A few weeks ago I tweeted about Eloqua’s benchmark report, which was announced at Eloqua Experience, their annual user conference in San Francisco. As a Salesforce.com consultant, I was very impressed when I received the following automated email thanking me for my tweet, only a few days later. (It even addresses me by name, and came from their director of content)

The reason I was so impressed was because of the automated nature of this email. It’s easy to manually monitor tweets and follow-up on a case-by-case basis, but this kind of automatic thank you is incredibly hard to achieve. While I’m not 100% sure how they pulled this email off, I’m assuming they did something like the following:

1. I’ve signed up for various whitepapers from the Eloqua site, meaning they have my name and email – but NOT my twitter ID
2. Somewhere along the way Eloqua was able to discover my twitter user name, likely using my email address
3. This user name was probably saved in my record, allowing Eloqua to scan for users in their system that tweeted about their event (this likely used the hash tag as the search query)
4. Once the users who tweeted about the event were captured, they executed the thank you email

The reason I’m impressed is because this is a data heavy operation requiring the internal DB to be rectified with the Twitter DB (through it’s API). This process is ripe with challenges like de-duplication, ensuring you map the twitter ID to the right contact record, and requires a great deal of time to map out the campaign properly. This campaign also carries huge risk, because if the above isn’t done properly, you’ll end up sending thank you emails to the wrong people.

I’m sure Eloqua could also build in business rules, to ensure their top prospects or client don’t get this email, and are followed up directly by their account manager. Very cool stuff.

People in the social media space are constantly telling us that social media doesn’t scale. This simple email does a lot to prove that by managing good data, social can indeed scale (to some extent).

On November 4th I has the privilege of attending Fuel the Conversation with Al Iverson, Director of Deliverability and Privacy, and Dawn DeVirgilio, (@dawndevirgilio) Social Media Manager at ExactTarget give a thought provoking talk on social media and email marketing – and the convergence between these mediums. Here’s what I took away:

1. Email marketing is far from dead:
Dawn highlighted some internal ExactTarget research which concluded that 93% of consumers subscribe to a commercial email list. Clearly making email the default method of communication for almost all business. 23% of consumers have become a fan of a brands facebook page, which highlights Facebooks’ penetration. While Twitter is growing, and receives a lot of attention, only 5% of US consumers follow a brand on twitter.

Social is now important, but email is still the first way you should be attempting to connect with customers.

2. Deliverability:
Simply put, you’re email marketing program only works if your message makes it through sophisticated spam filters. A number of studies suggest that up to 20% of your legitimate messages will get blocked. Al stressed that while the content of the email is important (try to avoid the word Viagra), email deliverability is largely dictated by sender reputation and subscriber engagement.

Reputation. ISP’s assign a score to your level of trust worthiness based on the email history from your @domain. It can take a long time to build a quality reputation, so work at being a good sender. If you’re interested your reputation can be checked using a systems like senderscore.org. While it can take a while to build a reputation, you can lose it almost instantly. Avoid (and measure) the common Email reputation killers: 1. User spam complaints to ISP’s, 2. Sending to spam traps by harvesting emails off the web, 3. Subscriber apathy resulting in low click through rates, 4. Allowing a high bounce rate by failing to clean your scriber list.

Engagement. If you want to avoid spam filters get permission, it’s (almost) that simple. If you want to make it to the inbox, send to subscribers who want your content – this can be measured by the click through rate. To avoid “emotional unsubscribes” bite the bullet and remove unengaged email subscribers, the increase in total click through rate will increase your deliverability.

Lastly, Gmail’s priority inbox is further changing deliverability, even if you make it to the inbox you end up in the “everything else” section unless the user flags your message as important. Which you can assume helps Google filter quality messages from spam at the aggregate level.

3. Social is about multi-channel communication – (which includes email)
Based on internal ExactTarget research, on average 4% of your email subscribers are also fans on facebook, and followers on Twitter (these people are clearly your brand advocates). The number of people who are overlapping across these channels is increasing at a rate that makes a multi-channel communication strategy critical.

You now need to segment the customer, the subscriber, and the channel, because no one wants to read an email when they read the content on Facebook (and vice-versa). This obviously increases the demand for good clean customer and subscriber data.

4. The interactive marketing hub: Social needs good data!
In order to manage the convergence of these channels, ExactTarget (who recently purchased CoTweet) is introducing the Interactive Marketing Hub. This system should allow the marketer the ability to understand each channel (including email) and how your subscribers are engaging with your message. I can’t wait for the live demo when it’s ready!

For reasons I describe below, I feel this comparison isn’t totally valid. But, I’ve been browsing my sites analytics and the one of the top keywords driving traffic my site are keywords related to ExactTarget and Eloqua. So here it goes.

Why Eloqua and ExactTarget aren’t the same: These two tools satisfy very different needs.

Eloqua is a fully featured marketing automation platform that can be used to manage and automate every customer touch point based on user defined logic. It then rolls the activity from all of these touch points into a lead score, and integrates with systems like Salesforce.com to get a complete understanding a prospect as they move through a sales pipeline. Qualified leads can then be sent to sales with more confidence.
The typical users of Eloqua are larger B2B companies with extended sales cycles.
The entry level price point is much higher than ExactTarget, only call Eloqua if you’re willing to spend $20,000 + on your marketing software.

ExactTarget is one of the leading email service providers (ESP), they strive to be the best email engine in the industry. In so doing, ExactTarget has developed one of the best email rendering tools, and is in the very top tier of email deliverability. (Side note, all ESP’s claim deliverability of >99%, they are lying! check out sites like senderscore.org for more on this). In my view, very few ESP’s are in ExactTarget’s league.

• Business, often B2C and with larger email lists are the primarily users of ExactTarget.
• It’s entirely level price point is also very low, if you send out 10,000 – 50,000 emails / year you can get set up on ExactTarget for around $2,000.

Why are they often compared? … While different, they both send email!

1. Eloqua does much of its lead scoring and nurturing using it’s built in email tool. Meaning, if you chose to go with Eloqua, you really don’t need an ESP like ExactTarget. In addition, if you have ExactTarget heavily integrated with other software like Salesforce.com and Omniture, you don’t need Eloqua.
2. Both are enterprise class marketing software, so they inevitably compete for scarce marketing dollars.

Which should you chose?
The use case should dictate the selection of the tool. The following is my view on the use case that would support your decision to choose one tool over the other. Chose Eloqua if you have:

• lead nurturing and scoring in your strategy
• allocated sufficient resources, both internal and external to feed the system. remember both of these are content and resource dependant! Eloqua only works if you put internal marketing resources and personal behind it.
• Want to keep all of your marketing tools in one place (making room for Salesforce of course).

Chose ExactTarget if you:

• Are looking for a world class email server to send segmented emails
• Have a very large email list
• Only want to send a newsletter
• Have complex email requirements such as dynamic sender information, dynamic content, etc.
• Are willing to take a modular approach to your marketing tools, and are willing to invest in custom integrations
• Want to grow your marketing automation program slowly. ExactTarget Core edition lets you start with basic functionality, and through integrations and upgrades you can have a more robust marketing automation platform.

I’m excited to announce that #marketingTO the digital customer experience is now sold out! That means all 95 tickets have been snapped up.

I think this validates the format of the event. I’m sick of long speeches filled with grand statements of strategy, constantly pointing out how revolutionary “the new world” is. I’m excited to be presenting an event that will focus on real actionable ideas – and thanks to Architech Solutions, it’s free.

I look forward to seeing you all there!

A little while ago I was talking to a colleague about how Salesforce.com could help their organization, and the topic of marketing automation quickly came up. I mentioned some options including Eloqua and he had an interesting reaction when we started talking about their service.

My colleague had been on a nurture campaign for a month or so, and eventually he decided to call the rep that the emails were coming “from”. He told the rep that he was truly interested in their service, but said they should follow up in a few weeks. But then, he received an email “from” the rep about 30 minutes later. Curious he opened the email only to find a generic, “touch base” email. He was rather disoriented to receive this message when he had just talked to the sales rep. Worse, he’s a high touch social media guy, so he was not exactly impressed with the automated email.

I told him that there was a valuable lesson to learn when multiple departments, in this case sales and marketing, are both interacting with a contact. In this case the interaction was both automated and manual. Provided you have the right tools, collecting information from digital sources is relitavly easy. The hard part is when your system depends on human interaction, like in the sales rep / prospect relationship above. The point is that people who are acting on the information being generated from a marketing automation system, must be diligence to update the underlying contact records properly. This creates obvious adoption challenges – a post for another day.

Ultimately, any marking automation system is dependent on the people using the tool, and in many cases, your marketing automation system will only be as good as the ‘people process’.

p.s. Hello to all the Eloqua people who made it to this post! … feel free to drop your two cents below

I’ve been managing an email marketing program for about two years, so When I first heard about Bit.ly URL tracking I instantly knew there was value in tracking links. I just felt it didn’t apply to me. I figured this was a great service for content creators, but I tweet about any article I find interesting, why would I care if their clicked on?

Then I realized that I was passing up an amazing opportunity to practice writing subject lines, AdWords ad copy, blog titles, etc. By looking at the tweets that causes a follower to click I can learn what motivates action and what doesn’t.

So thank you bit.ly for this great tool, I’ll be using this data to help me write subject lines, titles, and call to actions.