Best-Practice Email Nurture Configuration In Oracle Eloqua

Establishing positive relationships with consumers is one of the most important goals of any reputable brand. The brand-consumer relationship is the driving force at the core of any successful business.

By fostering this relationship, brands can make sure that they are perpetually present in the minds of their consumers. On top of that, consumers that feel a connection to their brand are more likely to develop loyalty, making it considerably cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one.

However, how can brands establish such a relationship with their consumer base?

Most communication is primarily done through email nurturing campaigns.

In this article, we cover what an email nurture campaign is, why it is important, and how to create a successful one in Oracle Eloqua.

What is an email nurture campaign?

Email nurture campaigns are a vital part of any successful inbound marketing strategy, being initiatives that turn potential leads into conversions, through education, awareness, and relationship-building.

Nurture campaigns are all about investing in audiences. For marketers to secure a loyal audience, they need to establish relationships that must be beneficial for both brands and customers alike. Nurture campaigns often take the form of heavily personalized emails to establish a beneficial relationship with consumers.

Using targeted data, 67% of email marketers invest in more personalized email campaigns because of the great benefits brought.

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is the process of investing in relationships with brand audiences. Lead nurture campaigns are essential for both B2B and B2C campaigns, delivering value through education. These enlighten potential quality leads to who a company is, what their line of activities is, and why they are the best in the business.

This often comes in the form of email and content marketing campaigns. Marketers use analytics coming from user behavior to target the right demographics and provide them with content specifically tailored to their liking.

Tailoring the right content for potential leads is the role of the content marketers. They have a wide range of content formats at their disposal to deliver the right content to the right person, from informational videos to educational whitepapers and blog articles.

Why do you need a lead nurture campaign?

Lead nurture campaigns are often emails that aim to provide an emotional relationship between the brand and the consumer.

Nurturing your audience is like a parent is nurturing a healthy child. A parent could just provide the basic necessities such as food and shelter for their child; however, to become a fully functional adult, emotional nurturing is required. To do this, the parents must listen to their children and make them feel safe and loved.

The same is true for the customers on your email lists.

Spending time getting to know your audience pays off, making them feel listened to and cared for by sending them perfectly optimized emails for their needs and wants. That is how you get your list to thrive.

How do you create a nurture campaign in Eloqua?

Now that we have covered what lead nurturing is and why it’s so crucial for a business to include it in their marketing strategy, let’s move onto the next step. How do you create a lead nurturing campaign in Oracle Eloqua?

1. Segment Your Audience

It is essential to be able to group your consumers in the same stage of the buying process. You do not want to send someone at the beginning of the buying process content calls to action meant for someone in the middle, or end of the buying process. That is an effective way to lose a customer.

In Eloqua, you want to start by segmenting out your leads by their current position in the buying process. You can also filter the segment to only show contacts from a specific region or country. You can do this by creating triggers based on the contact information that you have in your database.

After finishing and verifying the segmentation, it needs to be placed in a campaign canvas using the marketing automation platform.

2. Create the Emails to Offer Something Valuable

Next, you want to offer something of value to your customers.

Lead nurturing is a give-and-take kind of strategy. You cannot expect your customers just to give you their email address, their time reading your content, and their money, without giving them something in return. You must choose the best-suited content for your selected customers when creating a nurturing email, ranging from whitepapers, case studies, articles, or videos.

3. Create an Email Automation using Eloqua’s Canvases

After the emails have been verified and approved, you can send them through an automated email marketing campaign that shares resources like blog posts and videos, to stay on top of their mind and offer valuable information to each lead about your business and industry.

Be sure that each email has an objective or a goal. You don’t want to put anything within your marketing funnel that doesn’t serve a purpose. Each one of your emails should intend to move your leads further down the sales funnel. You want to offer valuable tips and information but end with the goal of them becoming your customer.

In each email, include at least three sections. Each section should have at least one call to action providing a document or a video, making your pitch stronger and irresistible. You can also add a call to action that leads to a page where an expert could provide more insight into the product listed on the other call to action links.

Furthermore, set up a timeframe for your email automation, like sending an email every two to three days, skipping weekends, so that you are staying at the top of the mind of each lead, without making them feel overwhelmed with daily emails, calls to action, and sales pitches.

Using the Multi-step Campaign Canvas, you send the emails using decision steps.

For example, before sending the first email you created, you must take a few more steps. You may want to include customers that are not part of the country you want to target, but fit the profile for the content you create. You can also add those contacts to a Shared List that you can use later. Moreover, you can further edit your list to exclude the unsubscribed, hard or soft bounces, or even people who had previously not engaged with your content. At this point, you are ready to send the first email that you created.

Besides, you can also create a SeedList, consisting of people that are part of your organization to ensure that the first email is received correctly. Before sending the second email and the third email, you can add a waiting period, usually varying from 2/5/10 days to even 14 days, or as many as you see fit.

For each part of the funnel, you can create additional multi-step canvases that help you in the buyer’s journey through your email nurture campaign.

The importance of email nurturing

Lead generation is essential, but without nurturing campaigns, most leads disappear.

That is because consumers want to feel appreciated. Nurture campaigns tell consumers that they, as individuals, matter to a brand. The easiest way to interact with these consumers and build credibility is through email.

More marketing teams need to invest in automated email nurture campaigns. That is because statistics and data back up these campaigns. Efficient nurture gives brands direct access to potential leads that can drive awareness, boost business growth, and increase sales.

When campaign production processes require seamless coordination between multiple stakeholders, business units, and third parties, all on a global scale, new challenges arise at every corner, though.

To access insights on how we managed to redesign our global tech client’s approach to digital campaign intake and configuration, check out our Customer Case Study. By optimizing project management procedures, designing new systems and business tools, and integrating a new digital campaign intake platform with our client’s asset management system, we enabled the successful management of over 2000 global Eloqua marketing campaigns.

We also explore the configuration process, implications, and SLAs for various types of Eloqua campaign production operational excellence in another blog post. Dive in to get more accustomed to industry best practices for most common campaign types or download a handy overview of what sets us apart in view of Eloqua campaign configuration within the INFOGRAPHIC: Operational Excellence in Campaign Production. Otherwise, learn more about the procedures for designing effective Eloqua webinar workflows here.

Final thoughts

With these things said, we hope you now have all the information and the tools at hand to excel in your pursuit of establishing a fruitful relationship between your customer and yourself.

Knowing how to leverage your marketing technology knowledge to implement it in your company’s digital workflow effectively is going can genuinely increase your marketing output. Besides, being able to configure seamless marketing campaigns for different audiences in Eloqua drastically boosts your lead generation capabilities.

You may further increase your marketing campaign creation output by analyzing your campaign production process. This is a crucial step that will let you better optimize your workflow to deliver better results in a shorter time frame. To aid you on this journey, our Eloqua experts are offering you a free Campaign Production Process Audit. We can help you improve your campaign configuration capacity forecast, deliver more campaigns with the same resource pool, without sacrificing any quality.

By leveraging the powerful emotional connection potential generated by email nurture campaigns, you can witness rather dramatic rises in your ROI, an increase in customer retention, subscriptions, and even sales.

On top of that, your customers will be happier to receive extra value from your brand in the form of targeted content and offers that are suitable for their needs and wants.