Eloqua was the pioneer, but now it is an expensive laggard. Oracle is hurting their innovation.
November 18, 2016

Eloqua was the pioneer, but now it is an expensive laggard. Oracle is hurting their innovation.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Modules Used

  • Eloqua

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Eloqua

Eloqua is the front end for all contacts entering into our CRM via web forms and list uploads. We use it to send out all marketing emails for nurture campaigns and event marketing. Furthermore, we use its lead scoring engine and workflow tools to do data cleansing and lead prioritization for our sales and lead qualifiying organizations.
  • It's a highly configurable application.
  • There are many other services that integration with the application.
  • The application is stable and has backing of multi-billion dollar company.
  • Impossible to use for any non-technical marketer. This is built for organizations with a large marketing ops team that does all of the execution of programs for other marketers. Creating emails is very difficult and it is very hard to have a responsively designed approach to using templates.
  • Virtually no innovation. They were the first to market in MAP and their legacy code is holding them back. Furthermore, once acquired by Oracle, their prices went up, support became worse and they basically stopped adding any real improvements to the software.
  • I believe that they are losing net customers each year.
  • The integration with SFDC is slow and doesn't do basic things like understanding a 1-to-many Salesforce campaign membership with a contact.
  • Reporting is very difficult and inflexible. Should rebuild that tool from scratch and dump microstrategy.
It is too labor intensive to provide any real scale. Yes, it can send out millions of emails, but it doesn't scale at the marketing project level. The technical nature and lack of usability are major barriers to get widespread adoption in an organization, let alone in a broader marketing department.
  • When it was first implemented, Eloqua did a great job to let the marketing team build a process for building the database and sending emails.
  • Over time, Eloqua's limitations have prevented the marketing team from improving its productivity and scalability as an organization. At this point it is an albatross around our neck that we must free ourselves from.
It would be close to a tie between Marketo & Eloqua but the best of the group right now is HubSpot. While HubSpot came from an SMB background, their pace of innovation and releases has allowed them to catch up and surpass the other MAP's vendors in many areas. Pardot was promising but has a terrible form strategy and seems lost after its two back to back acquisitions (ExactTarget, then Salesforce.com).
Good enough for a huge company that has a big marketing ops organization that is transactionally focused and doesn't change much. It is not appropriate for lean marketing teams or anyone who believes in self-service tools. It is also not a good fit if you want to have fast and rich personalization on your site because their forms and javascript tools are very behind the times.

Oracle Marketing Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
1
Dynamic content
3
Ability to test dynamic content
3
Landing pages
1
A/B testing
2
Mobile optimization
1
Email deliverability reporting
7
List management
8
Triggered drip sequences
6
Lead nurturing automation
5
Lead scoring and grading
6
Data quality management
8
Automated sales alerts and tasks
3
Calendaring
1
Event/webinar marketing
1
Dashboards
1
Standard reports
1
Custom reports
1
API
2
Role-based workflow & approvals
7
Customizability
9
Integration with Salesforce.com
3
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Not Rated
Integration with SugarCRM
Not Rated