Item: Oracle Marketing
Rating: 10
Author: Arpine Babloyan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Eloqua for the marketing team. It is used to orchestrate marketing campaigns, send email communications to our subscribers and existing customers, create landing pages for digital marketing campaigns, capture lead information and pass it on to Salesforce, and ensure our data is consistent and clean. Eloqua helps us to go to market much faster, automate communications with prospects and customers while staying personal and making sure the content we send is relevant to them.

Pros and Cons

Campaign orchestration - of all the tools I've used it has by far the best combination of ability to create campaigns fast while making them as sophisticated as you want
Reporting - the new Insight tool allows you to be very granular and get to any level of data needed to make smart decisions
CRM integration - it is very robust and customizable so it is easy to troubleshoot and change as the business changes

The reporting tool, Insight, is a powerful feature, but it is relatively new and having more documentation on it would be helpful.
Email and landing page editor are very easy to use, but it would be great to have some pre-designed email and landing page templates to start with, including an image gallery. Would also like to see more flexibility in adding custom code to non-html pages (built with designer) - for example, the ability to convert the page to HTML after it's built and make changes in the code as needed.
The connection between contacts and companies is currently based on account/contact relationships in Salesforce - it would be great to see it mature to something more independent. For example, I'd love to have companies created and linked to contacts that are not yet in Salesforce, it will help with our ABM campaigns
Eloqua Engage for Outlook is a better tool for BDRs than for account executives that manage deals with multiple stakeholders and often communicate in multiple threads.

Scalability

It really has all the features one needs to personalize as much as you would like, and personalization is really easy to set up. I think it's a lot easier to highlight its features in comparison with other tools I've used. Some of the other tools are easy to use, but have product limitations that will prevent you from accomplishing certain functionality - like updating fields based on certain actions a sales person does in Salesforce, and then sending this information back to Salesforce; or changing landing page content based on the person who lands on the page (which is a great feature for ABM)

Return on Investment

Time savings - I measured, and it takes on average 3 times less to create a multi-step drip campaign in Eloqua than it does with a different vendor we used previously
The amount of campaigns we can run at the same time has increased by over 1000% compared to prior to Eloqua, and that in turns results in increased brand awareness and website traffice

Alternatives Considered

Marketo, Act-On Software and HubSpot

It has a lot more functionality and third party / app integrations compared to the majority of the tools on the market, with probably only Marketo being just as powerful with Pardot being the next close contender. I found Eloqua much easier to use and being a lot more flexible and scalable compared to Marketo.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for marketing teams who want to be flexible, adaptable to changes in their business and create powerful, sophisticated campaigns to their clients. Teams that want to create automated drip campaigns with dynamic content and personalized cadence and messaging would find Eloqua very easy to use and perfect for their needs. It has powerful, in-depth reporting functionality and great CRM integration (note that I've had experience integrating only with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce - both of these integrations worked very well) - so teams that use CRM will also find it complementary to their marketing technology stack.
It will not be a good tool if a company doesn't use any CRM - as it is not a CRM replacement; or if all the marketing team is planning to do is "batch and blast" emails (which is a possible scenario for some very small businesses).

A flexible, scalable and powerful tool for our marketing team

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle CX Marketing (formerly Oracle Marketing Cloud)