Eloqua: Solid Choice for Large Businesses
January 18, 2014

Eloqua: Solid Choice for Large Businesses

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Modules Used

  • Eloqua

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Eloqua

Eloqua is the primary email platform for our entire business, managing millions of contacts. We use it for all prospect emails (nurture, newsletters, event emails, etc.), as well as customer communications (educational, training and thought leadership pieces for the installed base). We have a robust integration with SalesForce and an entire team of marketing operations staff to manage the infrastructure.
  • Eloqua allows easy flexibility to integrate with other platforms like Salesorce, DemandBase, and reporting software.
  • Eloqua offers strong product implementation training, with options for on-site, webinar and phone training.
  • Eloqua provides a sleek interface in its e10 environment to create automated programs in a manner that any marketer could understand without the support of an IT team.
  • While Eloqua allows for a lot of heavy customization (especially with integrations), they often forget to incorporate that flexibility with version upgrades. For example, they have started to restrict customization potential in recent releases, which puts legacy customers in a bind.
  • Eloqua does not mandate or allow a customer to consistently enforce naming conventions or folder structures among files in Eloqua, leading to a nightmare of data down the road. We would like to be able to set a naming convention and know that all Eloqua users will have to use it.
  • Eloqua lacks the best practice/thought leadership expertise of some competitors like HubSpot. They are a tool - not marketing experts. This isn't a reason not to buy, but if you're a small marketing shop, consider someone with more robust marketing offerings.
  • Eloqua has allowed us to build high quality lead nurturing programs with sophisticated rules. We can now produce lead nurturing programs 2x faster than before.
  • Eloqua has mandated the hiring of more than 4 full-time employees to help manage training, infrastructure, integrations, best practices and email management in an enterprise business.
  • Eloqua has offered faster, automated reporting than ever before (though e10 still has some significant bugs where the reporting module crashes at busy times of the day)
We evaluated three vendors when selecting Eloqua.

Eloqua: Great neutral price, good for large, enterprise businesses, fast implementation, great on-site and webinar training programs, and great flexibility to integrate with Salesforce.
HubSpot: Easily the prettiest UI, cheap price, great thought leadership and marketing expertise, nice customer service, but not heavily customizable for sophisticated integrations, making it too small for an enterprise business.
Marketo: Nice product, pushy sales people, and incredibly expensive. Price ruled this one out.
Eloqua works very well in mid-to large-sized businesses. It takes a large team of IT and marketing experts to manage, making it difficult to reign for small businesses. There are better alternatives like HubSpot and ExactTarget that I would recommend for small businesses. And while I stated earlier that the e10 interface allows everyday marketers to build automated programs, the infrastructure is built to support elaborate programs from an IT team. So if you want to get the most out of it - have the business to support it.

Using Oracle Eloqua

We have built and trained a large team of IT and marketing experts to support our Eloqua automation platform and its integrations to other parts of the business. We have significantly customized the tool, which would make it difficult to transfer to another product. We are satisfied enough with our customer support and the quality of the system that it would take some major changes from Eloqua to force us elsewhere. That said, with the recent acquisition by Oracle, we are watching the business closely to make sure those expectations don't change.