October Oracle Eloqua insights: Modern Marketing Express, user groups, and cookies

By Karin Pindle

One of the things I enjoy the most about being a consultant is visiting beautiful places and my latest adventures provided plenty of sights to see! October is always a busy month and so far, I’ve ridden the Northeastern rails to New York City then to Boston and back to New York City again.

Two more things I really enjoy about being a consultant? Working with wicked smart customers and alongside passionate teammates and I had the opportunity to visit with both on my October adventures to date.

In week 1, I attended Oracle’s Modern Marketing Express (#MMExpress) event in The Big Apple where Shashi Smith, SVP of Oracle Marketing Cloud, presented on “The Future of Digital Marketing.” He smashed it and I look forward to hearing him again at Modern Customer Experience 2019. More highlights –

1. Oracle Product Manager Thamina Christensen, giving Modern Marketing Express attendees the low down on what’s new in the Eloqua Landing Page Design Editor – nice! (FYI… If you’re a customer you can submit an SR to turn this feature on NOW!)
2. Oracle Markie Winner Thomson Reuters’ Marketing Operations Manager Stephani Sanchez for presenting insights and best practices for “unlocking the capabilities within the marketing ecosystem.” (And I must say, definitely deserving of the golden statue!)
3. Chocolate chip cookies, which are my all-time favorite cookie.

I then packed up and traveled to Boston in week 2 for Oracle’s Modern Marketing Express event, co-sponsored by my team at Sojourn and our solutions partner PFL. My highlights –

1. I was able to connect face-to-face with my long-time teammates Emily Bennett and Sue Wieberg – check!
2. We teamed up to lead an Eloqua/B2B collaborative session focused on “cracking the automated renewals code” – check! (We have customers like Naylor experiencing significant ROI with their recently implemented automated renewal programs and wanted to share the ROI love.)
3. Of course, we also enjoyed great networking with customers and others in the Eloqua community all afternoon (and more of my favorite chocolate chip cookies).

Next up in week 2? I had the honor of presenting a session at the New York/New Jersey Eloqua User Group (EUG) meeting, hosted by Eloqua customer, New York Life. Again, my highlights –

1. Positive feedback on my presentation “Eloqua Hacks and Tips” (which just proves we are all always learning in this space).
2. Another Eloqua power user presented on the new Eloqua Insight reporting tool (Classic Insight, aka the original Insight, was sunsetted as of last month).
3. Who doesn’t love an expert marketing panel? This EUG featured just that, led by marketing leader Jon Russo with interviews of an Eloqua power user, an Oracle Sales Consultant, and me, myself and I.
4. Again, chocolate chip cookies – as you can imagine, I was a very happy marketing automation camper!

Speaking of always learning, I learned some new things that can be achieved with the new Eloqua Insight – in my opinion, much better now that when it was first released. While there is still room for improvement, I like that users can create reports and dashboards with more graphical options and, honestly, fewer limitations than most native marketing automation reporting tools.

A trending topic at each of these events was CDPs (Customer Data Platforms). Oracle has its CDP, CX Audience, but a timeframe for integration with Eloqua isn’t yet being provided in the product roadmap (meaning, it’ll likely be a year or more in Oracle-time, in my opinion).  

So, for busy marketers trying to decide which of these types of events to attend in the future, here’s my take – 

The what and who:

• Modern Marketing Express is a free half-day event organized by Oracle Marketing Cloud, designed for both B2B and B2C marketers in North America.
• Eloqua User Groups are also (typically) free 2-4 hour events organized by either Oracle Eloqua team members, Oracle Eloqua customers, or Oracle Eloqua Partners.

The why:

• Modern Marketing Express events are focused on how all marketers can improve their customer experience leveraging Oracle Marketing Cloud platforms such as Eloqua, Responsys, Infinity, and CX Audience.
• Eloqua User Group events are focused wholly on Eloqua – from best practices to tips and tricks to hands-on how-to’s.

The best of both:

Modern Marketing Express
I found the Eloqua product roadmap and B2B collaborative sessions (with mostly Eloqua customers) the best. I really enjoy conversations with other marketers who are using Eloqua, as I did and still do, and learning about their challenges and successes. I think it’s great that Oracle is making these events happen (and for free)! (My only challenge with #MMExpress is that most of the general session presentations were more focused on B2C use cases than on B2B, but the tasty chocolate chip cookies kept me smiling through it all.)

Eloqua User Group
EUG events are plentiful and again, are wholly focused on all things in and around Eloqua. It makes sense, right? In many cases, hosted by Eloqua customers, for Eloqua customers – all about helping Eloqua customers.  I’ve attended dozens of these over the last 13 years and this last one hosted by New York Life was definitely one of the best!

Finally, Oracle team members at the #MMExpress events were very clear – multiples times – that the 2019 Modern Customer Experience (MCX) conference is in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay! Also, it’s earlier than usual as it’s typically in April but next year, it’s March 19-21, 2019. I hope you plan to be there and meet up with my team and me in our “safety orange” shirts (“safety orange” is code for they GLOW, seriously, you can’t miss us in a crowd). 

Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions on these events or others.

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