Item: Oracle Marketing
Rating: 9
Author: Kevin Cannon

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Eloqua was being used from my vantage point only by the marketing teams - different teams supporting different products were using in & would estimate that for our 5,000+ employee company that about 50 were using it day to day. It was largely being used as the main tool for launching & managing online campaigns.

Pros and Cons

Giving users insight into the journey of prospects/customers down specific funnels
Helps marketers automate a map for what happens to users based on their actions (email read, did not open, request submitted, etc)
Converges information from other systems to give a more streamlined perspective of prospects/customers in the right lens of the overall company

It's a little finicky in that sometimes if steps are not followed in the absolute correct order it might not work - or even if they are followed in the right order it might not work. I recall trying to get Eloqua to pull up information on a campaign & on the 5th try it finally worked, but I had done everything the same way leading up to that 5th attempt. I would say these glitches/bugs happen about 5-10% of the time using Eloqua & it is a big pain. It is really hard to tell a boss there is an issue only to show it to them & have it work flawlessly.
Interface is a bit confusing, lots of drop downs make it harder to navigate - it's nice that all the information is accessible from one main screen, but essentially there are hundreds of operations that can be done on this & the system is not built to account for how it's being used - so it's not intuitive to what users are doing with the software, so if I always/only use steps r,z, & y - I still have to navigate to them in several clicks - no saved favorites.
Aside the above point on the interface - it could really benefit from a facelift, if you've never used it before, it will be very obvious you are working on a 10+ year old system. Not that new features haven't been added over time, but the look & feel of buttons, layout, font, etc. is due for a makeover.

Scalability

It would be a 10 if not for some lag/load problems that in hindsight might have been scale related. Asking Eloqua about their biggest deployment sizes, scalability figures would be a big benefit to evaluators. I came into an environment where Eloqua was already being used so I missed out on seeing the transformative before & after effect - but it does provide a wealth of options for personalizing the automated interaction a user experiences based on their interaction - options to help prevent literature fatigue, re-engage, check-in/brand messaging experiences can all be weaved into the experience & easily applied.

Return on Investment

Automated the campaign process to create a far better experience than if it was done manually for over 20,000 customers.
Great improvement in lead management & lead scoring - this only started to really be put under a microscope 2 years ago by marketing leadership & while some of the concepts were new to the team, Eloqua was already perfectly capable of aiding in this. Now scores are generated around: Title, Type of content requested, amount of content requested, reoccurring/frequency - all used to fit our needs in a formula around the campaigns in Eloqua.
Also, another great little use case for Eloqua, say a salesperson has a VIP customer that they are worried about, with Eloqua - a marketer could show sales how that one VIP is engaging over time. Has there been a sudden dropoff of opening emails, visiting the site, etc. or is the VIP still engaging as per usual & just not interested in the salesperson pitch?

Alternatives Considered

I have no insight into alternative products. I see some overlap in capability with OBIEE, but the overall value prop is different & would not consider them to be competing products.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would say 9 in the sense that if a colleague was asking for it, assumedly they already have marketing based use cases in mind that are appropriate for Eloqua. It has its learning curves but can not really think of a more standard alternative than using Eloqua so it really is almost a necessary component of any best practice marketing campaign program. Worst scenario is hard to say - if your use case is outside the normal positioned value prop that Eloqua has, forget about it - not for you. It's meant for specific marketing experiences & would highly recommend not trying to apply it to more flexible outside the box use cases.

Oracle Eloqua is a marketing campaign must

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Eloqua