Integrating Your CRM With Eloqua for Better Insights Into Your Marketing Campaigns

Turning prospects into loyal customers is a multi-step process and requires the combined efforts of cross-functional teams. Therefore, integrating your marketing automation platform with your CRM can be the best decision you can make.

And if you use Eloqua as your marketing automation platform, you’re already on your way to unlocking various marketing opportunities and turning prospects into loyal customers.

According to research, 52% of marketers prioritize implementing a marketing automation platform that can integrate into other solutions to enhance their marketing efforts^[i].

When your marketing automation and CRM platform work together, your marketing processes are likely to be more streamlined and you can convert more prospects into qualified leads quicker and more effectively.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the Eloqua and CRM integration process and how this integration can solve your common marketing challenges to drive exceptional business growth.

Benefits of Integrating Eloqua and Your CRM

When you integrate Eloqua with your CRM system, you can automate your routine tasks and unlock the true potential of both platforms. Other benefits of this integration include:

1. Better Visibility to Marketing and Sales Team

The integration allows both teams to know where prospects are in the buying journey and what will their next action be. This way, they can identify, track and prioritize leads to craft personalized messages and deliver a superior customer experience.

2. Shorter Sales Cycles

Integrating Eloqua with your CRM makes the process of taking prospects through the sales funnel shorter and more efficient. You can build, segment, and filter your audiences by using their behavioral data to precisely target the right audience in the most effective way.

3. Consistent Messaging

By integrating your CRM and Eloqua instance, you can align your sales and marketing teams while delivering consistent messaging. Also, it becomes easy to provide consistent messaging when you have all the contextual information available in the cross-functional software.

4. Unified Data Management

With your marketing automation and CRM platform working together in harmony, sales reps don’t have to dig deep into the database to find the right customer profile, instead they can directly communicate or sell based on unified data management.

Integrating Eloqua With Your CRM – What Does the Process Look Like?

The integration allows the passing of information between your CRM and Eloqua. Integrations with the following CRM systems versions are currently supported by Oracle Eloqua:

• Oracle CX Sales (formerly Oracle Sales Cloud): Versions R11, R12, and R13 are supported.
• CRMOD: All available versions supported.
• Microsoft Dynamics: Online versions 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, Update 1, and 365.
• Salesforce: All available versions supported.

Here’s what you need to do to integrate Eloqua with your CRM:

• Eloqua leverages ‘External Calls’ to integrate with CRM systems. An External Call is a set of API instructions from Eloqua that accesses the CRM and passes data to it. Also, every External Call has its own user credentials to access the CRM system.
• Writing information to the CRM from Eloqua is called an Outbound Call. Outbound External Calls generally contain the word ‘Update’ or ‘Create’ in their names. You can find them in the ‘Send Data’ folder of the External Calls section within Eloqua’s integration interface. To see a detailed list of External Calls, all you need to do is click Settings> Integration> Outbound> External Calls.
• Outbound External Calls can be activated by Internal Events or Integration Rules. To view the complete list of triggers, click Settings> Integrations> Outbound> Internal Events.
• To get data into Eloqua from CRM, you can use auto-sync to schedule regular and automatic synchronizations from your CRM to Eloqua, on a record type basis. To view and make changes to your Auto-Sync, click Settings> Integration> Inbound> Management> Auto Syncs.
• When manually uploading contacts into Eloqua, the data may change within Eloqua. To ensure your CRM reflects the same changes, External Calls (which send data to CRM) control which data you are passing and for what entity type.
• View and change your External Calls by clicking Settings> Integration> Outbound> External Calls>. The calls that send data are found in Send Data folder.

Best Practices to Follow While Integrating Eloqua With Your CRM

It is crucial to understand what data is being passed back and forth between two platforms. It empowers you to make necessary changes as business requirements change, or perhaps to enhance your existing integration. So, here are the best practices you should follow while integrating Eloqua with your CRM system:

1. Establish Accurate Lead Scoring

Integrated systems enable greater accuracy when defining customer persona and assigning lead scores. So, make sure that priorities are shared across teams, and that scoring is accurate across the entire sales and marketing process, making corrections as needed.

2. Decide Which Triggers are Important

While integrating Eloqua with your CRM system, you need to specify which customer information and activities continue to be recorded into the system. Automatic updates can be a real-time saver and can alert teams to certain opportunities.

3. Eliminate Duplicate Instances

Duplication is hazardous because it leads to false reporting, compliance issues, and inconsistent messaging in your outbound communications. So, to avoid having duplicate instances of a single platform in your software, ensure that both your sales and marketing teams are regularly reviewing their accounts records and deleting them.

4. Plan to Implement Things

Determine if you can employ new low-code or no-code application development to enable to allow your marketing and sales teams to design the apps they need to operate their platforms. It can ensure that your sales and marketing teams have the skills to further develop their platforms as your company grows.

The Bottom Line

Integrating Eloqua with your CRM system will help you understand the gaps and the friction points in your marketing and sales processes. So, integrate your CRM with Eloqua to make your marketing and sales processes as effective as possible, shorten the sales cycles, and deliver superior customer experiences.

Want to Effortlessly Integrate Your Eloqua and CRM Platform? Let’s Talk!

Statistics References

^[i]https://www.demandgenreport.com/features/news-briefs/new-research-96-of-marketers-implemented-marketing-automation-platforms-in-2021-renewed-focus-on-operational-efficiency/