Oracle Eloqua 20A Release Overview

Oracle have a special present this Valentines Day for Eloqua customers on Pod 1: the first release of 2020. Eloqua 20A hits customer instances over the next two weeks with many new features and a notable deprecation. Marketers in love with ABM will particularly appreciate the benefits of this release.

End of an Era

First, the good news. Insight no longer requires Adobe Flash to run reports. Not before time. Flash is being killed off by Adobe at the end of the year, and browser vendors disabled it by default years ago. As a Firefox user, having to switch browsers and manually enable Flash just to run a report was a major annoyance. I mostly worked around the issue by previewing reports in the analysis editor, but that isn't always possible. Flash has definitely limited my use of the Oracle BI Insight compared to the classic version.

The not so good is that 20A also removes the ability to create forms in the classic form editor. Most Eloqua customers should have updated their landing page templates to work with the new responsive forms by now. However, there are still plenty of forms created in the Classic Editor, but as of this release, it will no longer be possible to copy them. Opening the forms and using the Save As option will work because this converts them to the new format. Copying them in the asset browser does not. If your form templates were created in the old editor, you should recreate them in the new one as soon as possible using the Save As method. Fortunately, you can still edit existing forms created in the original form editor and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

CRM Integration

That's the only feature removal in this release, but Oracle recently announced that they're removing the native Salesforce integration this time next year. Users have 12 months to migrate to the new Salesforce Integration app released last year. That's not a lot of time for such an important part of the typical Eloqua setup.

In the meantime, the Salesforce Integration app contains to get updates. There have been changes to the default mappings for the marketing activity exports, and to the configuration UI. The error handling for failing Salesforce Imports has been changed. If an import fails multiple times in a row, then it will be automatically stopped. This is a positive change, but worth knowing about when managing troublesome Salesforce configurations.

The field used to store the Salesforce User ID on the Eloqua User record has changed. A new field called Salesforce Username will be used for this purpose, allowing Salesforce and Oracle Sales Cloud integrations to run side by side. A similar update has been made to the Sales Cloud integration.

Account Reporting

The bulk of the release is devoted to ABM reporting. An Account Engagement Activity dashboard is being added to the native dashboard options, providing an account level roll-up for all the campaign responses and contact activity at each account. This is the first time that Oracle have added such a view to Eloqua. In the past, reporting on activities by account has required creating custom Insight reports. Few people bothered due to the limitations of the Insight data model, preferring to use external ABM platforms for account level reporting instead.

In order to build this new dashboard, Oracle have made some serious enhancements to the account level data available in Insight. A full set of Account Activity metrics has been added, which links all the existing performance metrics to the account as well as the contact level. Several additional out of the box reports have been added to Insight using this new information, including a Top Engaged Accounts report. The even better news is that this report drills down to the contact level, showing the most active individuals at each account. Sales will love all this additional information, assuming you're not giving it to them already.

Import and Export

There are a lot of new controlled availability features in this release, including some previously delayed integrations with the rest of the Oracle Marketing Cloud portfolio. Account scoring using the Datafox predictive opportunity scoring app has made this release after narrowly missing the last one. The integration with the Oracle Infinity Web analytics platform has been enhanced with more information on Eloqua activities tracked using Infinity. There is now a cloud feeder from Infinity Action Center, allowing remarketing lists created in Infinity to be pushed into Eloqua campaigns for outbound targeting through email or third party apps.

Campaign Member integration is now available for the Sales Cloud integration allowing campaign associations created in Oracle's CRM by Sales to be synced into Eloqua for use in segments and reports. Admins can now upload full address details to the user record. This information is used for email signatures when sending emails using signature rules.

The most interesting beta feature for most Eloqua users will be the new Email and Landing Page export capability. It is now possible for marketers to download the HTML of assets created in the design editor. The downloaded HTML can then be shared with third parties for sending through other platforms. Copying and pasting Source Editor emails into an external app has been simple enough. Nevertheless, there has never been any way of accessing the underlying HTML for emails created in the WYSIWYG. The new export option changes things. You still can't edit the HTML of a design editor email in Eloqua, but at least you can download it and upload it to Gmail or another marketing automation system.

Finally, look out for a change to the design of Eloqua notification emails. These are getting a visual refresh, which should also make them more mobile friendly.

The Oracle Eloqua 20A Update is scheduled over two weekends starting February 14th, 2020. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as a change to list unsubscribe behaviour, can be found in the official release notes.