Eloqua Welcome Series - Four New Ideas To Enhance Customer Experience

Eloqua Welcome Series Are Powerful

An Eloqua welcome series is one of the easiest and most powerful uses for Marketing Automation. Simply put, whenever a prospect becomes a new customer, an Eloqua Welcome Series sends the customer messages designed to onboard the customer. However, there are many capabilities in Eloqua that can be leveraged to make a welcome series do so much more. Below are some best practices that we’ve found that can make a welcome series establish a bond between you and your customer.

Idea: The Eloqua Welcome Series is the beginning of a dialog, not the entirety of it.

Many marketers make the mistake of thinking they need to use every complex bit of Campaign Canvas branching logic to tailor a welcome series that has fascinating twists and turns, routing customers who open, click or submit into various tracks. That’s a really great ambition and in some cases where the customer relationship is shorter in duration, that might make sense. However, more often than not, you are not setting yourself up for the long-term relationship with the customer you seek.

Why not?

Because with so many variations and paths, you don’t have a consistent profile or baseline of customer interaction. Marketers with a complex welcome series often struggle with the “So what’s next?” after the welcome series is complete.

But wait, I can imagine you object – isn’t that the point of Eloqua? To do 1:1 marketing and make the customer feel unique and special?

Yes. That is all true.

But just as when you meet someone face to face, you start with a series of predictable small talk interactions that build up to a meaningful dialog over time, so is true with ongoing customer communications. Slow down and cover the basics, then you can move on to the really exotic stuff if you want.

Motiv’s Four A’s for an Eloqua Welcome Series

Even if you have a fairly linear welcome series, there is a surprising amount of really cool stuff that you can do to ensure that each customer has an engaging experience. Over the course of 3-6 emails in a welcome series, it is easy to mix these in.

Affinity

Improve your customer’s emotional ties with your brand and establish loyalty. One or more welcome series emails in this category include reinforcing the buyer’s purchasing decision with reasons to buy. Elaborating on your company’s mission, history and core values also builds a bond with your customer.

Awareness

Make sure your customer knows what other problems you can solve for them. Offerings, resources, tips’n’tricks, customer culture all work well here.

Action

In a lot of cases, the best time to solicit a customer is right after they have purchased. Give them a chance to take action to register, participate in free trials or snag a promotion while you have their attention.

Advocacy

The customer just purchased, so at some level, they are convinced you are the right solution. Why wouldn’t they immediately become an advocate? Can you get them to provide referrals or post on social media about you? Even if they refrain, the thought has been planted.

Putting An Eloqua Welcome Series Together

Like all welcome series email campaigns, the steps should be in time with the experience you want to create for the customer. For some experiences, this might mean having an email every day for five intense days before cooling off. For others, it might be a constant touch that happens once a week for eight weeks. Your own experience will vary. However, the following are all key factors to consider.

Timing and Frequency

Eloqua provides a lot of powerful capabilities to ensure your customer experience follows that timeless mantra of "sending the right message to the right person at the right time". Do you want your welcome series to start right away? Should follow up messages always be sent on a certain day of the week? Be sure to optimize send time to coincide with your service delivery and other interactions with the customer. How many is too many? If your content is good, I recommend you keep going until you run out.

Segmentation

Should you send all customers the same message or create different tracks for different customer groups? It is tempting to subdivide customers by industry, company size, purchase history, demographics and more, but keep in mind that every division doubles the amount of content you will need, so the practical balance is going to depend on your ability to create great content in great quantity.

Build the Profile

I love blind form submits. I love them a great deal when it comes to welcome series emails where each email can lead to a quick blind form submit that builds your customer profile. If you really want to establish a strong digital body language profile for your customers, be sure to engage as many customers as possible in blind form submit interactions to kill two birds with one stone.

Content, Content, Content

Great content is the most important factor and you should avoid the temptation to water it down. Remember, a welcome series is the initial impression you make with your customer and you only get one chance to make a great impression. Great content also is content that you have quality checked. For more details on quality, be sure to check out Email Programs Are An Investment

Stick with these tips and before you know it, you will be able to see a major uptick in customer engagement, digital body language, referral and upsell.

David Ewing is the CEO of Motiv. Motiv is the largest Oracle exclusive CX partner in the world. Based in Austin, TX, companies around the world turn to Motiv for ideas, best practices, implementations, know-how and integration of Oracle CX solutions such as Eloqua, Engagement Cloud, Sales Performance Management and more. Learn more about Motiv at www.motivcx.com