We have all heard how having CRM integrated with Eloqua is a huge step in the overall thought process of data-driven marketing. I wholly agree with that, but what if you could integrate with more than your CRM to gather the data necessary to impact a customer buying without sales involvement? What would that look like and can it be done?
Is there an online store? What data could be received by Eloqua to be used for marketing purposes?
An online store holds a plethora of data that could be useful for cross-sell and up-sell capabilities. It could also be used for a myriad of different reasons like cart abandonment analysis.
Hypothetical: Easy Sheds has an online store where a customer can look at what sheds are available and build to suit. They can change the roof, the flooring, siding, the dimensions, etc. for the shed they need to have built. The customer can save his shed project to his online account for further review and editing. The customer may choose to call the customer service line to request further clarification and details on the shed he was building online. The customer service rep has visibility into what the customer was building online and may recommend additional details. After a couple days, the customer visits his local home improvement store where he talks to a sales person there that sells sheds. The sales person can access the customer’s shed project online and help with additional layout and configuration details. So how is marketing going to assist in this process?
Marketing has the knowledge that the customer has built an online shed, they have talked with additional representation to make changes, but they haven’t bought yet. Marketing can help by suggesting maybe a flooring change, maybe a roofing change that would make the shed more durable or heat/cold resistant based on their location. Marketing could send the customer a view of what the shed would look like with additional features that may not have been taken into consideration when talking with representatives either on the phone or in the store to further assist in the buying process.
You see, Eloqua has more ability to integrate than just with CRM.
Have information in a data warehouse that would be useful to have for marketing purposes, but extracting that data takes hours and custom coding to get out? There are several ETL tools that will help in the data transfer process, Oracle ISC or Dell Boomi to name a couple, can assist in getting that data from one storage place to Eloqua through a data transfer that is automated. There are also companies, like Put it Forward, who make custom integrations happen seamlessly for applications that aren’t standard or out of the box for Eloqua.
Living in a box is safe and comfortable, but when you look out that box and see the world of possibilities it is endless. Don’t let the box suffocate how much can be done with the data already available. The data is there, use it!
