Eloqua for Internal Communications
December 27, 2018
Eloqua for Internal Communications
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Standard
Modules Used
- Eloqua
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Eloqua
Our Marketing team uses Oracle Eloqua to send emails to our customers - I manage Internal Communications for the company and decided it would be a good service to use for our internal emails as well, so everything would have a consistent look and feel and our Team Members would receive the same professional, well-designed and formatted emails that our customers do. So Marketing and Internal Communications use the product, and it allows us to send emails and get metrics back on open rates, tracking, etc. to measure the success of campaigns.
- The template system Eloqua uses is very simple - it's easy to upload photos, add links, etc. There are not a ton of formatting options or opportunities for specific customizations, but you can do any basic designs easily and quickly. The templates are flexible and it's easy to move blocks of text or images around in the template if you are reformatting an older email, as I often do.
- The campaign tracking is very easy to follow - there are many different metrics you can run on your campaigns if you're looking for detailed statistics, but if you just want to check any bouncebacks and see the open rate, it is very clear on every campaign you send. Emails go out quickly and basic metrics are right there for you to follow.
- The sender settings are very customizable - you can change the "sent as" name to whatever you want, as well as the "reply to" name, so it can appear to be coming from, say, an executive, though the email address might be a communications email. It's very simple to update any of this information from the template and customize headers and footers appropriately.
- It is very quick to upload "segments"/listserves based on Excel documents. Managing lists of thousands of employees, I often simply upload a new excel file of their email addresses every month or so to keep my lists updated - it's simpler than trying to add in new individual profiles.
- It would be nice if there were more options for specific customizations in the template mode - for example, if you would like to have a photo to the left of text, there is a very specific spacing you're able to use, and you can't change the sizes of each piece more than 30 points in one direction or another. This means that if you have very specific designs you want to use for your emails, you may have to be a little flexible in the spacing and alignment. It's not a huge deal, but it limits some of the design options.
- I have dealt with some issues with bounceback statuses for emails - if an email bounces back once, the Eloqua system registers it as a bad email and you have to go in and clear the person's email in the system before it will send them an email again. This can be a tedious process - there is a way to clear an entire segment's bounce back status, but I had to go on a journey through the help section to figure that out. Also, if people unsubscribe to your emails, you have to go into their accounts individually and resubscribe them, and there is no simple way to do that en masse so it takes a very long time if you have more than a few accounts to resubscribe.
- The system goes down sometimes or is difficult to get into - the Eloqua network is sometimes slow to start and I may have to refresh the page for quite a while before it will load the email I'm working on, which can be frustrating. I think it is due to system overloads when there are a lot of users, but I'm not sure.
- You cannot add attachments to Eloqua emails, which makes it a little difficult. You can host documents on Eloqua, which is very nice, but you have to link them in your email versus making an attachment.
- I use Eloqua for Internal Communications, so there is no direct ROI as there would be for Marketing, but employee engagement is generally up, which I think is in part due to our use of Eloqua and prioritizing employee messaging in this format so our Team Members know they're receiving the same quality, well-designed messages our customers are.
- Eloqua is very helpful in showing immediate open rates, which allows me to find best practices in timing and frequency of emails - if open rates are low, I can send follow up communication and even go in the system and see who is opening the email, which is a great feature.
- Eloqua is mobile friendly, and since many employees read email on their phones if they are on the go, that is very important. When emails are forwarded they lose some of the formatting and the HTML can get messy, so that can be frustrating, but overall Eloqua emails are easy to read on devices.
My company is actually moving to Pardot because it integrates better with SalesForce, which our Sales teams use. I am new to Pardot so I don't know all the details on why it is a better system, but I will say that I have personally had very few issues with Eloqua and would have been happy to stay with the Eloqua system, other than the occasional downtimes.