Eloqua gets an AI makeover at Modern CX

It's customer conference season in the MarTech world. Last week Oracle held their annual Modern CX event in Las Vegas. This week Adobe are in town for their Adobe Summit, which ended yesterday with a dedicated Marketo Day. I'll post a write up about Adobe and Marketo next week. On the Oracle side, it is clear from the post-event buzz that Eloqua's role in the MarTech stack is changing.

‌‌These days Eloqua is part of the broader Oracle Customer Experience division which spans the entire customer lifecycle from marketing and sales through to commerce and service. Underlying all this is their data management platform (DMP), which started off as BlueKai but has expanded over time to include additional technologies. It is the job of the DMP to stitch all the activity and data in these different CX tools together into a single customer profile.

‌‌This is an architecture that many B2B sales and marketing teams have deployed over the last few years, with a master data management (MDM) platform slotting in to replace the DMP. Historically, DMPs have been more of a B2C tool than a B2B tool. This is because DMPs are built around demographic data and anonymous engagement activity. This doesn’t work so well in B2B where Sales cycles are longer, and the middle and late stages of the sales cycle are done with named individuals over the phone or face to face through marketing events and sales pitches. Oracle have seen this same struggle with their DMP. The personalisation challenge facing marketers is the same across both B2B and B2C, but the solutions needed are different.‌‌

At its core, effective personalisation is all about data. Even the most highly targeted content is wasted if the need or pain point it addresses isn't relevant to the audience that is consuming it. The only way to discover the right message for a prospect, is to collect everything you have about them and their interactions with your business and then analyse that data to spot a trend. A DMP can do this for B2C audiences, where the entire customer journey is experienced digitally and can be recorded using digital tracking mechanisms. In B2B, the 50% to 70% of the buying cycle that takes place offline has to be considered. At OpenWorld last year, Oracle announced CX Unity, a new CDP designed to pull in all the data you have about an individual across your entire Oracle tech stack so that it can be analysed and segmented for marketing, sales and service engagements across Eloqua, Responsys and CRM engagements.‌‌

Last week saw the announcement of further integrations between Eloqua and the Oracle Data Platform. Eloqua now integrates with the Oracle Infinity web analytics tool, another new product launched in the last 12 months. Infinity should be read as a defensive play against Adobe, who currently dominate the high-end web analytics market with Adobe Analytics – the former Omniture. As a full web analytics tool, Infinity tracks user interaction on pages at a much more detailed level than Eloqua can natively. The detail of how users interacted with pages, such as which links they did or didn't click, can now be used to feed website visitors into Eloqua campaigns, and will eventually be made available to Eloqua Segments and Lead Scoring‌‌.

Also featuring prominently at Modern CX was an integration between Eloqua and Oracle's recent DataFox acquisition. DataFox is the Sales equivalent of a predictive lead scoring vendor such as LatticeEngines or Mintigo. It integrates with CRM systems to act as a predictive account scoring engine, surfacing potential new opportunities using a bespoke AI based data model as well as using the data behind its model to enrich CRM account records. This will now integrate with Eloqua data too, so it can be used for ABM programs.‌‌

AI was a big theme at Modern CX. Oracle spoke heavily about using AI to reduce the burden of information overload from Marketers. Modern marketing is very data-centric, but most marketers are creative left-brained types rather than data-orientated right-brain types. This puts a heavy burden on marketing leaders and data analysts to correctly interpret the wealth of data under the control of the modern marketing department. Now Oracle intend to integrate AI into Eloqua to help simplify decision making, by adding a recommendations engine that can make content and customer experience recommendations throughout the tool. Examples include suggesting subject line revisions based upon what worked well in previous email campaigns. One particular use case for this AI is Send Time Optimisation, which is a new closed beta feature that gives Eloqua the ability to decide which time and day recipients should receive emails based upon their previous behaviour. You specify the audience and the email. Eloqua decides the rest.‌‌

There is a definite shift in Oracle's positioning of Eloqua in the broader Marketing Cloud portfolio. The cross-channel campaign orchestration capabilities of the platform have always been emphasised, and the integration with the Data Cloud often features in customer pitches. However, few B2B marketers actually use these additional tools unless they're heavily invested in the entire Oracle ecosystem. Eloqua is still used as a traditional marketing automation tool to both manage marketing data and execute campaigns. Some thought leaders have shifted the data management piece of that jigsaw into dedicated data platforms, now Oracle will be making a renewed appeal for the rest of their customer base to do so. This isn't entirely surprising. Oracle have a set of new AI and data products to sell, led by DataFox and Infinity. As a sales-led organisation, Oracle's business has long been based around buying in new technology and then selling it to their existing customer base. This doesn't always work - much of their CX portfolio is too B2C-centric to be a good fit for the typical Eloqua customer. After years of neglecting B2B marketing teams, this is a gap that they've finally trying to address. It's about time.