Eloqua Blog · Lead Nurture

Eloqua Blog: Lead Nurturing Markie - Runner Up

The story behind my 2012 Markie submission for a 60 touch Eloqua lead nurturing program at Axios Systems.

📅 First published: Mar 23, 2020

⏱ Reading time: 16 minutes • 👤 Author: Greg Staunton • 🎯 Focus: Eloqua lead nurture, campaign canvas, scoring, reporting, Markie awards

I am going to switch tack with some more theoretical posts rather than the technical ones. Before I begin, I think it is worth establishing my credibility as a marketer.

It was 2011 and I returned to work at Axios Systems in Edinburgh as a campaign manager. The Global Marketing Manager left just before I got there, so as the senior marketer I had the opportunity to step up into the role, which of course I loved.

Campaign wise, I broke things down into three groups: events, live campaigns and nurture. This article focuses on nurture and shares my exact Markie submission from 2012.

I came runner up in the Eloqua Markie awards, with Mark Emmett from Sony winning the category. Everything shown here was designed and built by me, at a time when much of the functionality now taken for granted in Eloqua was not available.

2012 Markie Submission

The category was Best European Lead Nurturing Program. The submission asked for a sophisticated lead nurturing program with measurable results, meaningful decisions and compelling actions.

Company

Axios Systems

SaaS and on-premise IT Service Management software.

Contact

Greg Staunton

Marketing Campaign Manager.

Program

Lead Nurture

A 60 touch nurture journey built on Eloqua 10.

Target Audience

The campaign targeted prospects that were inactive in North America, English speaking European countries and MEA. Inactive meant they had not opened an email, submitted a form or visited the website in six months.

To identify them, I created a contact status field and a Program Builder process that marked contacts as Active, Inactive or No Marketing.

North America: 96,055 inactive contacts
Europe: 29,705 inactive contacts
MEA: 11,751 inactive contacts

Contact Status Logic

Active contacts had been sent at least three emails in the previous six months and had opened an email, visited the website or visited a landing page. Inactive contacts had received the emails but had not shown those engagement signals. No Marketing contacts had not been sent at least three emails during that period.

The Challenge

There were several challenges I wanted to overcome with the nurture program.

Templates

Create a new uniform template for emails and landing pages.

Collateral

Use existing collateral to cover campaign gaps and maintain momentum.

Buying Stage

Send content that stimulated and measured where prospects were in the buying cycle.

Profile Data

Build up the amount of useful information held about prospects.

Sales Ready Leads

Push qualified leads over to sales at the right moment.

RPM

Identify potential revenue from active contacts and improve lead scoring.

Template Rebuild

Previously there was no real campaign automation. A campaign would start with collateral, such as a whitepaper, followed by an email driving people to a website form. Territory leaders would then request design changes before each send, which created inconsistency and slowed everything down.

The old email used CSS in the header, so it rendered in a browser but broke in Outlook. The nurture rebuild created a stable email and landing page pattern that could be reused.

Landing Pages And Forms

The landing pages and forms were rebuilt as part of the nurture engine, giving the campaign a consistent destination and a way to collect the data needed for profile building and lead scoring.

Program Build

The implementation involved creating the campaign structure, templates, landing pages, forms, lead scoring, CRM handoff and reporting. It was built in-house by two people in roughly three weeks.

People

Two people built and launched the program.

Timeline

The solution took about three weeks to implement.

Scale

The program reached roughly 150,000 inactive contacts.

Measurable Results

The reports in the original submission were generated from the day the lead nurture program was switched on at the end of February. They showed performance, engagement and pipeline impact for the program.

More Reporting Screenshots

Benefits And Lessons

The program gave Axios a repeatable campaign plan, established email and landing page templates, helped senior management pay more attention to marketing's impact, and brought sales and marketing closer together.

The hard lessons were just as useful: simplify Campaign Canvas, build approvals around internal seed lists, use shared content from the start, review old collateral before launch, communicate upcoming sends to sales, and protect against multiple form submissions causing duplicate scoring or triggered emails.

Submission Summary

Between two people and in just three weeks, Axios Systems designed, created and launched a 60 touch lead nurturing program that reached 150,000 inactive contacts from nothing.

The program increased reach by 500% in three months and was underpinned by new email templates, landing pages, a complex lead scoring model and RPM metrics for sales pipeline conversion. The backbone was Eloqua 10: Campaign Canvas for orchestration and Program Builder for the heavier data logic.

Creative Samples

The actual lead nurture campaign was broken down into four stages.

Problem Recognition

19 emails for existing whitepapers.

Early Solution Search

23 emails for existing recorded webcasts.

Later Solution Search

5 emails with product bundles.

Evaluation

10 emails with case studies.

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