different educational content and resources that your audience finds attractive to address their needs. This positions brands as knowledgeable and builds trust with contact lists.

Eloqua Campaign Configuration

After aligning your digital marketing goals with the campaign selected, you can start the configuration through different parameters. Setting these up well is critical to the creation process.

It’s safe to say that if not handled most beneficially, loss of valuable resources is at stake, along with unsatisfying campaign results. In other words, how a campaign configuration process is launched, from the very start, can make or break the project.

Depending on the type of campaign you intend to create, you can encounter different resource demands for campaign planning, intake, configuration, and creative design.

Different Eloqua campaign types imply different degrees of complexity – often determined by audience sizes and the rules behind their formation, the degree of personalization, or the number of Eloqua assets, actions, and decision steps involved.

Naturally, all these aspects require a vast amount of time, resources, and meticulousness to properly pull off. The silver lining is that new methods are always developed or discovered to help optimize campaign configuration processes – from intake to delivery.

Several aspects also negatively impact the campaign configuration time. It is essential to glance at these beforehand, as preventing bottlenecks in campaign production is virtually the first and foremost important step to take in optimizing the Eloqua campaign production process.

These bottlenecks can have a variety of drawbacks if left unaddressed. A lack of campaign focus on business priorities, mixed responsibilities or roles, undocumented campaign processes for intake, assessment, configuration, and reporting are prime examples. In turn, these issues can create problems such as employee burnouts, overcapacity workloads, decision-making pressure, and campaign delivery errors.

Explore our Customer Case Study to better understand how years of MarTech best-practice experience allowed us to tackle these issues for our clients efficiently.

Steps in Eloqua campaign configuration

1. Audience configuration

Audience configuration is among the most important parameters to set up when creating a digital marketing campaign in Eloqua or any other marketing automation platform.

This is crucial as the software virtually allows you to fully customize your targeting approach, leveraging highly advanced functions and data collected.

With sufficient expertise in campaign configuration and the valuable know-how in mind, you may impeccably set up audiences and benefit from Eloqua’s high accuracy targeting capabilities and personalization functionalities.

In turn, you unlock new heights of potential to attract, engage and delight your contacts, meaning that you are set to witness a much better return on your investment, by generating a more positive reaction from your target market.

2. Assets configuration

Assets configuration is the next essential step in your digital campaign creation process. This represents the moment you are adding all elements of the campaign to its canvas.

Multiple asset types such as emails, forms, and landing pages can be integrated into the Eloqua campaign canvas. And these are the elements with which contacts interact.

Thus, aside from the importance of ensuring flawlessness from a creative perspective, assets’ technical configuration as to correctly linking, scheduling, and sending options is equally paramount. Carefully handling these setups creates the best opportunity to engage your customers.

3. Decisions configuration

Decisions are one configuration area of your campaign that undoubtedly significantly impacts campaign efficiency and performance.

Decision elements allow you to customize contacts’ user experience throughout the entire campaign, based on actions they themselves take during set times.

Instead of personalizing this manually for each contact, Eloqua records actions taken and autonomously guides contacts through the designated path for said actions. In this way, the MarTech software creates a more streamlined and automated process that requires a fraction of the usual resources.

4. Actions configuration

Actions represent another configuration step that can improve marketing automation campaigns’ efficiency, leveraging Eloqua’s full potential.

Here, the platform is set up to take action based on the decision contacts take. For instance, these actions can determine whether a contact has to be redirected, moved, or added to other lists or campaigns. Considering this option is rewarding, as Eloqua, therefore, automates a very time-consuming manual task.

Benchmarks for operational excellence

Using industry benchmarks to gauge digital campaigns’ effectiveness is critical for collecting invaluable know-how in configuring future campaigns.

Each campaign created falls under a slightly, or widely different purpose. Their complexities differ across, respective of their aim, and hence, so does the configuration effort required.

As mentioned earlier, different campaign types imply different configuration times. For example, our in-house experts can configure a complete webinar campaign in 2-4 days, once provided with complete intake information.

For an extensive, highly personalized email nurture campaign, the configuration time amounts to 2 weeks, depending on the complexity of assets and campaign decision steps for customization.

Depending on the number of offers included and the type of audience configuration, newsletter campaigns may extend to up to 1 week for the more complex, or even take 2 business days to produce and deploy, if they are more straightforward.

To obtain further insights into what sets our configuration team apart when it comes to Eloqua digital campaign configuration, check out the complimentary INFOGRAPHIC: Operational Excellence in Campaign Production.

Our subject matter MarTech experts virtually ensure Eloqua marketing automation campaigns are appropriately configured and deliver the most accurate measurements to determine campaigns’ efficiency. In a nutshell, we help save configuration time for our client’s in-house marketing automation teams to facilitate better decision-making.

But assessing your campaigns’ success, besides the time and efforts required to produce them, also implies determining the right measurements or KPIs to use. Below you can see a list of the most essential indicators to keep an eye on. Check them out here or download a handy infographic, on the house.

• Total Sent is a metric that measures the volume of emails sent in a campaign. It is useful to have an overview of the emails sent to your campaign contacts.
• Total Delivered measures total emails that actually arrived in your contacts’ inbox; different from the total email sent. This metric is calculated by subtracting the total BounceBack emails from the total emails sent. Email deliverability focuses on best practices ensuring the emails end up in the inbox of the target audience. Faulty deliverability management can affect reputation and brand value. To learn more about keeping these threats under control, check out the article on top challenges in Oracle Eloqua Platform Administration and how to enhance your governance.
• Hard Bounces are a category of bouncebacks for emails. A hard bounce is defined as a permanent failure in email delivery, otherwise said an email that could never be delivered to your contact. There might be different reasons for this. However, the most common ones are the recipients’ invalid email or invalid domain names.
• Soft Bounces is the other category of email bounces. These are defined as emails that could not be sent due to a temporary error. Common reasons for soft email bounces include a full inbox, an email size that was too large, or the temporarily unavailable email server. However, as opposed to hard bounces, soft bounces can be delivered at a later time.
• Delivery Rate is calculated by diving the total email delivered by the total emails sent. It is a great way to see what percentage of emails indeed arrive.
• Total Opens is a rate that shows how often contacts are opening your emails. It counts the emails opened by the original recipients as well as the email forwards. It is a great metric to see how engaged your audience is when receiving an email from your campaigns.
• Unique Opens is a metric similar to total opens. However, the difference is that this metric only shows the number of unique opens that took place from your initial contacts and forwarded emails, counted once.
• Open Rate is calculated by diving the total opens by total delivered emails. This rate can show you the percentage of active and engaged contacts. Great to know how interested your contact list is in your business growth.
• Total Clicks measurements are registered whenever subscribers click on any of the links in your emails. Essentially, Eloqua “replaces” links with unique URLs that can accurately track all traffic. To calculate click rates, you divide the number of clicks on links, by the number of emails delivered.
• Unique Clickthroughs measure unique clicks to get a better view of users’ engagement. The system calculates these without taking a count on multiple clicks one same user took.
• CTR (Click-Through-Rate) is calculated by diving the total number of unique clicks into the total number of emails delivered. It pinpoints which contacts that opened the email further engaged with your email.
• Unsubscribed contacts are the ones who manually choose to opt-out of the campaign. It is vital to follow best practices focusing on minimizing complaint rates to keep this metric low. It can turn problematic, though, not implemented effectively, not “hearing” your customers’ complaints. To efficiently tackle this for our clients, our experts created an innovative solution for providing more in-depth insights into customer feedback. Read more about the Unsubscribe Reason Report in our Customer Success Story.
• Conversions and Submits are the total forms submitted, including multiple entries of the same contact.
• Campaign Conversion Rate measures the total forms submitted divided by the number of times the form was viewed.
• Total Visits in terms of report metrics counts one visit for all the page views in the session. When saying session, we refer to the visit to a web page.

After launching a multi-step Eloqua campaign, a simple email one, or an A/B Testing campaign, metrics measurement is necessary to determine performance.

Campaign Operational reports can be accessed directly from a campaign. If you wish to report on multiple campaigns or report on a single campaign’s performance beyond the last three months, we recommend using Insight reports. Oracle Eloqua’s Insight solution is powered by Oracle Business Intelligence.

For an added step further in performance measurement, we’re also taking into account the Power BI tool, a dynamically updated dashboard with key metrics that can be customized to fit any performance indicator.

All information deemed most relevant by decision-makers can be easily found and structured in an encapsulated form to ease decision-making processes. Read more about how we managed to implement it and reached impressive results in our Customer Success Story.

Final Thoughts

Overall, we see that marketing automation is here to stay and, as you can see, it plays a pivotal role in the success of sales and marketing organizations.

Marketing automation platforms, such as Eloqua, deliver extraordinary efficiency and outstanding results to any company that decides to boost its marketing technology stack.

We hope this article has shed some light on various important aspects to be considered for the configuration process of digital marketing campaigns that facilitate greater success. Without any further ado, we hope you are now able to launch Eloqua marketing campaigns that reach their targets with higher efficiency, delighting customers throughout the entire buyer journey.

Are you interested in finding out more about our campaign production expertise? Enjoy the perks of launching powerful digital marketing campaigns when they matter most. To fulfill your wish, we offer you a demo of our trusted Eloqua services: the Eloqua Campaign Production Process Audit.