From a Tweet to an email: Eloqua got cross platform marketing automaton right

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).