Real World Use Cases for Relationship One Appender Apps

February 16, 2022 Stan

We’ve all been there. A new marketing initiative is launching, the goals, deliverables and budget have all been approved, and the project is underway. You’re setting up the technical solution in Eloqua when you hit a wall. Eloqua just won’t do what you need it to do.

Often the issue centers around data and the way it’s stored in Eloqua. The native tools within Eloqua to fully harness this data can be limited. Relationship One offers a family of Cloud Apps aimed at solving these problems. The apps run on program and campaign canvasses and give you the ability to put critical data where you need it.

In this post, we’ll look at how three appender apps — the Object-to-Contact Appender, Object-to-Object Appender and the CDO Record Splitter — are able to overcome real-world scenarios where Eloqua’s out of the box functionality may not fit all use cases.

Consent Management with the Object-to-Contact Appender

In this scenario, a company needs to reference a Custom Data Object field to manage their contacts’ consent. The problem is, the company’s existing consent management programs in Eloqua use contact fields and are unable to reference the data in the CDO. Re-architecting the consent management system is not an option; the data has to be in a contact field. While Eloqua does have the ability to take CDO data and append it to contact fields, there are some key limitations that left the company stumped. The Object-to-Contact Appender was able to bridge this gap and keep their systems running smoothly.

This company has product purchase data coming into a CDO in Eloqua from their eCommerce platform that includes the product’s purchase date. Because they do business in Canada, many of the eCommerce records that come into Eloqua are eligible for marketing emails under the Implied Consent rules of CASL. Implied Consent begins when a purchase is made and it expires after a period of time if the customer does not opt in, so recording that purchase date is essential.

The challenge was to take the purchase date, identify the mapped contact, and write that date into a field on the contact table. Eloqua is able to do this using CDO Record Services and Field Mapping, but there are strict limits around the number of records it can handle. New records, with new purchase dates were coming into the CDO too quickly for Eloqua to keep up and a different approach was needed.

The Object-to-Contact Appender provided this solution. The company was able to set up a program in Eloqua that pulled in new CDO records through a Listener. The Object-to-Contact Appender app works on the program canvas as a step that finds the record’s mapped contact, takes the purchase date from the CDO, and copies it into an Implied Consent Date field on their contact table.

Because the app runs on the program canvas, it operates in near real-time and is able to handle the spikes in volume the company regularly experiences. New customers are immediately available to enter nurture campaigns and their Implied Consent period can be confidently tracked, ensuring that the company remains CASL compliant.

Email Signatures using the Object-to-Object Appender

Cross-referencing data that lives in separate CDOs is another common challenge, a scenario faced by a company that was trying to build a set of custom signatures to place in their marketing emails.

This company’s sales team is large, with over 1,000 reps covering multiple regions around the world. Turnover is high, and it’s not uncommon for reps to switch products or territories multiple times in a year. Knowing which rep an email recipient should see in the signature is no small task.

HR provides an updated file of reps each week that contained their names, job titles, contact information and other data used for signatures. This data is stored in a Rep CDO. Meanwhile, a separate CDO was set up for their customers and was intended to store their assigned reps. The goal was to take the rep data coming in from HR and populate fields in the Customer CDO that would be used for field merges in the signatures, but the two CDOs couldn’t talk to one another.

The Rep CDO used Rep Id as the unique identifier and records were not mapped to contacts. The Customer CDO used email address as the unique identifier, but joining the two datasets together was a challenge. The Object-to-Object appender provided a quick and efficient solution to the problem of getting rep data out of the Rep CDO and into the Customer CDO to power the field merges for email signatures.

It required very little configuration and worked well with their existing model for personalization. The big win was it didn’t require the company to go back to their HR department and ask that they reformat their weekly rep file. It allowed marketing to work with the existing data in the format it was presented in, while delivering the personalization that marketing wanted.

Powering Transactional Emails using the CDO Record Splitter

In this use case, the contract management software used by a company was providing a daily feed of newly signed contracts into Eloqua. Each contract involves up to 10 individuals who all need to be notified at various times about the contract depending on their role and relationship to the company. Some need to receive billing and payment information while others need to get service delivery emails. The challenge for this company was getting the data in the contract feed set up in Eloqua so that all stakeholders could be emailed.

The data coming in used the contract ID as the unique identifier and the stakeholder email addresses were all separate fields within each contract record. There was no way for Eloqua to extract the email addresses from each contract record and create new contacts to use for emailing the notifications.

The company was able to use the CDO Record Splitter to overcome this hurdle. A parent CDO was set up to hold the incoming contract data. Ten child CDOs were then created, one for each potential stakeholder. Tying it all together is a program canvas with 10 CDO Record Splitter steps. New records to the parent CDO enter the program canvas where the CDO Record Splitter steps “split” the different stakeholder email addresses into new records in the appropriate child CDO.

From there, native Eloqua functionality was able to create a mapped contact for each new stakeholder record, and the company was able to clearly identify the stakeholders and the specific emails they need to be sent to support the company’s contracts.

The family of Relationship One Appender apps offer affordable and easy-to-configure solutions to some of the more stubborn data limitations within Eloqua. How will you use the appender apps? Contact R1 today to see how.

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