This blog post summarizes key findings from Adobe’s “State of Marketing Automation” report Adobe recently collected actionable insights and best practices from more than 600 B2B organizations, all of them using a variety of marketing automation platforms (MAPs). The purpose? To learn exactly how today's high-performing B2B marketing teams are leveraging technology to separate themselves from the competition in 2023 and beyond. B2B marketing teams face limited resources and economic pressure as they drive strategic priorities around ROI/return on investment, growth, and optimizing customer experience. Adobe found that the top-rated marketing objectives for 2023, all rated as “very important” or “extremely important” by at least 90% of respondents, were the following:  Improve marketing ROI: 98%  Grow pipeline and revenue: 97%  Provide great buyer/ customer experiences: 97%  Keep pace with marketing tools and techniques: 93% Adobe’s report  The State of Marketing Automation  (free download) describes in detail how the best B2B organizations are tackling these challenging priorities in 2023. This blog post summarizes the report’s key findings. Accelerating adoption of MAPs and AI Marketing automation is widely viewed by B2B marketers as an essential ingredient for success. Adobe finds that “98% of B2B marketers say that marketing automation is very important or extremely important to their success.” Leveraging a MAP is simply the best way to orchestrate personalized buyer and customer engagement at scale and support efficient growth. B2B marketers are using their MAPs to drive both lead-first and account-first (ABM) approaches for engaging their target customers. The use of AI/artificial intelligence is also growing, according to Adobe, whether the AI is embedded in a MAP or otherwise. The Adobe report finds that “91% of leading companies are very or extremely satisfied with the embedded AI marketing automation features they are using today.” More personalization across channels The top-rated B2B organizations surveyed by Adobe are adopting more personalization across channels to drive ROI, leveraging their MAPs and other technology tools to do so. The report finds that “99% of leading companies are using a medium or high level of personalization across their marketing channels.” These high-performing B2B organizations know that big-ticket purchases often involve large buying groups and long buying cycles that can involve hundreds of touch points. That level of targeted, consistent, and highly-personalized account engagement can only be achieved with automation and AI. The great news for B2B marketers is that this “personalization at scale” technology is now proven and readily available, with more and more B2B companies putting it to good use. “To achieve success,” says the Adobe report, “[B2B] leaders are addressing all aspects of great personalization, including centralized customer data, content creation, omnichannel customer journeys, and measurement.” The complexities of personalization at the account-level (via ABM) are many and B2B organizations are leveraging technology to resolve challenges that include understanding buying groups and the associations within them, as well as the size of account-level opportunities and target accounts.  More channels are being accessed by B2B buyers, making orchestrating engagement across these channels more complicated. While email has always been an important B2B channel, other channels (such as SMS) are growing. For example, Adobe finds that “90% of B2B marketers plan to implement or improve website chat” in 2023. “Using an increasing number of channels creates an increasing need for orchestration between them,” explains the report. “As with personalization, leaders are making use of automation and AI to deliver results. Whether they are using lead-based marketing, account-based marketing, or both, many of the same capabilities are needed for great orchestration. Scoring, stage tracking, routing, and audience and activity triggers help [B2B marketers] listen, adapt, and respond.” Measuring what matters In one of the Adobe report’s most powerful findings, “100% of leading companies plan to work to improve attribution” in 2023. Yes, all of them. B2B organizations are focusing more energy and investment on attribution for one simple reason: it helps them prove and improve marketing impact. They’re seeking to measure the pipeline, revenue, and ROI performance of every campaign, channel, content asset, and touchpoint so they know what tactics are working at each demand stage and where to invest more resources, says the report. More than 7 of 10 of those surveyed (71%) have moved from single touch to multi-touch attribution approaches. B2B attribution can be tough to get right. According to Gartner, a typical buying group for a B2B solution involves 11 members. And with each member of a buying group engaging with B2B sellers through online and offline channels over the course of a multi-week or multi-month buying cycle, the number of touchpoints can easily grow beyond 100 for just one deal. So, the Adobe report notes, “it takes multiple campaigns, multiple channels, and multiple content assets—a lot of marketing investment—to get every B2B deal done.”  The ability to tie marketing actions to pipeline, revenue, and ROI changes everything marketing does. When done right, “attribution provides visibility to the revenue impact of every trackable touchpoint—and, thus, every campaign, channel, and content asset,” notes Adobe. When this information is combined with cost data, ROI is revealed. Attribution truly becomes the enabler of data-driven marketing optimization. Leveraging better data for better experiences Adobe finds that data management effectiveness underpins the success of high-performing B2B marketing organizations. After all, notes the report, “it’s data that informs effective targeting, personalized engagement, and accurate measurement. Marketing automation platforms . . . provide a powerful marketing data environment.” Customer data fuels great planning, engagement, and measurement. When marketing automation was first created nearly two decades ago, it gave marketers a much more actionable environment for marketing data than the CRM systems they’d been working with. “Marketers with complex customer data requirements are learning how to enhance the power of marketing automation and their overall martech stack through the addition of a dedicated customer data platform (CDP) that’s designed for B2B data structures,” says the report. The idea is to improve the quality of data, maintain its quality, and then enable its activation (often through automation) for customer engagement that’s timely and personalized. In 2023, the available technology is enabling more of that “data-fueled” engagement than ever.   For more information about, or help with, implementing any of the B2B marketing best practices and technologies listed above, reach out  to us today.

The roles and responsibilities of the B2B marketing function have grown dramatically over the last few years, especially since the pandemic has accelerated digital-first (often, digital-only) customer engagement. Marketing automation vendors such as Oracle have been working hard to provide the technology tools to enable marketers to succeed in a world where customers increasingly expect personalized, omnichannel engagement.  Oracle Eloqua , for instance, has announced a product roadmap for 2023 and beyond that empowers B2B marketers to: (1) deliver personalized customer experiences at scale and across channels, (2) intelligently adapt to evolving customer behaviors, and (3) connect data and systems in order to orchestrate engagement at scale. Since “doing more with less” is imperative for marketers in 2023 (and always), Oracle is also seeking to automate more tasks around campaigns and data management, so marketers can invest more of their limited time innovating and creating.  Sojourn's December 2022 Oracle Eloqua User Group  (virtual, and free on-demand), hosted by Karin “KP” Pindle (Senior Martech Advisor at Sojourn Solutions), was highlighted by a 50-minute presentation by Oracle’s Chris Campbell  (Director of Product Management, Oracle Marketing). Campbell basically offered Oracle’s vision for Eloqua and described its product roadmap coming in 2023 and beyond. The vision guiding Oracle Eloqua’s roadmap “Marketers need to deliver real-time, connected experiences” across channels, doing so with “contextual relevance,” says Campbell, and Oracle is working to address that need via three key areas of focus: Personalization at scale:  Oracle deeply understands that B2B marketers need to “know their customer” at a granular level in order to drive better personalization, says Campbell. Oracle has therefore created unified customer profiles that pull in data from across the Oracle ecosystem and beyond. Eloqua is also being designed to enable messaging with centralized content and enablement. Connecting experiences:  Oracle is focused on enabling B2B marketers to orchestrate (and automate) digital experiences across channels using intelligent journeys that can adapt to customer behaviors at scale. From a “back end perspective,” unifying data and systems is a key foundation for creating these connected, cross-channel customer experiences. Differentiating your marketing:  Oracle believes that automation and tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, embedded in the Oracle ecosystem, can liberate marketers from routine, manual, and data-intensive tasks and thus free them up for more creative work that can truly differentiate them from rivals. Oracle’s Fusion Marketing , for instance, allows marketers to engineer and orchestrate experiences. Oracle’s AI tools such as Einstein can support cross-channel and predictive experiences based on a unified customer profile and unified content management across the entire Oracle ecosystem. Highlights of the 2023 roadmap Having described Oracle’s foundational vision, Campbell went on to highlight some of the specific product enhancements Oracle and Eloqua will be launching in 2023 and beyond. 1. New user experience/UI.  Oracle is seeking to provide the same “look and feel,” in terms of user experience/user interface, across its multiple platforms, including its Eloqua MAP. The new Eloqua UI/UX aligns its MAP with the same UI/UX of all Oracle Cloud Applications, based on the award-winning Redwood Design System . Campbell noted that this UI enhancement is scheduled for release in the first half of 2023. 2. SMS enhancements: Segment filters.  Campbell notes that mobile SMS is a growing channel for B2B marketers and “we’ve had great interest around our SMS features.” The new “segment filters” enhancement will allow marketers to create customer segments based on SMS-related activities such as: phone number consent, replied to SMS, sent SMS, clicked SMS, and more. 3. Multiple branded domains.  “This feature will allow marketers to easily create and manage campaigns for multiple brands within a single Eloqua instance,” says Campbell. It enables marketers to configure up to ten brands within a single MAP instance, as well as select specific brands when creating emails in order to auto-apply images. 4. Subject-line optimization.  This enhancement works with Oracle’s AI and ML tools in order to help marketers optimize their email subject lines in order to drive email opens/engagement. It uses AI/ML to identify words and phrases that encourage customer engagement, as well as predicting open rates based on different subject lines offered by marketers. 5. Oracle Fusion Marketing Guided Campaigns.  Campbell describes this as a “new guided campaign workflow that allows marketers to build multi-channel campaigns across emails and advertisements targeted to your accounts.” The enhancement will also enable marketers to measure campaign effectiveness and attribute opportunity scores based on engagement, including intelligently scoring leads for potential sales follow-up. 6. Simple campaign enhancements.  Campbell says that Eloqua will be adding campaign approval functionality to simple campaigns, allowing marketers to configure approval workflows to prevent campaigns from being activated without the assigned approval. For more information about Oracle Eloqua’s 2023 roadmap, along with launch dates and details about specific enhancements, visit the Eloqua Release Center  in the Topliners Community. For more information about how implementing and properly managing Oracle Eloqua can help you prove and improve the value of your B2B marketing, reach out  to us today.

Marketing Operations remains a relatively new function and profession, but it’s evolving quickly. In its annual report  State of the Marketing Ops Professional , MarketingOps.com (the community-led platform for Marketing Operations Professionals), surveyed almost 600 Marketing Ops pros from multiple industries to better understand the trends driving the function. Those trends can be broken down into two large categories: (1) “people” trends impacting Marketing Ops pros and teams and (2) martech trends impacting the tools and technologies deployed and supported by Marketing Ops. In this two-part series, we’ll cover the findings of the must-read report under those two categories, beginning below with trends impacting Marketing Ops pros.  7 key findings on Marketing Ops pros Who are Marketing Ops pros? They are problem-solvers who take a strategic, cross-functional, and data-informed approach to proving and improving marketing value/ROI. The important work they do requires a thorough understanding of what other people do within the organization - Marketing Ops pros must align with Sales and other teams. It also requires a deep understanding of business processes, the customer/buyer journey, data analytics, and how technology impacts all of it. Here’s what the report found about the evolving role of Marketing Ops pros:  1. The Marketing Ops function is expanding and maturing. 80%+ of companies have a dedicated Marketing Operations individual or team (up from 65% in 2021), says the report. While 80% of Marketing Ops pros have at least 3 years of experience, 30% of them report having 10+ years of experience. Only 1 in 10 pros working within the function have less than a year of experience. In terms of age, survey responses indicate that most Marketing Ops pros are either Millennials or Gen Z, so they tend to be lifelong learners who skew younger. 2. The Marketing Operations role can be different depending on the organization.  The Marketing Ops function is anything but a standard, cookie-cutter role, which is why it’s so challenging for its practitioners. As the report explains: “Marketing Operations can look different at each organization. Some Marketing Ops pros are dedicated to managing software tools, naming structures, integrations, workflows, and the technical aspects of the marketing team. Others work closely with GTM teams to define leads, lead handoff processes, automation, and ensure the end customer experience is streamlined.” Clearly, the Marketing Ops role requires a learning mindset, both because the role requires working across multiple parts of the organization and because Marketing Ops continues to evolve and expand in scope. Regardless of the setting in which the Marketing Ops pro works, communication skills are essential because Marketing Ops is tasked with driving change across the organization. This means they must speak “the language and lingo” of multiple areas, from IT to Sales to Finance and others. 3. The top job responsibilities involve tech, processes, and data. The report found that the top four job responsibilities for Marketing Ops pros are:  Developing and implementing software or system integrations (54%) Designing, implementing, and optimizing operational processes/procedures (48%) Evaluation of tech stack and assessing what tech is needed (48%) Data analysis and data reporting (47%) So Marketing Ops pros must keep pace with trends in martech, including automation, artificial intelligence, and data management, while also keeping up with their organization’s various use cases for technology. 4. Marketing Ops is like a coach helping the marketing function prove and improve its value.  The report is clear about the most common, and most important, role of Marketing Ops: it operates “like the coach of the overarching marketing team, planning out the strategy, monitoring execution, and making sure that everything is running smoothly so the players can succeed.”  The Marketing Ops function, as we’ve said repeatedly, is ultimately about proving and improving what marketing does. That takes investments in technology, but also in training and enabling people. 5. Marketing Ops is a well-compensated function.  According to the report, about 7 in 10 Marketing Ops professionals make more than $100,000 per year. Those that report being at the Director, VP, or Executive level typically make $250,000 per year or more. As Marketing Ops becomes more defined, so will the specific titles and specialized roles within the function. It’s clear that more organizations are not only deploying a dedicated Marketing Ops team – with an average team size between 2 and 10 people – but are also seeing the need to fairly compensate and retain Marketing Ops talent. 6. Marketing Ops pros report working most closely with Sales, Demand Gen, and Sales Ops.  This is no surprise given the cross-functional nature of the role. Marketing Ops seeks to foster alignment in order “to figure out the best strategy to reach and convert more prospects and to engage with existing customers,” says the report. The alignment of the multiple teams that impact revenues and customer experience is foundational for Marketing Ops success.  7. The top four priorities for Marketing Ops teams are, according to the report:   Supporting revenue operations and pipeline Improving campaign efficiency Data cleansing/hygiene Improving/updating the tech stack Conclusion: State of the Marketing Ops Pro Report The Marketing Ops function is complex and multi-faceted, requiring its practitioner’s to have a broad-based skill set, as well as a mindset of continuous learning/growth. “The State of the Marketing Operations Professional” report highlights the multiple challenges Marketing Ops pros face – especially around alignment, processes/data, and technology – and how they are meeting them. In our next post, we’ll explore the technology and tools Marketing Ops pros are deploying and supporting to get the job done.   Want to learn more about Marketing Operations and its impact on driving the efficiency and effectiveness of your B2B marketing? Let's talk .

Marketing Ops remains a relatively new function, but it’s evolving rapidly. In its annual report  State of the Marketing Ops Professional , MarketingOps.com (the community-led platform for Marketing Operations Professionals), surveyed almost 600 Marketing Ops pros from multiple industries to better understand the trends driving it. Those trends can be broken down into two large categories: (1) “people” and teams and (2) tools and martech deployed by Marketing Ops. In this 2-post blog series , we cover the findings of the must-read 43-page report under those two categories. In this post (#2), we’ll explore the evolution of martech and how marketing ops deploys it to prove and improve marketing ROI. 4 key Martech trends Marketing Ops teams are tasked with selecting and deploying martech to drive marketing efficiency. Whether they’re choosing or using martech, Marketing Ops teams “are prioritizing tools that are able to grow and scale with them, and that integrate with their existing martech stack,” says the report. Here are four key martech trends highlighted by the report: 1. Most popular “general” tools. The #1 tool Marketing Ops pros use is - wait for it - spreadsheets, a surprising finding since spreadsheets have been around since 1979 . This finding is a bit like learning that Pac Man is the #1 video game decades after its creation (not true, by the way – the most popular video game today is Candy Crush). The #2 and #3 most popular tech tools are the collaboration/project management platforms Asana and Jira. As one senior Marketing Ops leader recommends in the report, you should either be using your tools or losing them: “Audit your tech stack and ask if anyone is using the tool. If not, get rid of it. Ultimately, you want every tool in your stack to contribute to revenue. When contracts are up for renewal, really think about their value, current features, and overlap with other tools.” 2. MAPs and martech tools.  Adobe Marketo Engage is the most popular marketing automation platform, with HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Oracle Eloqua following, in that order, within the MAP category. About 80% of surveyed Marketing Ops pros report being either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with their current MAP.  Unsurprisingly, Salesforce is by far the most popular CRM. More than 50% of Marketing Ops pros surveyed have a martech stack that includes a dedicated email and/or landing page creation platform. 3. Most important factors when choosing a martech provider.  The most important factor when Marketing Ops selected new martech in 2022 was the tool’s ability to integrate within their martech stack, with 69% of Marketing Ops pros citing that factor. Second was the tool’s ability to scale along with the company, with 53% of Marketing Ops pros citing that factor.  The next four most important factors in choosing a martech provider were: Ease of use (39%) Ability to meet compliance challenges, especially around data privacy/GDPR (29%) Price (26%) Service and support levels from provider (20%) 4. The top coding language Marketing Ops pros know is HTML, with about half of those surveyed knowing it. About 30% of Marketing Ops pros know JavaScript. When it comes to knowing the #1 coding language in 2022, Python, only about 5% of Marketing Ops pros know how to use it. About one in four Marketing Ops pros say they don’t know a single coding language. The good news, of course, is that in-built automation and other martech trends around “consumerization” are reducing the need for any user to understand a programming language to create value. The future of Marketing Ops: 3 ongoing trends “The State of the Marketing Ops Pro” report concludes by looking at the ongoing trends that will continue to shape the function. Three of the biggest “future trends” are: 1. More clarity and definition around the role.  Marketing Ops remains relatively young, and it tends to be an “everything plus the kitchen sink” role in many organizations. Marketing Ops pros, the report says, “want a more clearly defined role in their organizations.” The future will see more headcount, increased resources, and more specialized roles within the Marketing Ops function. 2. Marketing Ops talent will be harder to find and develop.  The function is so challenging because it’s so collaborative and cross-functional. The ideal Marketing Ops pro is strategic and data-driven, conversant in new technologies, a great communicator who can gain “buy-in” from Sales, IT, and senior leadership, and a dedicated, lifelong learner. Where does such a person find time to sleep, let alone perform their challenging and ever-evolving responsibilities? Marketing Ops will basically develop alongside the capabilities of the professionals working within the function. The future may indeed be about martech, but it will also be about the creativity and commitment of people. 3. There’s room for more digital transformation and growth at 93% of organizations , even if they already have a Marketing Ops team. Average Marketing Ops teams might have 2-10 members today and use a limited number of martech tools. The future will see more demand for what they do as well as larger, more specialized Marketing Ops teams deploying a bigger martech stack. As we’ve seen in Sojourn’s Marketing Ops reports done in 2021  and 2019 , the level of maturity among Marketing Ops talent and martech is growing but still leaves a lot of room for more growth. In fact, “The State of the Marketing Ops Pro” report says that only 7% of organizations surveyed have a fully developed digital maturity level, with integrated systems, complete lifecycle nurturing, and personalized content. That means 93% of organizations will continue to need big investments in their Marketing Ops capabilities in order to achieve marketing goals. Read post 1 of this 2-part series now.  Want to learn more about Marketing Operations and its impact on driving the efficiency and effectiveness of your B2B marketing? Contact us  today.

You know how sometimes you attend a User Group meeting and it's like, mmm, okay? Well, our February Oracle Eloqua User Group meeting wasn't like that at all - it was more like OKAAAY! Let me tell you why... First, a brief promo - our Eloqua User Group  is open to the Eloqua community and anyone interested in learning more. We spotlight one or two featured speakers each month, mixing it up from Oracle, an app partner, a Sojourn Eloqua expert, an Eloqua customer - you get the picture. In our February meeting, one of our two featured presenters was Sojourn’s Kelly Newton. Kelly's an Eloqueen (IYKYK), and shared a time-saving tip about using copy/paste functionality on Oracle Eloqua's Campaign Canvas. Y'all - the Q&A section lit up with all kinds of very relevant questions and tips from attendees - so much that we decided to share highlights with the community via this post.   Kelly's Tip : Use copy/paste to save time on your Eloqua Campaign Canvas when you're building similar steps and/or flows, especially complex flows. What? How? Here's what you do... Campaign Step Flow  - Place your cursor on the canvas near the flow you want to copy, then select and drag your cursor to outline the flow. Next, right click to copy (or use your keyboard shortcut) and then paste (using your cursor or keyboard shortcut). Voila! Campaign Step  - click on a step and either right click, or use your keyboard shortcuts, to copy/paste BONUS tip from an attendee : You can copy/paste from one campaign canvas to a second campaign canvas, as long as the second campaign canvas is loaded in the same tab.  See Kelly's " Two Minute Tip " video to see all this in action! To conclude, using copy/paste on your Eloqua Campaign Canvas allows you to quickly duplicate elements and ensure that your campaign is consistent and efficient.  Next up? We've got highlights from the very active Q&A:   Question 1 : If you copy/paste a Segment and update the pasted Segment in the same Campaign, does a single contact that exists in both Segments get both emails? Answer 1 : No - if a contact exists in both Segments, they will only enter the Campaign once and exist in only one of the flows. Question 2 : If you had all of the settings specified (in a Canvas or in an individual Step), will those all copy as well?  Answer 2 : Yes, in both cases.  Question 3 : Can you use the same email twice in the same canvas? I don't think so, but just making sure. Answer 3 :   I wasn’t sure, but I tested it and yes - yes, you can. I’m not clear on the use case for this,  but Campaign Canvas does support it.  Question 4 : Would there be an issue if you have two segments with separate emails on the same canvas? Some of our users are thinking of doing this as they find it more convenient than setting up two separate canvases. Answer 4 : No, this is actually ideal as long as it meets your overall goals and objectives - one consideration here might be reporting, ie, what are those requirements and will they be met if the two segments and two emails are included in the same campaign.  Question 5 : If we copy/paste to create two segments and two emails, how would we manage our seedlist, since the contacts can only be in the campaign once? Answer 5 : This can be done several ways - one is to create a full flow for a seedlist segment only, sending the first email (then pause for feedback as needed), and then the second email.  Question 6 : There is a setting in the campaign settings that allows someone to enter the campaign more than once - that doesn’t allow them to be in both paths?  Answer 6 :  No, this setting requires that a contact exits the campaign before they can re-enter - an example here would be a multi- To wrap, one attendee provided this BONUS tip : "Since we started using Eloqua, I knew we could use .1 hour in the wait steps, the equivalent of 6 minutes, but I didn't realize until recently that you can use .01 hours (3.6 seconds). We use the wait steps to understand better where people are exiting our programs/campaigns."  We hope you find these Eloqua time-savings tips helpful! For more tips and other learnings, register  for our March Eloqua User Group now. Also, subscribe  to our YouTube channel to receive notifications on new "Two Minutes Tips" now.

B2B marketers leverage digital channels because that’s where most B2B buying journeys happen today. In order to fine-tune and deliver relevant messaging to their B2B target audiences, marketers are using ever-increasing amounts of customer data and data management technologies.  It's more clear than ever before that old-school "spray-and-pray" outreach doesn’t work. Period. More mature B2B marketing teams are investing in a strong data foundation to generate the insights that fuel targeted engagement. Simply put, high-quality data is the fuel propelling today’s B2B marketing revenue engines. It’s therefore no surprise that nearly 7 out of 10 (69%) of B2B marketing teams plan to increase their investment in database strategies throughout 2023, according to Demand Gen Report . So where specifically are B2B marketers investing in their “data ecosystems,” and what steps are they taking to ensure their data quality? Answering that key question is the focus of this blog post. To dive even deeper into this topic, you can read Demand Gen Report's full report, What’s Working in Database Strategies? , which covers some of the same ground we’ll cover below.  #1: Integrate your data to ensure a “single source of truth” More data, by itself, is never the right answer - unless that data is properly governed across your organization’s customer-focused stakeholders. When you have data siloes embedded in multiple departments, you have the ingredients for data chaos, not data-fueled customer engagement. It’s often better to have less data, used more efficiently (i.e., with the approach described in this blog post) than to have tons of data that remains unorganized and badly managed. Incoming customer data needs to be put in the right format and be managed through a standardized process/workflow (including for fields and other naming conventions) across your organization. Moreover, data needs to be integrated across your systems so that changes made to data in one system are automatically updated in all other systems. You can’t maintain high quality data for long with data siloes, and random acts of data governance.  Why does having a “single source of truth” represent the first step towards ensuring data quality? Because it’s the only way to effectively manage data internally and also maintain a consistent, unified customer experience/CX. For instance, when a customer calls your customer success/customer service department to complain about the product they purchased a month ago, the sales department should not be calling said customer later that day trying to upsell or cross-sell your latest offering. That’s just embarrassing for the company and infuriating for the customer. When your data is unified, shared, and updated automatically, those revenue-killing CX moments disappear.  Unsurprisingly, many B2B companies deploy their CRM platform as their centralized, shared, and single source of truth. You simply cannot maintain data quality and leverage your data to fuel engagement unless you’re operating from a single source of truth. When your data turns to garbage, so do your insights/analytics, reporting, segmentation, strategies, planning, and overall decision-making.  Bad data costs you money. IBM estimated that bad data cost the US economy $3.1 trillion  (with a t) in 2022 in manual rework/cleansing, wasted investments, and lost business opportunities.   #2: Deploy automation to cleanse and transform your marketing data Ensuring quality data is a bit like chasing the sun – it’s an elusive activity that’s never done. The “high-quality data” you used last month can become absolute garbage next month. Maybe the VIP at your biggest account changed companies . . . maybe the big account pivoted their strategy and no longer needs to buy your offerings. Like life, data has a way of continuously moving and changing. When you use inaccurate, outdated data to build customer segments or create analytics or make business decisions you’re only amplifying the waste caused by bad data. Data quality can erode by as much as 20% per year. Never forget the oldest maxim in data science: garbage in means garbage out. Bad data leads to bad engagement. Many savvy B2B organizations are using automated tools  like data washing machines to continually maintain their data quality.  Automation and AI-powered custom solutions can constantly sift through your database to cleanse and update data, dynamically segmenting your database based on updated data, and more. Having your B2B data fully integrated and using automation/AI to constantly cleanse data and maintain its quality is foundational for any effective data management and data governance approach. #3: Use first party data + appended data to fuel insights  First-party data is data that customers provide by visiting your “owned” digital assets, such as your website. It is the single most valuable type of data because it tells you how customers are interacting with your content. So if a customer goes to your site and looks at a specific product page and then accesses your latest webinar on the product, you’d probably want to follow up quickly on that first party data.  B2B marketers are also looking to leverage data providers in order to enrich their data sets. Sojourn, for instance, has recently launched a new Marketing Data & Analytics Service  to help customers do this and more. The practice of incorporating enriched data into B2B databases is growing: about 33% of B2B marketers used data providers in 2021, but that number grew to about 50% in 2022, according to Demand Gen Report.  Of course, marketers need to do their due diligence before partnering with any data provider and when incorporating enriched data into their databases. Understanding the data quality offered by these providers is absolutely critical. Where are providers getting the data? How often do they refresh their data? What processes do they have internally to validate their data? Ask and find out to avoid issues and optimize your results.    For help with ensuring your ongoing data quality - the foundation of effective B2B marketing -  contact us  today.

Salesforce has sponsored and released a massive, 45-page guide to marketing automation platforms, called (fittingly enough) B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide , describing:  The capabilities B2B marketers need in a MAP, and  How B2B marketers can select and implement a MAP that’s right for their needs. We’ll be detailing the guide’s important findings in this 2-post blog series, and we also recommend that you watch Sojourn’s recent MAP Comparison webinar  ( register  for our October webinar now).  What a MAP does.  The Salesforce MAP guide begins by explaining the role of marketing automation in B2B marketing: marketing automation, it says, “focuses on defining, scheduling, targeting and tracking marketing campaigns, allowing the marketing and sales organizations to nurture leads with highly personalized content aimed at attracting and retaining customers.” Any marketing automation platform should also integrate well with your other martech tools, including (most importantly) your CRM. How a MAP is used.  The guide explains that more B2B marketers are leveraging their MAPs to enhance and drive personalization, using customer data to tailor and send the right messages to the right customers/accounts at the right time. Another important MAP use case focuses on deploying a platform to support account-based marketing approaches. This is where marketers and their sales teams engage with B2B buying groups on larger-scale purchases that tend to have a longer, more complex buying journey than B2C. 6 must-have MAP capabilities  The guide says that big trends in the MAP space include building artificial intelligence into many of the available features, making it easier for MAPs to integrate with other martech via open architectures, and increasing the number of apps available to enhance what MAPs do. With that said, here are six of the most important capabilities marketers should be looking for in any MAP: 1. Email marketing capabilities.  The first MAPs were built on a firm, historical foundation of email marketing campaign planning and execution. All modern MAPs enable users to create, send and measure personalized email campaigns. MAP vendors may differ in how email content gets created and personalized, explains the guide: “Some offer wizard-based campaign design or content templates, while others provide a more customized approach.” MAPs should also help you with improving email deliverability.  2. Lead management.  Managing leads and accounts (with ABM) may be the most strategic function of any MAP, because it’s central to demand generation. Any MAP should support B2B marketers seeking to dynamically segment their customers or conduct lead scoring and lead prioritization. MAPs today need to be lead nurturing machines, explains the guide, “keeping prospects engaged through periodic, personalized communications or campaigns until they are ready to buy. MAPs may offer pre-built nurturing steps or actions, as well as allow users to customize their content and process.”  3. Mobile marketing.  Mobile marketing is expanding because more customers and accounts are engaging with brands via their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets). And today’s mobile marketing goes way beyond the ability to integrate SMS/text messaging into your campaigns.  The content your MAP sends out must be “mobile-ready.” If it isn’t, then you’re losing a lot of engagement. As the guide explains: “many MAPs [now] include responsive templates for email, landing pages and web forms. Several vendors integrate with email testing tools such as Litmus, which allow users to preview email messages across clients and devices.” 4. Predictive analytics.  Using your customer data to anticipate buyer behavior is a massive trend in the MAP/marketing automation space. With more and better AI coming onto the scene, MAPs are getting better at analyzing customer behavioral patterns and providing insights based on those patterns to support personalized, relevant engagement.  As the guide puts it, “more [MAP] vendors are offering predictive analytics and models based on machine learning. This uses algorithms to process data and surface trends or insights that enable marketers to customize visitor experiences and marketing campaigns.” 5. Support for ABM.  Account-based marketing requires an “account context” around buying groups that make big purchasing decisions on behalf of companies. If a MAP doesn’t comprehend that a certain account has a buying group of seven people, and instead views each person as an individual lead, that necessary account context is missing, and ABM becomes impossible. MAPs are stepping up their ABM game and creating that account context, identifying buying groups, and enabling targeted engagement of the account as a whole. 6. Connecting with the larger martech ecosystem.  Your MAP isn’t an island, so should connect with other marketing automation tools. Integrations are important, so carefully consider whether your MAP has native integrations built-in or how it otherwise enables needed connections with your other tools. If it’s a big challenge to integrate your MAP and CRM, for instance, you’ll have a hard time aligning your marketing and sales teams around shared, real-time data. Most MAP vendors also have “app marketplaces” so you can enhance your MAP’s capabilities. As the guide explains: “App marketplaces can be an important area of differentiation for vendors. Cultivating relationships with developers who create add-ons and integration tools adds to the software’s utility without requiring the vendor to develop those integrations.” The bottom line here?  There’s a ton of competition in the MAP space around the core capabilities described above, not to mention around issues of price and service. In the second post of this series, we’ll offer tips and insights on selecting a vendor and implementing a MAP. Watch Sojourn’s latest MAP Comparison webinar  (free) and reach out  to us if you could use some help selecting, implementing or optimizing your MAP.

Contributor: Brenda Barrelle Following these spring cleaning tips can save you time, improve your deliverability score, your campaign results, and even the return on investment (ROI) for your marketing automation platform (MAP). Remember, your MAP is only as good as the data it contains, so prioritizing these spring cleaning tips will help to ensure your data is as accurate as possible. As a B2B marketer, your marketing automation platform (MAP) is your lifeblood. It’s where you store your customer and prospect data, run your campaigns, and measure your results. However, over time, your MAP can become cluttered with old data and inactive contacts, which can negatively impact a number of things including your deliverability score and ultimately your return on investment (ROI). To ensure your MAP is working at its best, we recommend conducting a spring cleaning at least once a year. Here are a few tips to get you started: Identify inactive contacts:  Inactive contacts are those who haven’t engaged with your marketing campaigns (or separately with any of your tracked digital properties) in a defined period of time. Review your database and identify those contacts - a key consideration here is to find the answer to the question "what is an inactive contact (to us)?" Depending on the results, you have several options to consider next - not just removal, but potentially launching a win-back campaign or even accelerating (or perhaps fully reviewing) your current contact acquisition strategy to lesson the potential impact to your targeted audiences.   Pro tip: Do the inactive contact analysis - is it 12 months, 18 months, longer? Does it vary by geo, product line, or another factor? It's worth spending the time to have a data-driven response to the question from your campaign managers "why do I have 2,000/20,000/200,000 less contacts in my campaign?" Clean out your contacts:  Where's the best place to start? You can typically score a "quick win"* by removing global hard bounces and global unsubscribes. These records can negatively impact your targeting, campaign performance, and reporting results. How? Most visibly, they inflate the numbers in each of these areas, which because they can't engage makes your results appear worse than they should. For example, if you're targeting 500,000 contacts in an email campaign and 25% of them are global hard bounces/unsubscribes, that's 125,000 contacts showing up in your dashboards that cannot engage. This does negatively impact any results you're reporting, and can even send you down a "what's not working in my campaign" rabbit hole - when in fact, it's your data that's playing a big factor.  Pro tip: Removing contacts from your MAP that you're not able to engage via email can also potentially help you save money, as some vendor contract pricing is based on the number of contacts. *We call this a quick win because the first pass is easy to complete, however, you do need to have a process in place to prevent the deleted records from being dumped back in to your MAP - the most likely source here is typically your integrated CRM. There are other things to consider as well, so feel free to contact us  to learn more.  Clean up your contacts:  Native data standardization functionality - an app or other - can help you clean and standardize your contact data, ensuring it's as accurate as possible. For example, most of us standardize Country fields values - that's simple enough - but you can do more. For example, you can standardize Title or even programmatically create a Title value based on a captured role/level value combination. This will help build queries that better match your ICP, improving the value of your campaigns. Bottom line? By minimizing data errors, you improve your campaign performance and reporting results. Pro tip: Before paying for a new tool to clean up your contacts, fully explore what your MAP can do to help. Some of this functionality may not be obvious - and may require a more data-driven mindset than some on your team may have - but we always recommend vetting out your current tool before buying a new one. To save time, vet it against your real use cases - this helps you to prioritize your time (ie, if the tool doesn't meet your second highest use case, then it may not make a difference it it meets the others). Just a thought.   Target inactive contacts:  Creating queries for inactive contacts can help you target these contacts with a win-back campaign or simply remove them from your database. Some examples of oldie but goodie win-back campaigns include the "we miss you" email, the "incentive" email, the "feedback request" email, or perhaps you'll need to go with the "goodbye" email. Consider this a jumping off point to get you started, and feel free to contact us  with any questions. Pro tip: Download and securely store all key contact data before purging inactive contacts, in case you need to reference the data in the future. To wrap it up, there's no question that these MAP spring cleaning tips can help you in a number of ways - so now it's up to you to get started. One more pro tip? Plan the time to benchmark where you are before you get started, where you are at key milestones, and where you when you complete your spring cleaning. Don't make the mistake of undervaluing the importance of your spring cleaning efforts!    Our team at Sojourn can help you with any/all of the MAP spring cleaning tips above! Learn more  about our Marketing Data & Analytics Services, or feel free to  contact us  for help with Oracle Eloqua, Adobe Marketo Engage, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or SFMC Account Engagement.

Although Oracle have already sent out an update, we wanted to give you a heads-up ourselves about some important changes from Yahoo!, that might affect how Oracle Corporation North America uses Oracle Eloqua. What’s Happening? Yahoo! has recently updated its Feedback Loop (FBL) system. This system helps email senders, like you, get reports on spam complaints from Yahoo! Mail users. These updates could change how these complaints are reported to Eloqua, which might impact the data you see for your email campaigns.   Here’s What You Need to Know:   1.  Spam Complaint Data: You might notice a delay or change in how often spam complaint data gets reported. This could affect how quickly you can respond to these complaints.  2.  Deliverability Metrics: The changes might influence your overall deliverability metrics because of the new way Yahoo! processes feedback.  3.  Campaign Adjustments: You may need to tweak your email strategies to keep your deliverability and engagement rates on track.  The Oracle team is on top of this and is working closely with Yahoo! to understand these changes fully and plan to make any necessary adjustments to minimize disruptions.   What You Can Do:   •  Monitor Metrics: Keep a close eye on your deliverability metrics and spam complaint rates over the next few weeks. If you notice any significant changes, take action promptly.  •  Review Campaigns:  Take a look at your current email campaigns. Consider making adjustments to improve engagement and reduce the chance of spam complaints. This could mean refining your targeting, enhancing your email content, or adjusting how often you send emails.  •  Stay Informed: We’ll keep you updated as we learn more about the impact of Yahoo!’s changes, and will share any further recommended actions, if needed.  This change takes effect on Thursday 1st August - so please ensure you have contacted Oracle Support to have Yahoo Feedback Loops setup and request TXT records from Yahoo Sender Hub for any of your sending domains, as per Oracle’s update.  If you have any questions or need help with any of the above, feel free to reach out to us. We’re here to support you!

UCLA Health  faced challenges with the integration of two Eloqua instances. While quick integration was implemented to send global unsubscribes, it caused several problems such as an increase in contact volume, compliance risk, and cumbersome manual solutions. UCLA Health approached Sojourn Solutions to find a new solution that could integrate subscription data between the two systems, ensure data alignment and consistency, limit the creation of net new contacts, and eliminate manual list scrubbing.  In this post, we'll take a closer look at the challenge and the solution designed by Sojourn that helped UCLA Health stay within their contract threshold limit and eliminate the risk of emailing unsubscribed contacts. The Challenge UCLA Health implemented a second instance of Eloqua in 2021 to allow their Strategic Marketing team to do larger list purchases and outreach to net new prospective patients without harming the domain of their main patient instance of Eloqua. When this second Eloqua instance was implemented, some quick integration leveraging form reposts was implemented to send global unsubscribes between instances by simply creating mirror contacts in each instance. However, in this case, quick didn’t mean better. The initial integration created several problems: First, when recording the unsubscribe in the secondary instance, the process created unnecessary net new contacts and increased UCLA Health’s Eloqua contact volume, causing them to go over their contract threshold. A more important problem was that the quick integration didn’t take into consideration when a contact changed his or her subscription preferences, which added a huge compliance risk.   Finally, the manual solution designed to manage and vet the subscription data against the two systems was too cumbersome to continue. The Solution UCLA Health challenged their marketing operations consulting partner, Sojourn Solutions, to find a new solution to not only integrate the global subscription data between the two systems, but to also: Ensure data alignment and consistency of Global Subscription preference status (Unsubscribed AND Subscribed) between UCLA Health’s two Eloqua instances; Keep the overall contact volume in mind and limit the creation of net new contacts that are not needed in the opposite instance; Ensure if a record is deleted, and later re-created, their previous subscription status remains; Eliminate the need to manually scrub list purchases against the older “Main” instance of Eloqua before uploading into the new “Strategic Marketing” instance of Eloqua. So how did Sojourn achieve all this? A Program Canvas was created using the Form Submit App. The Program sends the most up-to-date subscription status data to the opposite instance of Eloqua. That data is received using a new form, created specifically for subscription status updates, which in turn creates a full set of new contacts. Once the new contacts are received, the program triggers necessary processing rules to find and match any contact records and update the subscription field. Once the fields are updated, then a secondary program automatically deletes the net new contacts from the contact table. The Results The new integration eliminated hours of monotonous, time-consuming manual work to compare lists against each instance of Eloqua to ensure an accurate reflection of global subscription data. Instead, UCLA Health was able to quality control all of the contacts in the Strategic Marketing instance of Eloqua and delete all unnecessary contacts that were previously created just to log the unsubscribe. By implementing the solution, UCLA Health was able to stay within their contract threshold limit and remove the risk of emailing unsubscribed contacts they should not be reaching out to, saving UCLA Health both time and resources while enhancing their contact data reliability and engagement quality. To learn more about how Sojourn can help you improve data quality plus engagement quality - while staying within contracted thresholds - for your organization,  contact us  today.

Steve McConnell is a Marketing Automation Consultant at Sojourn Solutions with 10 years marketing experience specializing in marketing operations, sales enablement, CRM integration, and system and data management. He's a certified Eloqua B2B Implementation Specialist with over 8 years experience in the platform. Steve loves training and empowering Eloqua users to do new and existing things - and as for himself, loves making Eloqua do backflips!    Why you have no choice when it comes to data removals and email deliverability There is no more fundamental law in nature than entropy; the tendency for things to fall apart over time. The law’s infallibility was captured in the famous quote from British scientist Arthur Eddington: “The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” As it is in the Universe, so it is in your marketing database. “Yes, yes,” I hear you say, “everyone knows you need to look after your database - data cleansing, field completeness – I’m already doing that!” And that’s probably true – most companies have at least some form of contact washing machine program in place. But do you fully understand the implications of data being left in your database over a long enough period? Introducing Spam Traps Do you have any email addresses that you no longer use – including email addresses from a previous job? If you do, there is a good chance that one of those email addresses is now a spam trap. In order to detect spam senders, ISPs (including Gmail and Outlook) convert old email addresses that have been inactive for a long time into Spam Traps. Any emails sent to these inactive email addresses are immediately considered to be spam, since the only way you’d have that old email address is from failure to remove bad data from your email database, or purchasing an old address from a poor-quality data supplier. You read that right – over time, every email address in your database has the potential to turn into a spam trap, even those of previous customers. If you do not take measures to detect and remove these addresses from your database, you will eventually hit a spam trap, and see your deliverability start to reduce. What’s worse, you may not even detect this has happened unless you are using an enterprise deliverability solution to monitor inbox placement. The Best Disinfectant Did you know that we don’t actually get net energy from the Sun? It’s true – if we did, the Earth would cook pretty quickly with all that heat building up! What we get from the Sun is less entropy . Natural systems which appear stable and permanent (like the Gulf Stream for example) require energy to maintain and not destabilize over time. Life on Earth takes energy from the Sun and expends it to build new structures, organize cells, rearrange their environment – and clean up their email database! Removing contacts from your email database can seem scary at first, but as we pointed out in the first part of this article, you simply do not have a choice. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and by removing old, inactive email addresses from your system, you are not only preventing the appearance of spam traps, but you should see your most important performance metrics increase. Inactive recipients can only ever push your open, click and conversion rates down, and it is these metrics which are most important for email marketing strategies. Getting Started If you are already following best practice when it comes to removing inactive contacts, you are ahead of the game. As long as you are not purchasing data from poor-quality sources then you shouldn’t have too much of a problem. However, if you have not practiced removing data from your audience historically, your database may already have fallen victim to entropy and be full of undetected spam traps. In this situation, you may need to use third party tools to identify these addresses, and to get an accurate view of whether your emails are falling into promotions, social, or the person’s main inbox. Whatever your current practices though – make sure you are removing inactive emails from your database, and make sure you are avoiding (in the words of Arthur Eddington) “deepest humiliation” when it comes to your email deliverability. Questions? Contact us to learn more about how to improve your email deliverability and overall email marketing performance.

Since its widespread adoption in the 1990s, email has typically been the most effective and most widely-used communication channel for B2B marketers. That’s especially true when it comes to promoting B2B events, whether they’re virtual, in-person, or hybrid.  That said, the biggest challenge B2B event marketers face with email is the same challenge all marketers face: how to reach the right customers with relevant messaging that will convince them to act (in this case, by registering for the big event).  If you had an email list of over a million contacts, and you were asking them to register for the same event, you wouldn’t want them all to receive the exact same message. That simply wouldn’t lead to optimized engagement . . .and could even feel spammy. After all, people might participate in the event for different reasons and may want to attend different event sessions/speakers that address their different functional needs (such as to learn new skills or to network with other professionals in similar roles). Ideally, an engaging email message should address those different audiences and their diverse needs.  The challenge: Leveraging email to drive more event registrations  A well-known global communication and collaboration firm organizes an annual event that brings together tens of thousands of professionals from an array of industries and functions, including marketing, sales, and beyond. The communications and collaboration company (hereinafter, “the client company”) uses its annual big event to build a customer community, launch new offerings, and generally promote its global brand. The company reached out to Sojourn Solutions for help. The client company’s primary objective was to optimize its email program supporting the event, which was virtual in 2022, and build upon the past success of its email channel, which had driven 54% of total event registrants the previous year (2021). The client company leveraged four instances of Marketo. It also worked with multiple outside agencies and stakeholders to support promotion of the big event. While the client company had 1.3 million records/contacts, some of those records had missing or unreliable data fields such as “industry.” This missing/unreliable data meant the client company couldn't personalize its email messaging by industry. To further complicate matters, some of the client company’s managers were taking vacations at critical times around the email campaign’s launch, which had the potential to create delays or quality control concerns. And due to the just-launched Russian military invasion of Ukraine, messaging had to be altered at the last minute to ensure that the email’s tone was sensitive and considerate, especially for European recipients.  Finally, the organization of the big event also posed challenges, as sessions were typically more focused on the solutions offered by the client company rather than the specific Industries or roles the email recipients worked in. What’s true for shoes and hats is also true for events: one size does not necessarily fit everyone. The solution: More personalization leads to more event registrations  Sojourn worked closely with the client company to define a strategy for its email campaign, one that would enable more personalization/relevance in order to drive more registrations. Sojourn began by pulling all relevant contact/email recipient data into one place, PowerBI. It then made two big recommendations to the client company to facilitate increased email personalization: 1. On tactics and strategy.  Sojourn looked broadly at what messages were being sent to which recipients. “We believed that if the client company leveraged its available data to improve personalization and address the specific needs of multiple customer segments and personas, it would lead to increases in email open rates and more registrations,” said June Dean , Marketing Automation Consultant, Sojourn Solutions. The client company’s 1.3 million email recipients were grouped into five different and distinct “journey types” for the big event. Using the client company’s available data, Sojourn considered the function and role of each recipient, as well as the contact’s job level (junior, senior, or mid-level) and decision-making authority (were they on the execution/practitioner side and/or decision-makers?). Sojourn created two different “persona types” among email recipients; (1) Decision Maker and (2) Practitioner. From a campaign standpoint, outgoing email messages would recommend what sessions the recipients should attend, based on their distinct journey type and persona, and then help recipients pull out a specific value proposition for their particular needs.  The main idea was to tailor the email message to make it easier for email recipients to decide whether or not to attend the event. Not only were the emails tailored to address recipients’ personalized needs, but so was the event experience itself, which was tailored to different journey types and personas. 2. Campaign Execution.  Sojourn also recommended how the emails would be sent, working with the client company to create a more efficient and automated process to get all these different, more personalized emails built, QA tested, and delivered on time and on budget. Sojourn and the client company built out emails with 57 variations, in three different languages, using Velocity Script for efficiency as it meant content could dynamically be laid out, depending on the personalization required from the data. Additionally, A/B Testing was used on the subject line across the multiple language versions to help optimize performance. Sojourn did all the coding for the emails. Since there were four instances of Marketo, it also gave the emails, code, and instructions to another agency to manage, offering support as needed. Tracking links were added to all emails to determine what registrants were coming from what emails, as a way to prove and improve campaign performance. The results: 10% more registrations, cost savings  The bottom line result of the “personalization” email solution was a 10% increase in overall email channel performance, with 64% of event registrants coming from email in 2022 compared to 54% in 2021. In terms of raw numbers, about 2,400 more email recipients registered for the big event in 2022 versus 2021. The cost of each additional event registrant was only $8 per registrant. The campaign also effectively accommodated shorter timeframes around the launch and also addressed the “tone issues” created by the just-launched Russian invasion of Ukraine. “In the end,” says Dean, “the personalized emails simply performed better, garnering higher open rates, better engagement, and more registrations because they were more relevant in addressing the specific needs of different recipients.” In all, 57 dynamic versions of emails were sent to 1.3 million email recipients. While this “send volume” was indeed impressive, the quality of recipient engagement was even more so. For help in improving your “ data readiness ” to drive email personalization efforts, reach out to us here  for help.