A Single, Unified Instance of Oracle Eloqua: How It Can Help Optimize the Customer Experience

Relationship One had Zach Monroe, the senior manager of marketing automation at Thomson Reuters Legal, as a guest on episode 54 of its Inspired Marketing Podcast series. He spoke about the benefits of having a single, unified instance of Oracle Eloqua. Zach has been working with Oracle Eloqua for the past nine years for multiple companies. His current role involves him helping different business units execute their marketing campaigns, activate their marketing strategies, and translate that into the tactical requirements needed for Oracle Eloqua.

Across multiple companies, he has noticed a common theme of having disparate platforms, sometimes as the result of an acquisition. Or you might have the same contact in multiple instances. There could even be overlap between audiences, especially with different products and services that fit the same groups of people. Other times, different marketing teams will have different goals and technologies. They could even have multiple scoring models for different segments.

All of this calls for you to get back to basics and pare down into one, unified instance of Oracle Eloqua.

An Improved and Optimized Customer Experience

Why go with a single, unified instance of Oracle Eloqua? Because the migration can positively impact the customer experience. How so?

It simplifies your systems, allowing for more efficiencies and effectiveness in how your marketing teams execute.
It allows you to scale and build a new demand funnel and scoring model.
The prior two points then contribute to you being able to deliver the right information to prospective customers at the right time.

Having one instance optimizes the customer experience, so that now you can drill down to the minute details of how you engage with customers to refine how you communicate with them. You can ensure that you:

Don’t send them something they don’t want. You only send something relevant and useful to them.
Don’t overcommunicate by giving them too much information or contacting them too much. You send them just the right amount of communications within the right timeframe.
Give the customers more flexibility in how they choose to interact with you.

From top down, your organization needs to emphasize the customer experience and always try to view things through a customer lens. You may have a variety of products with different features and trial offers. You might have multiple websites and blogs for a customer to parse through. It can all become overwhelming for them, but simplification can help create an easier path through the customer journey for them and allow you to communicate and help guide them when it is needed.

These days, prospective customers do not want to wait around for the information they are looking for about your products. With a single, unified instance of Oracle Eloqua, you can better prioritize customers and get them the information they’re requesting more quickly.

The measure of success in undergoing a change like this will be how pleased your customers are and how much more easily they navigate the customer journey.

How to Go About an Integration

Map everything out. Figure out what you need to keep and where it should go. Set your project milestones and decide the steps you need to take. Do what planning you can upfront, as to make the execution easier.
Get executive buy-in for the project once you have a proper plan. Executive support can help drive the project and map any further changes to be made and align everybody.
Do an extensive asset migration. If it helps, pare what you can down into templates you can use going forward.

With a proper roadmap and everyone on board with the migration, you can try to set a timeline for the migration. It can take a great time of time to move all your assets, and you will always find that additional steps will be needed for things you were not able to foresee. You might want to pad your timeline by a few weeks or more to account for that.

What Next?

A single, unified instance of Oracle Eloqua makes working with it simpler and easier. It enables you to optimize the customer experience by delivering the information prospects need at the time they need it, but optimizing the customer experience does not stop there. You should always be looking at ways to further enhance it and make navigating the customer journey easier and more satisfying. Your customers will tell you all. Their behavior will indicate what is working and what isn’t. With that data, you can further optimize the communications you send to them and when you send to them.

The right marketing automation software can drive engagement and efficiency as well as help you derive real-time insights from customer. However, you need a modern, integrated platform to properly deliver on email marketing, demand generation, and lead management. Is your marketing automation platform up to the task? Find out by taking our two-minute Marketing Automation Maturity Assessment.

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