All posts tagged Program Builder

Welcome Aboard!

by Carey Copeling on April 6, 2010 in Other with No comments

In the past few weeks, several of our clients have requested some help with a nurturing campaign. Not an uncommon request for our consultants here, but in my case, after reviewing the end goals and expected results, it became apparent that it was not so much a traditional nurturing campaign, but more of an on-boarding or AWP (automated welcoming program). Essentially, these clients wanted a way to welcome and introduce net-new contacts to their brand, products, services and resources using emails and hypersites.

One particular client had developed an idea wherein they wanted to leverage Eloqua’s Program Builder, Email and PURL-based Hypersites to direct all new contacts in the database to a personalized resource portal that featured their top 5 whitepaper/resources, their sales rep’s information (lead owner) and some personalized messaging based on their industry or vertical. Not to say that other organizations aren’t applying this type of program to their net new leads, but it dawned on me that the majority of nurturing efforts occur after lead scoring, and a few weeks of traditional communication efforts have not made them MQLs. This particular program engaged the lead within 24 hours of becoming an Eloqua contact and provided a tremendous amount of value right away to the prospective lead.

The determination of whether or not a lead qualified was fairly simple: Was the Date Created within the last 24 hours, or did the lead have a SFDC Lead Status of “Prospect, No Opportunity” and was Modified by CRM within the last 24 hours, and had that particular contact not run through the program previously? If all of those answers were true, then the feeder would fire and they would begin their path. An email was sent the following business day welcoming them to the company, and quickly let them know that there were some key, and more importantly free, resources available to them that they are encouraged to view on a personalized Hypersite page. When any of the assets were viewed/downloaded, a closed SFDC activity was written to their record, notifying the lead owner that the lead’s interest was mounting and that they were now far more educated about the client’s products and services than they were a mere 24 hours ago. On the Hypersite page itself, the lead owner’s information was clearly present, which gave an additional personalized touch to the resource page, and essentially put a name (and a face) to the connection between them and the next step in the relationship.

Now, we know that the first email isn’t always going to peak the interest of a particular contact, and as Steve Woods posted in his blog last week, evaluating which contacts clicked through and visited the hypersite and those that did not is the key to nurturing these welcoming messages. Putting a decision rule after the email send will allow you to ‘bucket’ those that did not action the first email, and allows you to change your messaging to this group and try them again at a later date. Steve referenced 4 days, but again, that is up to the client. With this particular example, the second email went out 3 weeks later, and a 3rd email went out 4 weeks later after evaluating visitors vs. non-visitors.

This is a very valuable tool/method for treating new contacts/leads in a way that will educate, empower and engage them quickly and effectively while passing on value immediately. If you have access to Program Builder and Hypersites this is a must have, and truly will help you gain that all-important first touch that you leads and contacts are probably really going to want.

Twitter Tools: Leverage Eloqua, Microsoft Outlook and RSS feeds

by Carey Copeling on January 25, 2010 in Marketing Automation, Social Media, Twitter with No comments

Checking in with Twitter multiple times a day can be tough and time consuming; most likely there are only a few people in your organization that have been assigned Twitter detail, but there is a good chance there are others in your organization that might want to see what’s going on without having the time to check-in themselves.

We recently recognized a need to keep the team here abreast with relevant tweets, but not everyone has the time to login to CoTweet to check themselves. We utilize the SearchPad function in CoTweet to save common and relevant search results, but if you don’t login, you can’t see these results. The solution was to do one and/or two things: Enable RSS feeds for specific search results in our Microsoft Outlook instances, and also setup a daily Eloqua email sent to an internal distribution list with RSS feeds enabled to display desired search results.

Microsoft Outlook RSS Twitter Feeds:

This may be a no-brainer for some of our readers who already utilize RSS feeds with Outlook, but we’re going to go through the process of finding the feed and adding it to Outlook.

Determine which search query or queries yo uwould like to include in your RSS feeds by logging into Twitter (or your Twitter management application) and running a particular search. In our example below, we searched for the term “CouchAssociates”. Near the bottom of the control panel on the left hand side, you should see a link (highlighted in blue) entitled “RSS feed for this query”. Clicking that link will take you the RSS version of the query results.

 

The URL (highlighted in red) is the location of this particular feed. Copy this URL, as it will be inserted into Microsoft Outlook in the next step.

Open Microsoft Outlook and locate the RSS feeds area in your Mailbox area.

 

To add a RSS feed to this area, right-click on RSS feeds and click ‘Add RSS Feed’. Paste the URL from the query feed you copied from the previous step.

     

You will see that this feed has now been added to the RSS section. It will continue to refresh and mark new Tweets as Outlook sends and receives data normally.

Again, this is a great way to stay on top of relevant Tweets without having to login or have access to any Twitter-related accounts.

Automate Twitter Feeds with Eloqua:

To all of our Eloqua customers, this is an easy win for sharing Twitter search results with key stakeholders within you organization. **Note: This particular method requires the use of Eloqua’s Program Builder (Eloqua subscription required: Eloqua Express, Eloqua Team or Eloqua Enterprise)**

Create a simple template email, using the wizard, leaving the content section(s) blank.

Once the email is created, select the Main Content section, and using the toolbar located at the bottom of the frame, select Insert Feed.

Using the URL of the search feed (see step 2 of the section related to Microsoft Outlook RSS Feeds), add the URL using the Add button on the insert feed menu. You can also set the number of items you want to insert into the feed – for our example we are pulling all new tweets within the last 24 hours. Other options available here are feed format (we are using Heading Only), the feed style (we created a custom theme) and also the update option (Auto update feed is the best option here as it doesn’t require any manual efforts to update the feeds).

Once you have added all of the desired feeds to the email, name it appropriately according to your naming convention.

Using Eloqua’s Program Builder, you will need to quickly create a simple three step program:Step 100. is a holding entry step that uses a feeder that adds members of a contact group (in our case this is our internal contact group of all C&A employees that was built using filter criteria Email Address is equal to *@couch-associates.com) and executes at 9:00am EST, Monday through Friday.
Step 200. sends a batch version of the email you created in the previous step.
Step 300. removes the contacts from the program so they can be added using the feeder at 9:00am the next (business) day.

The result? A daily email sent your list, automatically, that keeps your team and stakeholders up to date and informed as to what is being discussed about your brand, competitors and industry-related topics on Twitter.