How UCLA Health cut Eloqua costs, simplified operations, and unlocked room to grow

Not every Marketing Operations success story is about doing more. Some of the most valuable work is about stopping waste before it quietly drains budget, time, and credibility.

For UCLA Health, the problem wasn’t campaign performance or engagement. It was structural. Their Oracle Eloqua environment was costing more than it should and was on track to cost even more.

Sojourn Solutions was brought in to fix it. Permanently.

The challenge: When contacts quietly become a liability

UCLA Health’s Eloqua contract capped total contacts at 1.5 million across two instances.

On paper, this seemed manageable. In reality, it wasn’t.

Because Eloqua counts duplicate email addresses separately across instances, the combined contact volume exceeded the contractual limit by roughly 200,000 contacts. The secondary instance, originally built to support strategic acquisition initiatives, contained approximately 175,000 contacts - but by this point, it was no longer delivering meaningful business value.

Instead, it had become a workaround.

For nearly six months, the secondary instance was being kept alive primarily to warm IP and domain reputation, requiring the team to repurpose and deploy a bi-weekly newsletter with minimal strategic impact. Meanwhile, growth in the primary instance was constrained, and UCLA Health faced a looming choice: Pay recurring monthly overage fees or commit to an expensive contract upgrade.

Neither option was appealing.

The solution: Simplify, consolidate, and stop paying for nothing

Sojourn began by assessing usage trends across both Eloqua instances. The conclusion was clear: The second instance was underutilised, operationally expensive, and no longer aligned with UCLA Health’s marketing strategy.

The recommendation was decisive - decommission the secondary instance entirely.

Sojourn led the full decommissioning process end to end. Active forms, landing pages, campaigns, and reports were identified and disabled. Embedded landing pages were updated and redirected appropriately to avoid broken experiences. Database records, activity history, and assets were archived to ensure nothing was lost and could be referenced in the future if needed.

Engaged and relevant contacts from the secondary instance were carefully migrated into the primary instance, preserving data integrity and ensuring continuity for active marketing programs.

The result was a single, cleaner Eloqua environment that the team could actually focus on and scale.

Just as importantly, ongoing operational noise disappeared. No more maintaining a second instance simply to keep it “warm.” No more duplicated effort for minimal return.

Building a healthier database for the long term

Instance consolidation solved the immediate overage risk, but Sojourn didn’t stop there.

To enable sustainable growth, Sojourn also supports UCLA Health with an annual, ad hoc database hygiene process designed to reduce contact counts without compromising compliance or data integrity.

This process manually identifies and removes non-emailable contacts such as hard bounces, long-term inactive leads, and deceased patients. Given UCLA Health’s daily full-file patient feeds, this work is coordinated closely with the Office of Health Informatics and Analytics (OHIA) to ensure suppression happens at the source - preventing removed records from being unintentionally re-created in Eloqua.

Deceased patients are flagged using MRN or Patient ID to ensure they never re-enter the system. Hard bouncebacks are flagged by email address, allowing contacts to be reintroduced automatically if they update their email address in their patient record and become emailable again in future daily feeds.

This hygiene process typically reduces total contact counts by an additional 10–20% each year, creating ongoing headroom for growth without triggering contract penalties.

The results: Fewer contacts, lower costs, more flexibility

The impact was immediate and measurable.

UCLA Health reduced its total Eloqua contact count by approximately 175,000 through instance decommissioning alone, with a further 10–20% reduction driven by ongoing database hygiene efforts.

By addressing the root cause rather than treating the symptoms, UCLA Health avoided recurring overage fees estimated at $5,000 per month, as well as the need for a costly contract upgrade. At the same time, Marketing Operations became simpler, leaner, and easier to manage.

Most importantly, the primary Eloqua instance now has room to grow... without fear that success will be punished with unexpected costs.

What the client had to say:

“Sojourn helped us take a strategic, long-term approach to managing our Eloqua environment. By consolidating instances and improving database hygiene, we were able to reduce unnecessary costs, simplify our operations, and create room for future growth without disrupting active marketing programs.”

The takeaway

Marketing Operations isn’t always about launching more campaigns or adding more tools. Sometimes, the smartest move is knowing what to turn off.

By decommissioning an unused Eloqua instance, cleaning up contact data, and putting long-term governance in place, UCLA Health transformed a growing cost risk into a scalable, sustainable foundation.

No overages. No wasted effort. No unpleasant surprises in the renewal meeting.

Just a cleaner system and a marketing team back in control.