Eloqua lead nurture email tracks overview.

Eloqua Blog · Lead Nurture

Designing An Off The Shelf Lead Nurture Engine For Oracle

A proposal-style walkthrough of an Oracle Eloqua partner nurture engine built around AIDA tracks, progressive profiling, lead scoring and background programs.

📅 First published: May 17, 2020

⏱ Reading time: 14 minutes • 👤 Author: Greg Staunton • 🎯 Focus: Eloqua lead nurture, partner marketing, scoring, campaign architecture

A few years back Oracle asked me to design an off the shelf partner lead nurturing engine that they could use to enable their partners to market to their own databases on a shared instance of Eloqua.

They essentially wanted me to architect what I had created when I came runner up to Sony for the best EMEA lead nurturing campaign in their Markie awards, but on a much larger scale.

The brief was to create several lead nurture tracks that partners could use to identify Marketing Qualified Leads across a range of products. Each product would have a catalogue of content and prebuilt email templates so partners could individualize content and deploy quickly.

The shared database challenge was handled through Eloqua contact level security. So grab a coffee and run through the proposal, complete with lead scoring engine and campaign workflow.

Note: The email screenshots were from the Axios Systems campaign and were included for illustration in the original proposal.

Lead Nurture Engine Overview

The Eloqua based lead nurture engine for Oracle partners was designed to provide partners with both marketing automation technology and a repeatable nurture approach they otherwise may not have had access to.

It combined the strongest attributes of Oracle Eloqua into an off-the-shelf, 12 month, fully automated campaign. Marketing assets were sent in a logical order based on each member's interactions, or lack of interaction.

Underpinning the campaign was a robust lead scoring model designed to identify sales ready marketing qualified leads.

The AIDA Framework

The engine was based on the time-tested AIDA framework: Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. This simple model gives marketing communications a logical sequence and gives scoring a clearer buying-cycle structure.

Awareness

Introduce useful content and start building profile completeness.

Interest

React to engagement and send related, more specific messaging.

Desire

Use content consumption to deepen buying-stage signals.

Action

Trigger sales-stage communications and MQL handling.

All uploaded contacts would enter the first scheduled awareness track. Downloads from that track would trigger related Interest messaging. Interest engagement would trigger Desire, and Desire engagement would trigger Action.

Awareness Track

The awareness track would be developed by Oracle and the creative agency, using the previous year's Oracle marketing campaigns relevant to each partner type.

Each communication would drive prospects to a landing page where they could access valued content by submitting a form. Net new contacts entered topic-based awareness tracks, with two awareness assets offered per topic and a two week break between sends.

Typical awareness content included whitepapers, analyst reports and practical guides. Across a year, the program planned for 24 different awareness assets.

Progressive Profiling Landing Pages

When a user clicked through from an asset, the landing page form asked questions that helped build a richer contact profile. A background program monitored profile completeness so Eloqua dynamic content could show only the unanswered questions.

The first questions captured contact details and location. Later questions collected job, industry and explicit scoring information. Finally, when enough was known about the contact, the forms could ask sales-stage questions that controlled follow-up communications.

Campaign Workflow

The campaign workflow used the AIDA model to move contacts through awareness, interest, desire and action communications based on their interactions with emails, landing pages and website content.

Lead Scoring Model

The nurture engine used explicit fit, implicit sales stage and implicit behavioral signals to create a meaningful overall lead rating.

Explicit Fit

Profile and qualification fields helped identify whether a contact looked suitable for sales.

Sales Stage

Asset consumption mapped contacts back to Action, Desire, Interest or Awareness.

Engagement Pattern

Visits, email opens, clicks and asset consumption identified high, average, low or no engagement.

The resulting rating identified sales readiness and provided sales insight through a meaningful naming convention. It also created a foundation for a sales feedback loop to maintain and improve implicit scoring over time.

Background Programs

The lead scoring model would be built in Program Builder rather than the Eloqua 10 lead scoring component. Several background programs supported data maintenance and reporting.

Marketing Effectiveness

Each partner would have a dedicated program monitoring Oracle awareness assets and partner interest, desire and action assets. Activity updated a custom object connected to the contact record.

Sales status: INQ, MQL, SAL, SQL
Campaign, subscription and hard bounce status
Highest marketing engagement level
Asset status across awareness, interest, desire and action

Profile Completeness

A profile completeness program monitored fields held against the contact record and used update rules to control which form questions were shown next.

Stage 1: contact details and location
Stage 2: job title, job function and industry
Stage 3: explicit scoring fields
Stage 4: sales-stage request fields

Level Of Effort

The proposal split effort into the core engine build and the onboarding of each partner. The initial build included sales decks, onboarding documentation, templates, campaigns, forms, scoring and background programs.

Cost Set	Scope	Total Hours
1	Eloqua based lead nurture engine for Oracle partners build	313
2	Onboarding of each partner	177.5

The partner onboarding set included 43 emails, 13 landing pages, 24 campaigns, a form and a lead scoring model, with technical implementation and project management separated for planning purposes.

Roundup

This kind of off the shelf nurture engine is really a reusable operating model: shared architecture, shared governance, repeatable content tracks, progressive profiling, lead scoring and reporting all working together.

The challenge is not only building the campaigns. It is designing the data model and background programs so every partner can move quickly without breaking reporting, contact security or sales follow-up.

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