Item: Oracle Marketing
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Eloqua is used by all business units globally to deliver all marketing emails. Email is our largest communication channel, and so it's critical that we have a solid enterprise level system to manage it. We engage in limited marketing automation, and are focused on converting from a corporate "batch and blast" attitude to a nurture based system.

Pros and Cons

Great ease of use. The campaign canvas is essentially programming with pictures. I love it.
A solid, growing API that provides a technical back-end for those of us so inclined.
Ease of segmentation. I'll often put together a segment to answer questions instead of running a report.

Track my links! Are you people crazy? You refrain from tracking email activity by default, presumably to save space on YOUR end. Meanwhile I have to bake not forgetting to check a track link box into my QA process. If I forget that box, our proof of ROI is GONE, and I'm out of a job. This is a major pain point, in case I'm not being clear. And it's been a pain point my entire automated marketing career.
I'm going to list the lack of automatically tracking my email engagement twice here, because I cannot fathom where that decision came from in the first place. "Hey, you looking to run an email campaign?" "Sure!" "Great, well we're not going to track shit unless you go into a specific tab under a specific tool window and tell us which links individually to track."
I am not joking around here I almost lost my job once because of this lack of a feature.

Scalability

I mean... I'm working on introducing an entire business unit to Eloqua, folding it into our existing processes. Once the foundation is set up properly it scales with minimal effort.

Return on Investment

It's the foundation of our largest communication channel.

Alternatives Considered

Marketo

Eloqua and Marketo are competitors for a reason. There are only a few features here and there that push Eloqua over the edge for us, and they're all specific to our implementation and use.

Likelihood to Recommend

Eloqua is a great platform for sending emails. It's second to none. It's got a wide array of features for building and enhancing emails with dynamic content, and has excellent data processing and list building tools.

I wouldn't bother using it as a business intelligence tool. You can answer great questions with Oracle BI, but without a major custom build it's never going to be the kind of database that can be an all-in-one marketing orchestration tool. That being said, though, it's clearly not built for that anyway.

Great product. Easy to use. You don't track my links by default and it's a major issue for me.

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Eloqua