The Challenge:Alignment of campaigns to support sales objectives and the ability for sellers to add contacts to these campaigns
Greater alignment and communication between sales and marketing is common challenge in any industry, but even more so in the healthcare industry. Our sellers are in field based and spend most of their time in operating rooms and healthcare facilities. Because our industry size and contact base is fairly static, our marketing teams are tasked with a more account-based approach to product awareness, demand creation and sales enablement. The combination of our sales organization and marketing approach creates a unique challenge as our sellers are often the most aware of the buyer's stage in the buying cycle and therefore the content that is/isn't appropriate. This means that without a high level of communication/alignment between sales/marketing, we could be missing the best opportunities to communicate with customers and prospects to create product awareness and interest and support our sellers by accelerating the buying cycle. Our recent adoption of Salesforce.com and subsequent Eloqua integration, opened some interesting opportunities to increase alignment and communication via the API.
The Solution: Campaign Integration
We leveraged the newly built integration calls between SFDC/Eloqua to pull back campaign membership (contact details), status(active/responded), and seller info (rep owner) into an Eloqua custom data object (CDO). This integration allows us to automate Eloqua campaign inclusion based on a seller adding a contact to a matching campaign in SFDC. Our campaign segments are built on shared filters that query the CDO to include/exclude the appropriate contacts based on campaign membership and status. There is an added level of complexity to our contact/campaign model in that a single contact will often be part of multiple organizations and could be speaking with reps that cover separate product lines all at the same time. We solved for the multiple rep by writing the SFDC campaign member owner (rep who added them to a campaign) to a unique rep type contact field for each of our rep types in Eloqua and by configuring a signature rule based on this field so that each email comes from the correct rep. Additionally, as our contacts often respond directly to the seller via phone or email, we built in safety checks on the campaign canvas between each email to verify that the contact has not "responded" in the SFDC campaign so that we don't email contacts that are actively communicating with sellers.
The Results:
12.2% increase in Unique Open Rate as compared to non-signature rule 'marketing' emails
1.2% increase in Unique Click-Through Rate as compared to non-signature rule 'marketing' emails
4,803 contacts enrolled in campaigns in the first quarter since launch
2,027 new contacts added to Eloqua via campaign integration (full SFDC-->EQ contact integration is not turned on currently)
94% of sellers in core launch are participating
Significant initial closed-loop reporting results via this integration
Considerations:
1. Email Privacy Compliance. This has been launched only in the US based on current privacy regulations. Additionally, we have enabled some traffic management steps on the campaign canvas to help avoid over-emailing and have an editorial calendar so that there are limited campaigns available each quarter that align with sales objectives.
2. Content. One of the key wins in this was greater alignment on campaign content that directly supports sales objectives at specific stages of the buying cycle. Take advantage of your seller's expertise and perspective when writing content for sales focused campaigns.
3. Sales Alignment. We have started to frame the SFDC/EQ integration as the primary communication channel between sales and marketing. Sales can let us know which contacts they need help with via campaigns and we can provide information back on marketing engagement at the account and contact objects both for these direct rep-initiated campaigns as well as for lead lifecycling. This accountability and transparency have been very positive for the sales/marketing relationship and SFDC engagement.
EU Classes That Influenced This Solution:
Eloqua Sales Tools
Personalizing Campaigns
Database Configuration
System Integration