LoopFuse (discontinued) vs. Oracle Marketing

My advice in choosing software in general is to know what you want to get out of the software. Then start researching the software on your own to see what features and benefits each has that will help you accomplish what you need. Once you have a good idea of what sorts of features you're looking for, reach out to the vendors that have them to see demos. Get really in-depth with your demos and ask for practical use-cases for each feature. Free trials are pretty useless with this sort of technology because the initial set-up is so time-consuming that you would either not set it up properly, or you would not stop using the provider you chose after the set up because you don't want to do it again!

A duration of one and a half years is enough for us to
recognize the capabilities of a tool and in my opinion, this one is just a
great tool to manage marketing campaigns of even massive-sized firms. Its
marketing automation tool and its way of managing campaign and the way it
executes digital initiatives is enough to get an inkling of its abilities.
Less favorable for the people who want to have something at
a cheap price and are more dependent on the reports as its reports have nothing
much in detail.

Incentivized

• It is easy to use without too much set-up.
• The e-mail engine is simple to use and straightforward, and e-mails seemed to get delivered for the most part.
• The reporting information is very in-depth and detailed.

• We can look for the behavior of our clients on our website and mobile application using the analytics it provides.
• It is highly customizable.
• It presents data in a form that is easily understandable and reports are highly beneficial for us.
• Analytics in the form of graphs.

Incentivized

• I think creating the HTML email campaigns could be made easier.
• I would like to have more HTML templates available.

• User Interface - The UI is a bit outdated and clunky, but gets the job done with some getting used to.
• Training - There isn't much out there for training, unless you are willing to pay Oracle or a 3rd party.
• Support - There is no dedicated support and you have to use their portal. It sometimes take awhile to get things looked at or fixed, but they eventually get to it.

Incentivized

My new company is much larger and we need robust capabilities so we're implementing Marketo currently.

We have been able to automate so many marketing processes with Eloqua over the past 5 years that the only direction would be to adopt the latest and greatest features Eloqua adds. The alternative would be to go back to the marketing stone-age and start over again. And we would rather move forward with increased automation and efficiency.

It's pretty easy to use without any technical abilities, but the email editor will require html skills (no drag and drop).

Personally, I find it quite easy to use. But for those members of our team who have little or no testing experience, it's been a bit more difficult. There's also training required for development teams in order to have your campaigns coded and set up in the most efficient way. Our developers have been able to do basic and intermediate tests with no difficulty, and they find the interface itself quite intuitive... it's just the extremely complex tests that require a bit more understanding.

No one has experienced any problems with availablity.

There are occasional complaints about slowness to refresh a screen or build a report. However, this is as much a factor of network access speeds as the system itself, since often the complaints occur when someone is accessing on a wireless network.

I would actually rate day to day support a 1. We often knew more than the person on the phone.

I would however rate escalation support a 7. When we went to “red status”, support was very good. We were assigned a technical resource who performed a full audit. Unfortunately the integration to Salesforce.com still failed

They offer very basic classes which are required for master certification.

After having been through it, I would not consider anyone with a master certification any more qualified, unlike Salesforce.com certification which is a more difficult thing to acquire. For example, one of the classes towards certification was around social media. I would have expected examples of how to incorporate into campaigns in the product, with a demo and hands-on test. Instead, it was a powerpoint slideshow that went on way too long and covered really basic stuff like “what is Facebook, what is Twitter”

Ok, so, this sounds like it could be horrible because it was all remote, but we loved it... the Adobe training environment was easy to use, and the trainers were engaging. It was simple to switch back and forth between the meeting and the hands-on exercises in their training instances. We took the fundamentals training early in our implementation-- before the consultants came onsite-- and I know this made a big difference in our implementation, because we were able to ask informed questions throughout

I give it a 10 because the only issue we had was a result of not following the guidance we were given. Maxymiser provided a customized implementation guide for each site where we were adding the code. On our site implementations when we followed that guide to the letter, it was extremely fast and easy and has worked very well.

At the time we had to choose between several versions of marketing products. We decided to choose LoopFuse since a few of our employees were quite amused with the ease of use of LoopFuse. Also when looking at cost-effectiveness LoopFuse is a great product for the smaller companies. Making the decision was not too hard.

It was quite complex to generate segments with Adobe
analytics and I wasn’t personally satisfied with the overall performance of
Adobe Analytics and wasn’t enough flexible in any way. So we decided to switch
to something else better than Adobe Analytics and is available in the market at
a cheap rate and we ended up doing our research for the most suitable tool at
Oracle Infinity and we don’t regret our decision.

Incentivized

Eloqua is definitely good for larger companies that have 100,000+ contacts and complex marketing workflows and data. Personalization is fairly robust with Eloqua for larger campaigns with smart content and features. Scaling across channels is also seamless - as the platform has great options for non-email channels like SMS, Direct Mail, Chat, etc.

Incentivized

• The workflows were really easy to build and definitely increased our lead conversion. We did a lot of webinars, eBooks, etc - and it was so easy to decide on workflows to turn those prospects into hot leads by watching what they did on our website, or what they clicked on in our emails.
• Lead scoring also made our sales team more efficient. We had quite a few leads coming through our system, and many were not sales ready - but Loopfuse could transfer the lead score into Salesforce to show them which leads to focus on, as well as why the leads had the score they did (Loopfuse also imported lead activity into Salesforce - including emails sent, opened, clicked, webpages viewed, forms filled out, etc).

• Eloqua has had a very positive impact on our ROI and ability to build very complex programs. We have been nomitnated for the past 4 years as a Markie finalist and have won a Markie ourselves.
• Eloqua has a great pulse on the marketing trends and future developments to help keep it's software competitive.

Incentivized