Eloqua is great company but product can be hard to use.
February 24, 2013

Eloqua is great company but product can be hard to use.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Team

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Eloqua

  • We've loved the program builder. It can be a little tricky to use if you are not well trained (the Eloqua remote training classes are awesome). But through program builder, we have enabled our nurture and demand gen strategies. The automation of emails-- right message, right time-- was exciting because we did not have that before.
  • We have improved our response rates and our lead conversions by a few points through changing our marketing strategy-- Eloqua sparked that kind of thinking with our marketing team.
  • Copying programs is another small thing that helped us tremendously. We were able to create templates for the marketing team to standardize our sequences so we weren't recreating them from scratch every time. This is pretty standard for marketing automation, but was a new concept to us that we were happy to take advantage of.
  • The cloud connectors were exciting, and we were planning to significantly reduce manual workflows by using them. For example, we planned to automate webex registration confirmations and attendance emails (thanks for coming, sorry we missed you) and then send the contacts into different nurture paths. The connector was very slow to provide that data back to Eloqua from webex (over 24 hours in some cases). We didn't see the efficiency gains we desired.
  • Building things like Progressive Profiling was difficult for anyone other than a Master. It's possible, but not that easy. You've got to really love geeking out to get into it. Once built, it's great.
  • We recouped our first year investment with the first campaign we ran-- the sheer reach that we were able to get would have cost us 200% of what we spent on our Eloqua subscription in year 1. Our thought leadership content consumption broke records. We also later closed 3 deals from that campaign that I believe we would not have been able to touch previously.
Marketo. We picked Eloqua because we were using a less common CRM, and Eloqua was able to solve our needs via batch integration. Our sales process and experience with Eloqua was also a defining factor-- they have been amazing to work with.
Eloqua is a great company to partner with-- we were totally new to the marketing automation world, so the true value we got from them was more than just a product. We started developing that competency internally and really turned on the science part of a creative marketing brain. Our relationship with them has been fantastic, as well.

The product (E9 Team) can be hard to use, though. We were not as prepared for the additional complexity that the tool introduced to some of our resource groups. We hired a Power User (hard to find, by the way) to focus full time on building out our use of the system. Think carefully about your marketing strategy before implementing any marketing automation tool to ensure that your system is enabling the strategy and you're not just building a strategy because you can now do something cool.

Using Oracle Eloqua

  • We use this to run our demand generation and nurture campaigns. It enables our go to market strategy.
We're investigating the upgrade to E10 or potentially switching. A potential switch is not due to unhappiness with the product, but is related to internal issues. Specifically, we have a big CRM initiative underway that plays a big part in our decision on the future of marketing automation.

Evaluating Oracle Eloqua and Competitors

Marketing Automation was a new concept for us; we were previously using a couple of smaller point solutions for emails, but we were not doing anything sophisticated with campaign flows, lead scoring or nurturing. We had poor visibility into our funnel conversions and no visibility into our contacts' online behaviors.

Oracle Eloqua Implementation

We had a quickstart, minimal configuration implementation with Bulldog. I think that the positives of our implementation were related to our online training from Eloqua directly, not really because of our implementation partner. Overall it was OK- not sure I would select them again.
  • Professional services company
Bulldog Solutions performed our quick start implementation.

Oracle Eloqua Training

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.

Oracle Eloqua Support

I haven't personally called Support for help on a ticket, but my staff did and has been very happy with the level of service. As an example, we were trying to get our first campaign out the door and Support spent 2 hours on the phone with us to resolve the issue. I was also impressed with their upgrade readiness assessments; they walked us through the pros/cons of moving to E10.
Not Sure - When we first started with Eloqua we had a dedicated Customer Success Manager (for at least the first year). I think that has changed, so I'm not sure what our current status is. If the CSM is an extra expense now, I'd recommend it for any new users/companies. Once you're up and running.... it's still nice, but not as necessary. Especially not if you have a power user on staff.