Marketing Challenge
We are a networking company that sell our products to reseller partners that in turn sell to the consumers. Our Marketers use Eloqua for all reseller digital marketing (B2B). Now we would like to extend this application to market to our existing consumer customers (BTC). For this we need to be able to sync our database of registered customers and their product registrations from CRM system into Eloqua. This will allow us to target market to consumers to improve brand awareness. This will indirectly help boost revenue.
I have been tasked with this project. My biggest challenge is to sync all consumer contacts into Eloqua from CRM system with product purchase history information. This will help our marketers create targeted segments based on product categories purchased, consumer demographics, geography among other data points.
While bringing these contacts into Eloqua I don’t want to overwrite existing reseller contact information in Eloqua database for those contacts that are present in the BTB as well as BTC database. As you know Email ID must be unique in Eloqua. So if I use the same external call, it will overwrite the unique identifiers I want to use for the BTB segmentation (ex. Record Type ID field, CRMcontactID field). I need to make sure I can track the unique identifiers for the BTB segment as well as the BTC segment on the same record (in case of contacts that occur in both databases).
Goal
Sync 300K+ BTC contacts with product purchase history from CRM to Eloqua. The data synchronization must not overwrite key data elements for contacts that are already present in Eloqua in the BTB database.
Implementation steps
The solution I found was to create additional fields on the contact object to track unique identifiers for BTC contacts. I created separate fields for SFDCCTScontactID & SFDCCTSRecordtypeID. These fields helped in creating the BTC segment by using them in segment filters. Additionally, I created separate BTC integration rules to manage these contact’s synchronization separately.
Lastly, I created custom object ‘Asset’ to bring BTC contact’s product purchase history information from CRM to Eloqua.
Detailed Steps:
1. Create new fields SFDCCTScontactID & SFDCCTSRecordtypeID. Then create separate external call to bring BTC contacts to Eloqua from CRM.
In the screenshot below you can see how we are storing BTC and BTB contacts data for the same email address & differentiating them with newly created unique keys.
Figure 1.1
2. Now next challenge is to sync BTC contacts into Eloqua but not to over write basic fields like First Name, Last Name, Address, City, Phone number if the contact is already present in Eloqua. Here Eloqua class for ‘System Integration’ helped me a lot. Advanced Options for field mapping are used as shown in below screenshot.
Figure 1.2
3. Created Custom object ‘Asset’ to bring product purchase history information from CRM. Then created an external call to bring Asset object information to Eloqua & mapped it to BTC contacts.
Figure 1.3
Goal Achieved:
This will allow our marketers to use Eloqua as a one stop shop for both BTB and BTC marketing. It will help us raise brand awareness of our products among our registered customers. Our marketers will be able to target market to our customers by segmenting on geography, product purchase history and demographic data as shown in figure 1.4.
Figure 1.4
Helpful Eloqua University Classes that influenced this project
Eloqua University Classes
Eloqua 10: Database Configuration
Eloqua 10: Advanced Segmentation
Last but not the least, is information I found on Topliners site. It provided great help on creating Custom Objects & their integration with CRM system as this topic is not covered in Eloqua University classes. Additionally, I found some great guides on system integrations there.