Oracle Eloqua 21A Release Overview

It's update time for Eloqua over the next two weeks. The arrival of the 21A release brings further extensions to the archiving feature, more AI features and enhancements to the Salesforce integration app. For starters, the new Oracle Redwood UI seen on the Eloqua home page has been extended to the asset launchpads and the most commonly used dashboards. Don't expect a bumper set of feature updates this month though, because the Eloqua product team are more focused on the ongoing OCI migration.

Oracle are in the process of moving the Eloqua application out of the existing data centres and on to Oracle Cloud. The Australia based Pod 7 made the switch late last year, but subsequent migrations have been delayed by unspecified technical issues. The aim of the OCI migration is to make Eloqua easier to manage for Oracle, and is part of a broader project to deploy all of Oracle's cloud applications on their cloud hosting platform. There's no direct user facing benefit to the project, but it should indirectly make the platform faster and more reliable, as well as easier to maintain and update.

The transition to OCI hosting should be a smooth one for most Eloqua customers. The application IP addresses will change, which may impact email whitelists, CRM login restrictions and custom integrations. You should also check the DNS records of any Eloqua microsites, bounceback domains or application domains. The DNS records required by Eloqua for web traffic have changed several times over the years and many longstanding customers may not be using the latest instance specific versions. These actions should be carried out sooner rather than later, as the IP addresses for Oracle developed Eloqua Apps will change when they're migrated to OCI in March. The CX Sales Integration and Salesforce integration Apps are both affected by this change.

Archiving

The headline feature in this release is the ability to archive folders. This follows the re-introduction of archiving of forms and emails last summer. Currently, only folders in the forms and emails areas of the application can be archived. Now folders can be archived too, using a process that works the same way as it does for assets. Furthermore, archiving folders has the effect of archiving the forms or emails contained in the folder. Unlike asset archiving, folder archiving is a controlled availability feature that needs to be requested through support. This restricted availability will likely change over time and the feature will eventually become generally accessible.

One feature already making the switch from controlled availability to general availability, is the ability to disable form submissions for specific forms. After this release, an 'Allow Form Submissions' toggle will be added to the form editor giving Eloqua users the ability to block all submissions on old or inactive forms. When this option is enabled, anybody who tries to complete the disabled form will receive an error message and the form submission will be rejected. This provides an easy way to take registration forms for oversubscribed events offline and has the security benefit of preventing spam attacks on any old forms floating around the web.

On the landing page side, a fix images option is being added to the asset editors. Chrome recently stopped loading non-secure images on secure pages, which broke some landing pages. Eloqua users can fix this problem by editing the affected page, and clicking a link that automatically updates the URL of the affected images from http to https. This only works for Eloqua hosted images, but does apply to both email and landing page editors.

Salesforce Integration

There are a whole swath of enhancements to the Salesforce Integration App. This has now fully replaced the old native integration, which is no longer supported but continues to be enabled for those Eloqua customers who were already using it. Many of those updates are intended to bring the app up to parity with the native integration. This includes the ability to use Salesforce IDs stored in a contact field in CDO action steps, more reliable address syncing and the ability to write Salesforce Unique IDs back to a contact field after update action steps. It is now possible to use Advanced Edit Mode to concatenate multiple Eloqua contact fields into a single Salesforce reference, currency or double type field. There are several enhancements to campaign response and campaign member integrations, which make syncing campaign responses to Salesforce easier and more reliable.

The most significant update to the Salesforce Integration comes in the form of filters to the marketing activity exports. Eloqua has long had the ability to create activities in Salesforce whenever a contact interacts with an Eloqua email, landing page or form. This provides Sales with visibility of the activity, and gives an opportunity to call them if they're already engaged with that contact. However, it's never been possible to filter the activities integration to specific contacts, only to specified activity types. Eloqua attempts to create a Salesforce activity for the desired marketing engagement types, regardless of whether the contact exists in Salesforce or not. This generates lots of unnecessary integration errors and API usage. A new controlled availability feature changes that, allowing Eloqua users to filter the activities integration using 5 contact filters. As such, it will now be possible to use the activities integrations in Eloqua instances that are integrated with multiple Salesforce instances for the first time. That was never possible with the old native integration.

Advanced Intelligence

Last year saw the release of the new Eloqua Advanced Intelligence add-on, this is Oracle's attempt to add AI capabilities to Eloqua. It includes the send time optimisation features piloted last year, as well as subject line optimisation, account engagement scoring and contact fatigue analysis. This release substantially expands the scope of contact fatigue analysis. Until now, fatigue analysis was only available as a segment filter criteria. It could be used to filter out customers who were receiving too many emails from campaigns, this was calculated automatically using their activity history. That same fatigue analysis condition can be now be used as a decision step on campaign canvas, allowing marketers to match nurture cadences to the contacts ability to engage with the content. Automatically slow down or accelerate nurture flows based upon the AI generated fatigue level, rather than relying on manual communication limit filters. That same information is also available in a new dashboard, which shows overall contact fatigue level and email performance by fatigue level.

In a similar vein, send time optimisation has been updated to automatically reschedule AI enabled emails to the next best time, if another email is manually scheduled for the same time. Previously, there is a fixed delay period built into send time optimisation, after which the AI enabled email campaign was sent. This could lead to emails being sent at undesirable times, thus defeating the point of the send time optimisation feature in the first place.

The Oracle Eloqua 21A Update is scheduled over two weekends starting February 26th, 2021. Although, Pod 6 got it early on February 12th, 2021. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as a change to insight, can be found in the official release notes.