BACKGROUND
Can you please provide a brief description of your company and the role that you play there?
We are a marketing automation partner with Oracle. We also are an analytics deployment partner with Adobe Analytics. We leverage marketing models we've developed to help our clients increase their revenue, by leveraging the analytics and the market automation better.
What are your role and responsibilities?
I'm one of the co-founders of the company and also a senior consultant.
OPPORTUNITY/CHALLENGE
What was the business challenge that incited the need for a marketing automation platform?
We use Eloqua as a tool for our clients who have had issues with leads that are not being followed through appropriately. In the past, clients would just let those leads fall through the cracks. They never followed up with them, they were going to the next new, what they thought was a hot lead, and lots of revenue was being unrealized about each client. That's the main issue that we're trying to solve.
We take a phased approach to marketing automation. I know the Oracle Eloqua people have their own process for deploying clients, which we will follow if that's what the client has purchased, but quite often they'll last for years. Clients want a more customized approach, so what we take is an approach where we do way point situation analysis, and we run it through our experience in working with different vertical brands. What we do is, identify where they want to go, where they're at now, what their goals are, what their technology capabilities are. Then, we try to support their goals with their technology capabilities and also their data sets there.
If you want to do certain things that are advanced, but you don't have the proper data sets or standardized data, which hampers everything down the road and makes it extremely difficult. It's like driving a car without tires that are filled with air. After we do that analysis, we have a game plan that we put together that really leverages our unique experience and capabilities in how to leverage their existing technologies stacks in addition to Eloqua. We make sure it plays well with what they already have.
Then, later on, what we're doing with our methodology, we usually get to the point where they know exactly what type of content they need to create, what type of nurture programs, we do a lot of persona-based marketing, persona build outs. When you take that approach you usually have a significant success within 12 to 24 months. Even less than that, actually. It depends on how aggressively the client wants to deploy these things.
SOLUTION
What pricing plan does your company currently utilize?
It depends on the use case, and the needs of the clients. If it's a large client with millions of contacts – contact equals a unique email address in the system – you're going to pay more. If you have different tiers, like Eloqua for the basic level, all the way to the enterprise level, then you're going to pay more even for the same level of contacts. So, enterprise with a 100,000 contacts is more than a basic level Eloqua with only a 100,000 contacts. It's a tough question to answer, really.
RESULTS
Can you share any results of your implementation of this platform?
We have clients that won Eloqua Markie Awards, which are awards recognizing clients achieving certain benchmarks. We have significant revenue increase for clients. We had a client that had a division that was doing about $9 to $10 million a year. About 24 months later, that division is now doing $33 million. The sales team has doubled from 22 to 44 people. That's a significant example of what could happen because they were doing probably nothing. They were not nurturing – they were not growing leads.
Clients who already deployed Eloqua may have some additional results from just learning how to integrate it with their analytics solution better, like Adobe Analytics. We helped another client in that case, and what they've seen is increased open rates, it was about 20 percent or 43 percent increase. Their click-through rates went up significantly because they could see what the analytics was telling Eloqua when we integrated the two, some things that Eloqua was not aware of, and then reacting to that and sending people a little bit more tailored, customized messaging. Those are two examples. I can go on and on.
FEATURES
Were there any software features that you were really impressed by?
Eloqua will allow companies to scale to huge proportions. The ability to scale is the ability to handle complex scenarios that come up. A lot of smaller clients might pick a "cheaper" provider, but what they fail to realize is that in about a year or two, their revenues can completely go crazy. Eloqua has always been a great tool to integrate with multiple different technology sources or data points that we can pull in, integration issues, and complex filtering. They may not need it today, but in about 12 months they're going to need something like that, and that's what I think is best – the ability to scale.
Content creation is also very easy. If you want to put content in the platform, landing pages, assets, things of that nature, images, CSS files, PDFs that can be hosted, you can also integrate a video and track how far people watched something in the video – all of that is pretty straightforward. Getting content in there is simply uploading things, and it stores it in the proper folder that you created for it. It's really intuitive.
Are there any areas of the software that could be added or improved upon?
They made huge strides in that regard. Right now, I would say the majority of 90 percent-plus of what a marketer would use in Eloqua is extremely intuitive. If you were to ask me that five years ago – we've been Eloqua's partner for seven years now – I would have said the entire interface is completely counter-intuitive to some degree.
They took the feedback from the marketplace, they hired some UI [user interface] specialists that are really good for the last several years, and it's completely amazing how easy it is, with drag and drop and other things that you can do.
OVERVIEW
We have a few quick questions and, for each question, we ask you to rate the software on a scale of one to five, with five being the best. What would you give the software for desired functionality of the features available?
Five-plus.
What would you give the software for ease of use and implementation?
Five.
For support and responsiveness of the team or resources available?
Five. It's always been great, and now Oracle has their resources behind it, so it's very responsive.
For overall satisfaction with the platform?
Five.
How likely are you to recommend the software to a colleague or similar business?
Five.
