Eloqua is the best...but it's not for everyone
Updated February 17, 2015
Eloqua is the best...but it's not for everyone
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Team
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Eloqua
- A highly robust tool capable of integrating with almost every facet/channel of marketing.
- Integration with CRM and other third party tools and forms allows for a more integrated marketing management experience.
- Sales tools help to bridge the gap between marketing and sales, so that sales has greater visibility into marketing activities and their outcomes.
- Communication and education through the topliners community give user access to materials they need to help themselves and engage with fellow users, as well as provide feedback and feature requests.
- Continual improvements (though sometimes buggy at first) shows that Eloqua understands the world of marketing and how it's evolving, and is ever-striving to provide a tool that support the all-round needs of marketing.
- Closed-loop reporting and revenue performance management tools help to close to loop between marketing activity and actual sales results.
- The E10 platform is a user-friendly interface that makes marketing easy (much better than E9), though its does leave a bit to be desired for highly technical users.
- Many of the beneficial administrative features of E9 were taken away in E10, making the tool more user-friendly for the average marketer, but less useful for the technical marketer
- The reporting function leaves a bit to be desired. The fact that reports can only be built and customized by someone with an analyzer license is not cool. It leaves user dependent on one person, unless they want to spend big bucks to pay for additional people to be able to report.
- There are a lot of bugs - big ones - after each product release. Product releases used to be exciting (like Apple releases in the early 2000s) and now they're terrifying as we brace ourselves for the week following the release and what will inevitably go wrong (like Apple releases now).
- Eloqua used to invest much more in their customers and actively worked to educate them on the newest trends in marketing and helped clients to leverage to tool to align with those trends. Now, it's more about self-education via topliners. It's a great tool, but you have to have the time (and drive) to proactively go out and teach yourself what's new and how you can use Eloqua to take things to the next level.
- The really useful features that make Eloqua differentiated (for the serious marketer) are hidden and hard to find. Closed loop reporting, for example, should have its own functional area. Instead, various management features that go into that functionality are hidden in the 'settings' area within various other functional sections.
- I have a love/hate relationship with the campaign canvas. It's wonderful for building out campaigns and if you have your act together before launching, it's great. It's less great if you need to "build as you go" or if you want to change things up mid-stream. The canvas is not very amenable to on the fly changes because you have to deactivate it to make changes, during which time if someone responds to your campaign, you've lost your ability to pass that info to your CRM. It's a brilliant functional idea poorly executed for the average marketer.
- I never believe a tool is responsible for things like "increased ROI" and "faster lead conversion" - it is a company's business practices that are responsible for these things. That said, Eloqua allows us to more easily execute better, more integrated programs that allow our marketing team to focus less on execution and more on optimization.
- Ability to report on marketing campaign results throughout the demand funnel, making it easier to enforce lead management accountability and marketing ROI.