Whether you are an Oracle Eloqua user who has recently learned that your Marketing department has decided to migrate to Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) or a Salesforce Marketing Cloud user tasked to migrate to Oracle Eloqua, the task can make your mind spin. You likely have so many decisions to make that you barely know where to start. 

There are several ways to approach any migration, and it is important to keep best practices in mind regardless of the systems involved. When it comes to migrating from Eloqua to SFMC, it is important to understand the fundamental differences between the platforms so you can make educated system design and migration decisions to meet the needs of the business. Some key differences lie in the data model and integration architecture, audience selection, automation, unique identifiers, and terminology.

Migrating from Eloqua to SFMC: Always Start With the Data Architecture

Eloqua and SFMC think about data organization differently. 

In Eloqua, Contacts are the primary entity, unique by Email Address in most cases.  Each Contact can relate to other entities in a many-to-one relationship with Accounts or one-to-many with custom tables known as Custom Data Objects (CDOs).  SFMC, on the other hand, offers a great deal of flexibility by organizing data in a way that allows you to store many data sources in different ways, depending on the journeys and campaigns you want to support. In addition, each email address in SFMC may be intentionally duplicated and have a one-to-many relationship with a contact/subscriber key for different use cases.

While both Eloqua and SFMC allow automated integrations, Eloqua offers out-of-the-box syncs with Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, and Oracle Sales Cloud, allowing decisions on what data is being passed back and forth between systems.  SFMC offers an optional Connect app to integrate other Salesforce clouds such as Sales or Service Cloud as well as integrations with Microsoft Dynamics.  Both systems allow for automated imports and exports. SFMC includes a built-in SFTP location, the option to encrypt or decrypt data, and the ability to inject audiences into journeys through automation.. 

Migrating from Eloqua to SFMC: Where is my Audience?

In Eloqua, you may notice you have several audience sources for your Campaigns.  SFMC offers many audience sources for your Journey entry source, but you can only choose one.  While SFMC is very powerful, this is one area that you will need to pay attention to and wrap your brain around the power of Automation Studio and SQL queries to combine multiple sources into a single source. Automation Studio is where you will create automations to manipulate and update data using SQL queries and many other activities, creating a unique combination of data to use as your journey entry source. 

Data can also come directly from activities triggered from Salesforce Sales or Service Cloud via Campaigns or other CRM data changes and many other entry sources such as Cloud Pages and Mobile App Events.

Migrating from Eloqua to SFMC: Learn to Speak a Different Language

Most MAPs strive for the same end goal, but as much as they are the same, they can each speak a different language. Like anything else, once you know one of them, you just need to learn how to do the same thing differently.

In Eloqua, you have Campaign Canvas, and in SFMC you have Journey Builder. Please review one of my previous posts, Comparing Eloqua Campaign Canvas to SFMC Journey Builder, where I have listed a few features that stand out to me between the two platforms.  

Eloqua includes customizable drag-and-drop responsive Landing Pages that offer the ability to embed drag-and-drop responsive forms with available processing steps.  SFMC offers CloudPages to publish targeted marketing content to customers across multiple channels using a drag-and-drop interface and is HTML-capable. If you want to further customize your pages, the Code Resource feature allows you to create JavaScript, CSS, and other files in CloudPages and link to them from a landing page.

One important skill that you will need to brush up on while moving to SFMC is SQL.  Automation studio is a vital component in managing data in SFMC, and one of the critical workflow activities is a SQL Query.  One of my favorite sites, whether you are just getting started or need to brush up on your SQL skills, is sqlbolt.  If you are like me, you might just geek out a little with this site.  For more information on SFMC Automation Studio, please review a previous post on Demystify SFMC Automation Activities

Migrating from Eloqua to SFMC: Audit existing assets and processes

Where to start?? If you do not already have good asset and process documentation, now is the time to do this.

Document existing Eloqua Assets and processes that will need to be reviewed for migration to SFMC. Only move current processes and simplify when possible.

  • Data (wait to pull final contact data until close to the cut-over date)
    • Consider the Unique identifier that will be used in SFMC
      • This may not be the “Email Address” in SFMC
    • Export Global unsubscribes and hard bounces
    • Identify Master Exclude criteria
    • Subscription group members
    • Critical Shared Lists
    • Critical Shared Filters
    • Critical field views
  • Custom Data Objects (CDO)
    • CDO fields (data types and picklists values if applicable)
    • Object Services
    • Dependencies
      • Update rules
      • Shared filters
  • Campaigns
    • Audiences
      • Segments
      • Feeds from other assets
    • Emails (Marketing and Transactional)
      • Images and image URL links
      • Button URL links
      • Shared Content Blocks
      • Dynamic Content
      • Email Templates
        • * Ask us about a “Custom Template Framework” for SFMC
    • Eloqua Landing pages
    • Subscription Groups
    • Signature Rules
      • Review “Dynamic Sender Profiles” in SFMC
      • Review “Amp Script processes” in SFMC
  • Forms
    • Forms on Eloqua Landing pages
    • Forms integrated on External landing pages
  • Integrations
    • Import/Exports
      • Document source and file path/name
      • Field mapping
      • schedules
    • Autosyncs
      • Document source and file path/name
      • Field mapping
      • schedules
    • Outbound External calls
      • Trigger source
      • Data source
      • Field mapping
      • Enabled Activity Events
        • Activity type
        • Field mapping
  • Critical Insight Reports
    • Active Agents
    • Active Reports

Of course, as you head into migration from Eloqua to SFMC, you’re going to spend a good amount of time analyzing your contact database and your assets to determine what you plan to migrate and what you will leave behind in your phased migration approach. Take the time to clean up your data before importing it into SFMC. Additionally, make sure you complete your due diligence with your assets – rename or house all your assets to be migrated in a central place so that you can easily identify them during migration. Lastly, having a strong migration and implementation partner who understands the ins and outs of both systems will help you organize and ease this transition as well as provide expertise with those critical decisions needed to future-proof SFMC. Have questions or need assistance making the switch? Reach out. We have both Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce Marketing Cloud experts ready to help with standard and customized solutions.