So your company has decided to migrate from Eloqua to Marketo…. Whether the reasoning is based on cost or you’re looking for an easier solution, the marketing automation specialist (aka “Elo-queen” or “Elo-king”) is probably going to be responsible for getting the team up and running on Marketo as soon as possible. Don’t fret, it’s not as complicated as it may seem.
While there are tons of articles on what to consider when migrating from one platform to another, and even scorecards on which platform is better, from prior Eloqua experience, we’ll share how to translate your everyday Eloqua activities into Marketo quick wins and what you need to do now before your Eloqua subscription expires.
What to do right now:
- Inventory all of the assets and campaigns that are currently running – everything!
- Become BFFs with your:
- Web designer/developer
- CRM Admin
- Develop a plan to turn on your Marketo nurture programs so that nurtured leads are not receiving the same content they received while in Eloqua.
- It is possible to have both Marketo and Eloqua integrated with the same CRM at the same time. Have a clear plan in place of how data is flowing between the systems.
Set up your ongoing marketing initiatives
Programs are key in Marketo. A Program is one specific marketing initiative, similar to a campaign in Eloqua. Unlike an Eloqua campaign, the Program houses all of the assets related to the initiative (emails, landing pages, reports, lists) as well the mechanism used to drive those marketing activities (send emails, change data, sync to CRM, add to a list) – The Smart Campaign. A Smart Campaign will replace your Eloqua data cleansing program, your campaign canvas, and in some cases your internal and external calls. As of the writing of the post, Marketo provisions your new instance with Best Practice Program templates, including one for a Nurture Program, that simplifies the process of building your nurture tracks. Clone all of the program templates and use them to quickly set up your most common initiatives.
Marketo also gives users the ability to create and schedule Simple Emails, one-email batch blasts to a list of leads. Inventory the email templates, landing pages, and forms that you restrict your marketing team to using. You’ll want to recreate these in Marketo. Analytics in Marketo allows any user with the right permissions to create and customize a variety of reports and share them across the platform. Unlike some reports in Eloqua Insight that can take up to 24 hours to populate with accurate data, Marketo reports display data in real-time. Report subscriptions can also be created in both platforms. And speaking of subscriptions, you can quickly and easily subscribe Marketo users to your Smart Lists.
Don’t forget your global assets
Comfortable with HTML? Copy the HTML code of your Eloqua email templates and add the code to the template in Marketo. Please be aware that you will have to add <div> tags around sections of the code that you want to be editable when creating emails. Not so comfortable with HTML? Consult with your web designer to help build these.
In Eloqua, you may be creating a new form for each new landing page. In Marketo, that’s not necessary. Try limiting the number of forms by type. For example, web content download, live event registration, online event registration, etc. You can reuse the same form on multiple landing pages. Core audience lists should be either imported into Marketo or defined in a global Smart List. Use your frequently Eloqua Segments to create similar lists in Marketo. Don’t forget to identify your exclusion and unsubscribe lists. The standard unsubscribe field in Eloqua maps to the same standard CRM Email opt-out field that Marketo maps to. So if your CRM is integrated, you’re golden. However, any custom preference or unsubscribe fields will need to be mapped to fields in your CRM which should sync over to Marketo.
Keep sales in the loop
Sales emails can easily be created and made available to your sales team if you are integrating Sales Insight in Marketo. Sales Insight, like Profiler, gives your sales team insight into what behaviours specific leads are taking. It also allows sales to choose and personalize emails created by Marketing but much more seamlessly than Eloqua’s Engage. By making certain Smart Campaigns available in Sales Insight, you can allow sales reps to add leads or contacts to those marketing initiatives.
Lead Scoring is very robust in Eloqua, and for many, the score itself is much easier to understand than Marketo’s scoring system. A contact’s score of A4, tells me that the person is a perfect demographic match but isn’t really engaging in our content. Marketo’s model is different but by adding custom Behaviour and Demographic score fields to your CRM, you can also inform sales of what’s driving the score – the fit or the interest.
Simplifying the complicated
Marketo is designed to make things simple but powerful enough to handle the complexities you throw at it. You only need to learn Marketo terminology, the Marketo interface and core Marketo concepts and you can turn your focus to launching and managing initiatives and generating revenue.
This list of actions is not exhaustive but rather an attempt to tackle some of the required quick wins of most marketing organizations. Careful planning of your migration project will go a long way to a successful implementation.
You may also be interested in How to Manage Marketing Automation Like a Project.
Need help with your Eloqua to Marketo migration? Let’s get the conversation started– talk to us now!
Image Credit: Simple vs. Complicated via assimilationsystems.com Smart Campaigns like an engine via Marketo
