Marketing automation with eloqua

What this book covers Chapter 1, Creating Your First Campaign, walks through setting up a basic digital campaign in Eloqua to send an e-mail.. The e-mails that are used in our campaign

Marketing Automation with Eloqua

Build a robust campaign from start to finish using Eloqua

Ben Griffith

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Marketing Automation with Eloqua

Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy

of the information presented However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.First published: December 2013

About the Author

Ben Griffith is an accomplished consultant and developer with expertise in web analytics, sales and marketing automation, and system integrations His career began

at a consulting firm where he was one of the first certified consultants for the Eloqua partner program He is the founder and president of Salytics (http://www.salytics.com), a hybrid consulting and application development firm Client services cover

a range of platforms including Eloqua, Salesforce, Marketo, and Adobe Marketing Suite Salytics works with numerous companies designing and implementing global marketing campaigns utilizing the Eloqua platform

Ben has also authored open source projects to extend Eloqua website tracking and three native Salesforce.com applications that has been publicly released He holds

a dual degree in computer engineering and economics from Queen's University in Kingston, Canada

I would like to thank my family, in particular Elishka, for supporting

me throughout writing this book I would also like to thank Mike

and Amrita for their invaluable contributions

About the Reviewers

Amrita Sekhar is an accomplished IT professional with extensive experience in the areas of application development, business process analysis, process re-engineering, quality assurance methodologies, and project management Her experience spans multiple verticals, including high tech, staffing, finance, and biotechnology

She specializes in business systems analysis and systems integrations, and works with Marketing, Sales, IT, and other cross-functional organizations on global campaigns and marketing automation strategies using Eloqua and Salesforce.com She is a certified Eloqua master and a certified Revenue Performance Management specialist She has contributed towards research for published articles on back-office technologies to support the staffing industry

She holds an Engineering degree in Computer Science and a Master's degree in Business Information Technology

I would like to thank Ben for giving me this wonderful opportunity

to review this book

Darwin Witt is a Web Developer and User Experience Consultant based in

Seattle, Washington He has earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Alabama, and a Master's degree in Human Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Washington He works on a multitude of projects dealing with medium and large-scale productivity software His concerns lie in both with understanding the needs of Business Intelligence, and in simplifying and standardizing the process to help make everyone's work a little easier

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Offline activity – external assets and activity 30

Table of Contents

[ iii ]

Contact-centric data model 101

E-mail, website, and form activities 103

Visited landing page's shared filters 112

Table of Contents

This book looks at the Eloqua platform and breaks down the powerful tools that can be used to build automated digital campaigns for the modern marketer

You will learn to build e-mails with personalized and reusable content Gating

of your high-value marketing content will be explored and implemented using the native features of Eloqua landing pages and forms Contact management and segmentation will be covered in depth If you want to learn how to take advantage

of Eloqua, this book is for you

Marketing Automation with Eloqua will help you realize your potential by

demonstrating how your campaign vision can be translated into a digital

campaign in Eloqua and how to measure its success

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Creating Your First Campaign, walks through setting up a basic digital

campaign in Eloqua to send an e-mail The user interface is introduced, and many

of the common tools used in Eloqua are touched upon

Chapter 2, Eloqua Campaigns, reviews common-use cases involving Eloqua campaigns

and discusses best practices to consider when designing your campaigns

Chapter 3, Creating Your Next Campaigns, begins the building process of the campaign

that will be built during the remainder of the book The steps and assets that will comprise the final campaign are added to our Eloqua campaign as placeholders

Chapter 4, Assets Overview, reviews the different assets that can be used in Eloqua

campaigns Eloqua's component library is discussed including the relationships between the components and the assets: e-mails, landing page, and forms

Chapter 5, Managing E-mails, covers the e-mail editor in Eloqua in detail The e-mails

that are used in our campaign are all built out in this chapter using various Eloqua features, including field merges, shared content, dynamic content, signatures, and subscription management

Chapter 6, Managing Forms, introduces the form editor Field management is used

while creating the backend form for our campaign Available processing steps are described and a subset of those steps is used for our campaign's form

Chapter 7, Managing Landing Pages, introduces the landing page editor Differences

between it and the e-mail editor are noted before using the editor to build the landing pages for our campaign We use page snippets and dynamic content to gate content Previously built e-mails are updated to link to the newly created landing pages

Chapter 8, Contact Segmentation, details the relationship between contacts and the

data that is collected in Eloqua The source of filter criteria used in segmentation

is detailed and an example segment is created for use in our campaign

Chapter 9, Campaign Activation and Analysis, reviews the remaining steps to

be configured in our campaign A very simple leading scoring model is set up for use in our campaign and decision steps are configured Our campaign is

activated and standard reporting is subsequently reviewed

What you need for this book

The prerequisite for this book is access to an instance of Eloqua 10

Who this book is for

This book is for any marketer, business analyst, or other marketing related

professional wanting to gain practical knowledge of Eloqua 10 No coding skills are required, although there is a very small amount of copying and pasting code when using advanced functionality It's assumed that you will have access to an Eloqua 10 instance to follow along

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning

[ 3 ]

Code words in text are shown as follows: "All code between the tags <script…> and

</script> should be copied."

A block of code is set as follows:

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the

relevant lines or items are set in bold:

{failureMessage:"This field is required"});var field2 = new

LiveValidation("field2", {validMessage: "", onlyOnBlur:

failureMessage: "A valid email address is required"});var

field4 = new LiveValidation("field4", {validMessage: "",

onlyOnBlur: true});field4.add(Validate.Presence,

{failureMessage:"This field is required"});var field5 = new

LiveValidation("field5", {validMessage: "", onlyOnBlur:

true});field5.add(Validate.Presence, {failureMessage:"This

field is required"});

};

</script>

New terms and important words are shown in bold Words that you see on the

screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Let's

navigate to Assets | Emails in the top navigation bar."

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this

Tips and tricks appear like this

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Creating Your First Campaign

In the first chapter of this book, we will walk through building an e-mail campaign using the Eloqua platform

Eloqua is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, specifically referred to as a

marketing automation platform It offers a set of tools to manage scalable digital campaigns consisting of emails, landing pages, forms, and automated processes Utilizing marketing automation software allows marketers to collect data and digital activity, sometimes referred to as digital body language This information can then

be used for campaign performance analysis Additionally, marketing automation helps to reduce the time and effort spent on campaign execution

Let's say that you, as a marketer, have been tasked to send e-mails inviting prospects to

an event your company is sponsoring This event is four weeks away, and you would like to remind people if they do not respond to the first e-mail within a week before the event date By using marketing automation, you are able to set up a workflow within

a campaign, which would send the first e-mail at a scheduled date and the reminder e-mail at another scheduled date (to those prospects who do not respond to the first e-mail) This can be set up once, turned on, and left to perform the scheduled actions.Ultimately, by leveraging the power of marketing automation, marketers gain more time to focus on their message and strategy

This chapter will cover creating the components of a very simple e-mail campaign The purpose of this campaign will be to send an e-mail to a group of contacts We will build the campaign workflow, activate the campaign, and measure our results.Let us take a closer look at the following two basic elements of our campaign:

• Segment: This will be the target audience who will be receiving the e-mail

• Email: This will contain the actual marketing content we are delivering

Creating Your First Campaign

Because our campaign is very simple, and we know the two elements that will be used, it makes sense to build the elements first, and then build the campaign using them With more complex campaigns, it can be helpful to design the workflow and add place holders for the assets to understand the overall design and scope of the campaign, before setting up the actual components themselves

Navigation overview

We'll start by logging into Eloqua by going to https://login.eloqua.com This will redirect us to the login page, where you will need to enter your login credentials

Before creating our email and segment, let us take some time to review the

navigation within Eloqua Once logged in, you will see a navigation bar across the top of the application Each of the following five icons in the middle of the navigation bar can be used to move to different areas:

1 Campaigns: This will open Launchpad to create a new campaign or open an

existing campaign Once a selection is made, the campaign editor will open

2 Assets: This has several subcategories Emails, Landing Pages, and Forms

are the primary digital assets you can build and manage in Eloqua Each

of the links in the navigation will bring you to Launchpad Here, you can

create, open, or upload new assets for Emails and Landing Pages You can create, open, or integrate website forms for Forms from Launchpad After

any of these selections are made, you will be taken to the respective editors

in Eloqua Component Library contains separate components that can be

used within the primary digital assets The examples include images or blocks of HTML content that can be used across several assets

3 Contacts: This has several subcategories as well Contacts, Accounts, and Custom Objects, all take you to sections where you can view and manage the respective records in the system Lead Scoring opens Launchpad that will take you to the lead scoring editor Segments also open Launchpad, but it will take you to the segment editor Data Tools and Shared Library

offer additional tools and mechanisms to manage contacts, accounts, and custom objects

Chapter 1

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4 Insight: This opens Eloqua's reporting engine in a separate window

This is where the data inside the system can be analyzed

5 Setup: This takes you to the area where you can perform system

administration tasks Here, the fields for objects can be managed,

integration with your customer relationship management (CRM)

system can be configured, and many other configurations for Eloqua

can be set

The buttons on the right of the navigation bar allow you to search, access support resources and account information, and log out of the system respectively

On clicking on the Eloqua icon on the left-hand side of the navigation bar, you will

always be taken to the My Eloqua page, which has various containers of links for

quick access to different specific assets, campaigns, and reports

Creating an e-mail

Now that we've reviewed the basics of navigating to the different areas of Eloqua,

let's navigate to Assets| Emails in the top navigation bar Here you will see three options: Create an Email, Open an Existing Email, and Upload an Email.

When we create an e-mail by clicking on the Create an Email option, we will be presented with a Template Chooser window Select Blank Email and click on the Choose button.

Creating Your First Campaign

The email what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor is now open to create a

new e-mail Important settings for the e-mail are shown at the top of the editor, with more settings available in the options menu accessed by clicking on the gear button

in the top-right corner of the editor The tools available to work on the e-mail can be accessed by clicking on the icons in the left panel of the editor The e-mail itself is shown in the large right panel of the editor, outlined by a light gray border We will call this area of the editor the canvas The different components of the editor will be

discussed thoroughly in Chapter 5, Managing E-mails.

To create a simple e-mail for this campaign, we will first add an image by clicking on

the Image icon in the left panel of the screen The icons here represent the different

components that can be used to build an e-mail in Eloqua Upon clicking on the

Image icon, the Image Browser window will appear It allows us to do any of the

following tasks:

1 Search for an existing image in the Eloqua's image library, which includes the images that have been uploaded to the system in the past

2 Scroll to an existing image in the thumbnail previewer

3 Upload a new image

Chapter 1

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For our purposes, we'll upload a new logo image of a hypothetical company named Beyn Beyn has just hosted its annual conference, bringing its customers and prospects together to learn about everything related to Beyn We, as marketers, have been tasked

to send a thank you e-mail to all those people who attended our event

A logo image, logo.gif, which was included in the files for this chapter can be used

Once you have the logo file ready, click on Upload in the Image Browser window, then click on the cloud icon to browse for the file, and finally open it The Save As

input will display the name the file will have once it's been uploaded to Eloqua Optionally, you may rename the image here if you would prefer to search for it by

another name in the future The Where input allows you to choose a folder in which

to save the image Saving it to the Unfiled folder is fine for this exercise Click on Upload to complete the process.

Organizing assets

As your organization increases its usage of Eloqua, it can become very important to organize assets within Eloqua by using clear folder structures and naming patterns A common approach to organizing assets is to create a folder structure based on business unit (if applicable), year and quarter, campaign type, and campaign name

For example, the folder hierarchy for our campaign may look like the following: Business Services | 2013Q3 | Events | 2013Q3 Global Summit Attendee Follow Up

Now that the logo is uploaded, searching for it by name will bring it up in the

Image Browser window thumbnail previewer Once it comes up, you can either

double-click to add it to the canvas or click-and-drag it onto the canvas

Creating Your First Campaign

After the image has been added to the canvas, it should be positioned at the left corner of the e-mail It can be moved around easily with a mouse by clicking, holding, and dragging it around the canvas To position it more precisely, we will

top-click on the Tools icon in the left panel of the screen to open the tools widget This widget has six tabs along the top of it They are Text Tools, Style Tools, Hyperlink Tools, Layout Tools (sometimes referred to as Dimensions Tools), Page Style Tools, and Page Snippet Tools.

To position only the image, we will open the fourth tab, Layout Tools Here we

are able to set the width and height of the image, or reset the size of the image if the width and height were previously adjusted Additionally, we can control the position of the image on the canvas by setting pixel offsets from the left and top of

the e-mail canvas Let's set From left (X) to 0 and From top (Y) to 20.

Now that we have a logo for our e-mail, let's add some text Click on the Text icon

in the left panel of the screen to add a new text box to the canvas You will see a

textbox containing the text Double-Click to Edit Double-click within this box

and enter the text

If you are copying text from another source, such as a word document or web page, it is always a good idea to first paste the text in a text editor such as Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS, and copy it again from there If text is copied directly from a source, it will be copied along with its current XML tags, which may cause inconsistent formatting issues with your e-mails

Chapter 1

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Next, we will add a field merge to the text A field merge is a special component added

in the text that will dynamically populate the field value of a particular contact field for the recipient of the e-mail In our case, it will populate with the first name of each person who receives the e-mail, provided it exists in their contact record in Eloqua

Click on the Field Merge icon in the left panel of the screen to bring up the Field Merge Browser window It is similar to the Image Browser window in its functionality

We can perform the following tasks in the Field Merge Browser window:

1 Search for an existing field merge in Eloqua

2 Scroll through the existing field merges in Eloqua

3 Create a new field merge

A field merge should exist by default for the first name called First Name used for Email Only You can either search for it or just scroll through the field merges until

you reach it

If for some reason a field merge does not currently exist for the first name, you can

create a new field merge by clicking on the New button In the window that opens, enter a name for the field merge, for example, First Name used for Email Only Enter Colleague as the default value Finally, select Merge From: Contact Fields, and choose First Name from the drop-down list Click on Save to return to the

editor where you may select your new field merge

Select the First Name used for Email Only field merge by clicking on it and then

click, hold, and drag the field merge to the textbox we previously created

Creating Your First Campaign

The textbox will be highlighted when a field merge is dragged over it Release the mouse button, and the textbox will be emphasized The next place you click within the textbox will be the placement of the field merge Click right before the comma

on the first line of text to add the field merge The first line of text should now read

As a final step to creating the e-mail content, we will turn the text Join us next month into a link to your website

• First, double-click in the textbox and select this text Second, click on the

Hyperlink icon in the left panel of the screen.

• This will open the tools panel to the third tab Hyperlink Tools - Text.

Check the Enable as Hyperlink checkbox and select Webpage In the Enter a URL input, type the URL of your website Optionally, enter Link Hover Text This is the

text that will be displayed when a person hovers over this link with his/her mouse before clicking

Chapter 1

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There are two types of links that Eloqua will allow you to set up in its editors They are as follows:

• Direct: In this link, you would not check Redirect (for untracked pages)

• Redirect: In this link, you would check Redirect (for untracked pages)

If you are linking to a page on your website, and Eloqua's tracking scripts have been added to it, those tracking scripts will track the page visit and link it back to the e-mail

If you are linking to a page that does not have Eloqua's tracking scripts on it, there is

no way for Eloqua to know that someone visited that page In this scenario we can use

a redirect link to capture the visit to the page An example of when you would check

Redirect (for untracked pages) might be on a link that takes people to your company's

YouTube page or LinkedIn page

Creating Your First Campaign

The content of the e-mail is now in place As the last step in setting up the content,

select the textbox and navigate to the fourth tool's panel tab, Dimensions Tools Set the width of the textbox to 550 and the position from the left to 25 Additionally, you may change the From top (Y) value to position the textbox in the desired place

on the e-mail canvas

The remaining settings for the e-mail can be set by clicking on the option's

drop-down menu in the top-right corner of the screen From the drop-down

menu, select Settings

Chapter 1

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Here you may enter the data for the following fields:

• Name: This is the name for your e-mail Let's use 2013 Q3Beyn

Events Promotion.

• Email Group: This selects the available e-mail group in your system

It will populate a default e-mail header and e-mail footer Select one

of the available groups

• Email Header: This selects the header the e-mail will use It will populate

automatically based on the Email Group choice If the selected Email Group selection does not have an associated header or you would like to change the header, you may pick one of the available headers from the list

• Email Footer: This selects the footer the e-mail will use It will populate automatically based on the Email Group choice If the selected Email Group selection does not have an associated footer or you would like to

change the footer, you may pick one of the available footers from the list

• Subject: This is the subject for your e-mail Enter the subject Thank You For Joining Us!.

Creating Your First Campaign

• From: This is to be left as it is It should default to your system settings,

unique to your company

• Reply-to: This is to be left as it is.

• Bounceback: This is to be left as it is.

• Encoding: This is to be set to Unicode (UTF-8) (if it is not already set).

• Email tracking is enabled: This turns tracking of e-mail on or off

Ensure that it is checked

Many of these settings should have been configured when Eloqua was initially deployed for your organization The settings you should consistently be making

unique for different e-mails are Name, Email Group, Email Header, Email Footer, and Subject.

The settings From, Reply-to, Bounceback, Encoding, and Email tracking is enabled should generally be left unchanged The Email tracking is enabled checkbox places

a small image in the footer of your e-mail The act of downloading it by a recipient triggers the e-mail opening activity to be logged for that e-mail and recipient contact

After the e-mail settings have been configured, click on Done to close the settings window, and then click on Save to save the e-mail.

Creating a segment

Now that the e-mail has been created, we will need a segment to send the e-mail

to Segments are groups of contacts that can be a combination of static members and members that are dynamically pulled based on filter criteria They are used to

feed campaigns in Eloqua, and will be covered in more depth in Chapter 8, Contact

Segmentation For this campaign, you will create a segment with yourself as the sole

member Navigate to Contacts | Contacts.

Chapter 1

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In the search input, enter your e-mail address

If you are not found as a contact in the system, we will create you as a contact by

clicking on the New…button near the top-right corner of the screen All the known

individuals with which you would like to interact using Eloqua must exist as contacts within the system

You should enter at minimum: e-mail, first name, last name, and company for your

contact and finish by clicking on Save.

Now that you know you exist in the system as a contact, create a segment and

add yourself to it Navigate to Contacts | Segments and click on Create a Segment

In the Template Chooser window, select Blank Segment and click on Choose.

Creating Your First Campaign

You are now in the segment editor In the left panel, the list of segment components

will be listed once we have one or more To add one, we can click on the large + button, where we'll have the option of adding any of the following components: Filter Criteria, Individual Contacts, Upload Contacts , Shared Filter , and Shared List

You just want to add yourself to this segment, so select Individual Contacts, which

will add a segment component in the left panel and display the list of contacts for the segment component in the right panel

Click on Add Contacts to open another modal window, where you can search for

your contact and add it to the list The segment component in the left panel should

update to display 1 included Before saving this segment, you may right-click on the segment component in the left panel and select Settings to enter a name and description for this segment component, such as Ben Griffith and Beyn respectively Click on Save when finished and enter a name for the segment For example, Beyn -

Ben Griffith

Creating the campaign

Having a segment and e-mail ready, you can now navigate to the campaign canvas

by clicking on Campaigns from the top navigation After the Campaigns Launchpad opens, click on Create a Campaign Next, in the Template Chooser window select Blank Campaign and click on Choose.

Creating Your First Campaign

To add the segment, click on Segment Members in the left panel and drag it into the

large white area on the right of the editor, the canvas Double-click on the newly added step and enter the following data:

• Step name: This is your contact's name For example, *Ben Griffith*.

• Choose a segment or create a new one: This is the segment we

previously created For example, *Beyn - Ben Griffith*

• Choose when to add segment members to the campaign: Select Add

members once when the campaign is first activated.

Now, click on Email from the left panel and drag it onto the canvas Double-click

on the added step and enter 2013 Q3Beyn Events Promotion (as the step name) and 2013 Q3Beyn Events Promotion (as the e-mail).

The remaining options including Signature, Send Options, and Scheduling can be

left as they are

The two steps should then be connected This can be done by clicking and dragging the connection point at the bottom of the segment step to the top connection point of the e-mail step

Once this has been done, you should have two steps with a curved line connecting

them and a small circle with 1 in the top-right corner of the segment step

The campaign canvas is now set up for the e-mail send

The settings can then be configured for the campaign by clicking on the option's

drop-down button and selecting Settings Enter the following settings:

• Name: This is the campaign name of your choice For example, *2013 Q3

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• Description: This is an optional setting where you can enter a description

For example, *Follow up promotion to Global Summit 2013 attendees*

• Campaign Reporting Runs From: This should be entered and should include

today's date These dates control the period during which campaign metrics are collected in Eloqua So, they should always span at least the duration for which you expect the campaign to run

If there are additional required fields under any of the tabs Settings, Financials,

or Custom Fields, you will need to fill them out as well.

It's important to understand what the start date and end date represent Campaign activity is only collected after the start date of your campaign and for 12 months after the end date of your campaign

The fields Product, Region, and Campaign Type are standard fields that cannot be

changed However, their requirement would depend on how the campaign module was originally set up

The CRM Campaign ID field will automatically populate after the campaign has

synced with your CRM system, assuming that Sync with CRM is checked and you have set up the closed loop reporting integration with your CRM system

The Include in Opportunity ROI field is related to reporting for a closed loop

reporting integration as well, but this setup is outside the scope of this book

Creating Your First Campaign

Click on Update after entering all the settings' information you would like to

or are required to enter At this point, the campaign can be saved by clicking on

Save in the top-right corner, and then be activated by clicking on Activate.

Activating a campaign is the last step to actually turn it on Once activated, a campaign will process the contacts its segments contain and run them through the workflows set up on the campaign canvas Additionally, all the activities tied back to the campaign and its assets will start collecting as a campaign activity.Before a campaign is activated, it will not collect activities, and it will not process contacts that are included in the segments feeding its workflows

Congratulations! You have just created and run your first Eloqua campaign! You should receive the e-mail shortly with the personalized greeting

In the next chapter, we will discuss Eloqua's digital campaigns in more detail

We will discuss the different components that make up a digital campaign and explain best practices for designing campaigns built in Eloqua

Eloqua Campaigns

In this chapter, we will examine Eloqua campaigns in detail We will discuss

how Eloqua campaigns can be used, and the different trade-offs while architecting campaign solutions for your marketing efforts Eloqua is built around the concept

of a digital campaign A digital campaign will typically comprise the following components:

to better understand our prospects and existing customers by using Eloqua for campaign management and measurement

For common digital assets, e-mails for example, this is straightforward because Eloqua tracks these for us automatically If we are running a campaign that comprises one component, an e-mail with an exclusive offer for example, we can set up a campaign

as we did in Chapter 1, Creating Your First Campaign This give us data that tells us how

many e-mails were sent and to whom, the number of e-mail click-throughs, and other e-mail specific metrics

Eloqua Campaigns

Let us consider a large campaign spanning a full fiscal year This campaign is for

a new version of software for a large technological company The campaign will involve purchased ad space across several mediums (for example, Google search ads), a full microsite built for it, an e-mail nurturing campaign, webinars, and several content offers Without a marketing automation platform, such as Eloqua, managing all of these different components and measuring the overall performance

of the campaign would be difficult and require lots of different resources (people, software, and time) With Eloqua, we can manage many of these components and bring together data from all of them in one platform

It is important to note that there are relative strengths and weaknesses of Eloqua as

a complete solution to a digital campaign of this scale Eloqua manages e-mails and the capture of leads very well Web pages hosted by Eloqua can be managed and measured alongside the other campaign components too However, webinars have

to be managed in another system, but that system can be integrated to work with Eloqua Ads are outside of Eloqua's core competencies at this time, but again, they can be managed and set up in such a way as to work with Eloqua

Campaign overview

Eloqua campaigns serve two purposes Campaigns can provide reporting on the assets belonging to them and campaigns can be used to create workflows for members that are added to them For example, a campaign can do the

following tasks:

1 Send an e-mail

2 Identify whether an e-mail was clicked through

3 Send an exclusive offer if the first e-mail was clicked through on a landing page that may have been visited due to the first e-mail or through another source, such as an offline advertisement

The digital assets that a campaign may include are e-mails, forms, and landing pages Because landing pages hosted outside of Eloqua cannot be included as assets for campaigns, it is strongly recommended that you host your landing pages in Eloqua This increases the data captured and available for campaign analysis

In addition to controlling a workflow, campaigns can also be used to capture and report on metrics Assuming there is one e-mail, one landing page, one form, and one offline advertisement as part of a campaign, we can carry out the following tasks:

• Report on e-mail activity, landing page activity, and form submissions

• We can also potentially report on metrics for the offline advertisement

we have not discussed how contacts are initially added as members of campaigns.Eloqua uses the concept of segments, which can represent static and/or dynamic collections of contacts within your Eloqua database Segments are discussed in

detail in Chapter 8, Contact Segmentation, but for now, it is important to note that

these are used as the primary source of entry for campaigns Contacts can be

added to campaigns via segments and will then usually run through workflows with some actions that send e-mails

Campaigns involving just e-mails and segments are fairly straightforward to

set up and measure in Eloqua, as we did in the previous chapter

Members can also be added to campaigns through form processing steps that

add submitters to a certain step in a campaign This is described in Chapter 6,

Managing Forms.

In addition to campaign members that are added to campaign workflows,

members can be included in campaign reporting by visiting landing pages

or submitting forms that are assets of the campaign

Finally, members can be included in reporting when they are uploaded to a

campaign and marked as performing an external activity

Next, we will walk-through some of these scenarios and review considerations that should be taken into account while designing your campaigns

Tracking external sources to landing pages

A common requirement for campaigns that utilize Eloqua is to measure the source of those who engage in the campaigns From the data that will automatically be captured

in Eloqua, we'll know how many e-mails were sent, opened, and clicked, and we'll know how many people visited landing pages for our campaigns Unless we plan ahead to identify the landing page visitors that come from advertisements and other sources, we would have little to analyze if we wanted to know which visits to the landing page were sourced from different places

Eloqua Campaigns

If we have multiple advertisements, for example sending people to landing page(s) for our campaign(s), there are several ways we can manage our campaign(s) to measure the sources One approach would be to use one campaign and distinguish among visitors that come from the different advertisements This can be accomplished in one of the two following ways:

• Unique landing pages can be built for each different source For example, if the landing page was originally set up as http://offer.beyn.com/demand, a second landing page can be set up and used in the offline advertisement, such

as http://offer.beyn.com/demando If both landing pages are assets for our Eloqua campaign, we can differentiate between the visits that resulted from the offline advertisement and visits from elsewhere, based on the page visited

• A single landing page can be used The source can then be identified by a query string parameter appended to the URL For example, if the landing page is http://offer.beyn.com/demand, the offline advertisement could point users to http://offer.beyn.com/demand?src=advert The query string parameters, in this case the value src, can be set up in Eloqua by

navigating to Setup | Query Strings The Query string setup will not be

covered in this book as we will not use it for our campaigns

Another way we can distinguish among sources of landing page visits is to create

a campaign for each advertisement Using this approach, we can add the same

landing page as an asset to each campaign and then use a query string parameter, elqCampaignId, with the ID of our campaign to which we would like the visit to

be attributed Each of these approaches can work well depending on the specific

requirements of the campaign If the campaign only involves e-mail calls to action

as a source to the landing page, using one campaign with a single version of the

landing page makes sense

If there are going to be a huge number of sources driving people to your landing page, then in the interest of time, it might make sense to just use a query string parameter you've created in Eloqua with different values for the different sources You will not be able to report on the sources directly from the campaign, but the setup within Eloqua will require much less time and effort If form are used as assets in your campaign, using this approach would not differentiate conversions from the different sources

If you will have a number of sources driving people to your landing page, but you would like to report on the campaigns together, you can create multiple campaigns and re-use the landing page assets across them

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For campaign reporting, if you can use individual pages, this will allow reporting

on the key performance indicators of the campaign in a single report If you use multiple campaigns and share assets among them, you can report on the campaigns together Using solely query strings with a single campaign would be the least optimal approach, but with very high volumes of external sources, it may be the most efficient approach

Tracking external sources with forms

We've discussed how tracking external sources can be done with regards to landing page visits If landing pages contain forms to capture data, you may want to attribute the form submission to one of many different campaigns as well

In the scenario where a single campaign is used, the form submissions will be

attributed to that campaign automatically and there is no need for additional

configuration In the event that you are using several campaigns and sharing assets among them, you will normally want to attribute a form submission to just one of those campaigns

Let us consider again the example of having multiple advertisements driving people

to a landing page There is one single landing page and one single form shared across multiple campaigns, one for each advertisement Utilizing elqCampaignId as a query string parameter, we will attribute the page visits to the campaign with the ID passed

in the query string If no further setup were to be done, a form submission would then

be attributed to all of the campaigns that hold it as an asset

To prevent this from happening, we can specify a campaign ID to which to

attribute the form submission We need to pass a hidden form field with the name elqCampaignId and a value of the ID of the campaign to which we would like to attribute it The campaign must hold the form as an asset as well

Offline campaign components

We mentioned earlier that people can be uploaded to Eloqua and then added to

a campaign for performing external activity External activity can include various offline activities such as attending a trade show or another event, or receiving an offer by mail