PathFactory and Eloqua. The Perfect Match.

What goes together better than peanut butter and jelly? Maybe peanut butter and chocolate? That could be a tough debate. However, finding the perfect combination of marketing technologies is an even better treat than scarfing down a peanut butter cup. Is that taking it too far? Maybe, but now your attention is peaked. 

So, how do you know when you’ve found a great pairing of technologies? When the combination of each tool’s capabilities allows you to significantly enhance your customer’s experience with your brand, products, and services, you know you’ve hit the mark. This is especially true when bringing together PathFactory and Eloqua. Separately, they enhance your ability to reach and engage with your audiences. Together, they form a formidable unification that takes your marketing, content intelligence, and personalization efforts to the next level.

Simplistically, Oracle Eloqua is a best-in-class B2B marketing automation platform, providing marketers an easy way to nurture leads, align with sales, and intelligently orchestrate campaigns and communications.  PathFactory is a content-intelligence tool providing personalized experiences that increase conversion by recommending and aligning content with customers’ needs and online behavior. When used together, PathFactory and Eloqua provide enhanced, personalized customer experiences, connecting high-value content engagement with lead nurturing, scoring, and notification capabilities.

Integrate PathFactory and Eloqua

PathFactory’s extendability allows integrations with several leading marketing automation tools, including Oracle Eloqua, Adobe Marketo, and Salesforce Pardot. The integration with Eloqua is fairly simple and documented in PathFactory’s help center. Configuring the integration allows PathFactory to share page view data with Eloqua while making it seamless to pass real-time engagement data.

To begin configuration, create a dedicated Eloqua user for the PathFactory integration. It’s best practice to create a specific user instead of using an existing one tied to an Eloqua user. Otherwise, you risk disabling the integration should the individual tied to the user leave the organization. Be sure to add the proper security and CLS groups to your integration user, as outlined in PathFactory’s documentation. Within Eloqua, you’ll also need to add specific IPs to your whitelist if IP address restrictions are enabled. Once complete, connecting the two platforms is as easy as navigating to organizational settings in PathFactory, entering your Site ID and user creds, and enabling tracking (optional). 

That’s it! Now, PathFactory will begin sending web activity data directly into your Eloqua instance, allowing you to segment, score, and personalize based on these behaviors. Activities will appear in the contact’s activity log within 15 minutes of completing the engagement.

Share Engagement Data

In addition to sending activity data into Eloqua, you can create PathFactory webhooks to send specific event data into an Eloqua CDO. You can send four different types of events to Eloqua – visitor session, visitor activity, form submission, or virtual event session (if enabled). A visitor session will be captured whenever someone lands on a track and closes the page (or 30 minutes have passed). A form submission will trigger whenever a standard PathFactory form is submitted. It will also trigger for 3rd party forms if the Capture tag is included. A visitor activity can be triggered based on rules you configure. You can set your visitor activity to fire based on viewing specific content pages, the number of assets viewed, an engagement score, and more.

Creating a webhook in PathFactory is simple and only takes a few moments. Simply navigate to Settings and Webhooks. You’ll see a button to “Add Webhook.” Here, you will create a name for your webhook and select the type of activity you want to use. You have additional options related to the form creation and firing of the webhook. More information can be found in PathFactory’s help center.

If you enable the PathFactory and Eloqua integration, a form will be auto-generated when you create a webhook. Fields will be auto-mapped into your chosen CDO (created separately within Eloqua). You can still utilize webhooks with your Eloqua instance if you do not enable integration. In that case, you manually create the form in Eloqua and set the proper form name within the webhook. 

Once these are configured, you’ll capture rich engagement data to bolster your nurturing and scoring activities. 

Enhance Nurturing and Scoring

Now that you’ve integrated PathFactory and Eloqua, and you’re sending online behavioral data, you can use the information to guide nurtures, enhance personalization, and score leads more accurately. PathFactory outlines a few ways you can use engagement data to fine-tune your communications based on online consumption. As they describe, you can utilize your contact’s engagement to adjust nurture tracks and messages based on already-viewed content tracks. You may want to send recipients different emails (or dynamic content blocks) based on their online consumption trends. Similarly, you may want to adjust the frequency of emails based on the interest level of your buyers. 

Consider building nurture or email campaigns based on engagement data and personal information as you brainstorm various ways to utilize consumption data. Perhaps you want to route specific buyer personas or account group contacts through their own nurture, dynamically populated with topics of interest. Maybe you want to send a welcome campaign to high-consumption contacts that are new to your brand, focused on their interests. The options are quite endless.

While you think about your nurture efforts, remember to adjust your lead scoring based on content engagement. If you have a PathFactory and Eloqua integration configured, online activity will automatically be considered in your lead score’s calculations, assuming you use these criteria in your engagement score. PathFactory outlines a way to create an engagement score field within your Eloqua instance that can be used within your lead scoring models. If you create this score, you can also use it for segmentation, personalization, and decisions within your campaigns and nurtures.

Create Alerts

PathFactory recommends creating “Fast-Moving Buyer Alerts” within Eloqua, so you can alert your sales team members of leads that are likely to convert. To create these alerts, you simply create a webhook for visitor activity. Within the visitor activity itself, you define the criteria for a “fast-moving buyer.” When a visitor meets these criteria, the webhook sends engagement data into the form created (either auto-generated by the webhook or manually created by you). You then set your form processing step to send an email notification to the appropriate sales member. Keep in mind, you may have additional scenarios in which you want to create alerts. Again, the possibilities are endless.

If you’re using Eloqua (or another marketing automation platform) and add PathFactory to your marketing technology stack, you’ll exponentially increase your personalization, scoring, and conversion potential. With a PathFactory and Eloqua integration, you take your content intelligence, customer experience, and actionable insights to the next level. If you want to dive into PathFactory and Eloqua and need some experienced guidance, call us at Relationship One. As a PathFactory partner, we are excited to help.