I did a presentation to the Austin Eloqua user group meeting this afternoon, and there was enough interest in the material that it seemed worth sharing more broadly.The presentation (PowerPoint) was intended to show how, at Bulldog, we’ve used Eloqua to deploy a perpetual nurturing program geared towards the dormant leads in our database — providing them with valuable content in an automated fashion on an on-going basis. The two objectives of the program were:

1. Get those dormant leads to reengage — if they’re not interacting with us, we can’t provide any value to them, and they’re not going to look for us as resource if and when our services would be a match for their needs
2. Assess/qualify those leads on a continuous basis — this was some work we’ve been doing to really take our lead scoring to a new level; it’s the implementation of multidimensional lead scoring, which we believe in very strongly

The presentation also includes a very honest assessment of what we learned about some of the capabilities of the Eloqua platform in the process — we use Eloqua to do a lot of things…but we pushed it and prodded it in some new ways for us with this program. So, the latter part of the deck has some “good, bad, and ugly” observations. There’s one slide that’s good and two slides that are bad/ugly. Don’t jump to any hasty conclusions from that: the “good” slide are major capabilities where Eloqua is very, very, very good. The “bad” slide has a few things that are a bit annoying, but that we got workarounds in place for without too much hassle. The “ugly” slide highlights a couple of way-down-in-the-weeds things we came across that we couldn’t work around. But, truth be told, they’re not really all that “ugly.” But, “the good, the bad, and the nitpicky minor stuff that we wish was different,” was just too wordy.

It’s been a fun project, and we’ve got enhancements in the works already — some of them being features that we cut out up front as we aggressively managed scope, and some of them are features that weren’t yet available in Eloqua when we deployed the program.

Do you have a program geared towards the dormant areas of your database? What are the main elements of it?

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