In a presentation during Sojourn's June virtual Eloqua User Group meeting, Brenda Barrelle - Senior Consultant at Sojourn Solutions - described how the Eloqua Contact Washing Machine app works and gave a quick demo of a few simple use cases. Basically, the Contact Washing Machine (CWM), as its name implies, helps keep your contact data clean by enabling the automated cleansing of contact fields. With Oracle’s CWM app, Barrelle says, “you're able to define one or more fields as inputs, and then you can run several “actions” on them. You can even perform lookups to populate fields, and then the data can be mapped back to the same field, or you can actually map it back to a different field.” These “actions” Barrelle mentions are basically commands that are going to transpose data. You can set up and run these actions on one field at a time.
The CWM works on both an Eloqua Campaign Canvas and a Program Canvas. You can leverage the app to help keep data fields clean, which improves the effectiveness of lead creation and lead scoring, as well as segmentation. The CWM app also helps with personalization efforts, especially if you do a lot of field merging in your emails. “The fact that the CWM app can be used on Program Canvas is such a value for marketing automation teams,” says Barrelle.
Downloading the CWM app. You can simply download the CWM app from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace: It's a standard, pre-packaged app from Oracle, which they own and configure. As Barrelle explains, “you just go into your settings area and then go to apps; you could also go to the Marketplace search to find and download the app. There's nothing to do – once it's installed, you're good to go.” You can pop the CWM into a program or campaign canvas, and that's where the configuration and all the magic happens, notes Barrelle.
Some actions the CWM app enables
Among the 13 actions enabled by the CWM app are the following:
Trim - Removes all white space
Trim Left - Removes white space to the left of the text
Trim Right - Removes white space to the right of the text
Lowercase - Turns all letters to lowercase
Uppercase - Turns all letters to uppercase
Propercase - Capitalizes the first letter of each word
Compose - Builds up a string of text from static values and Eloqua contact fields and places it into the destination field. Press Ctrl + Space to view the list of available static and contact fields.
Set to Blank - Clears data in the source field
Lookup - Lookup lets you standardize and add to your contact information by pulling data from lookup tables. This helps minimize fields for customers to fill out on forms.
Some use cases for the CWM app
Barelle’s presentation described several use cases for the CWM app in great detail. Here are some of the highlights:
Pick lists. If you've got a country or a state pick list, and you're really trying to keep it clean, especially when passing leads to sales, you can use the contact washing machine to do that.
Multiple actions in one step. Barrelle demo’ed how to take multiple actions in one step. “In step one, I'm doing proper case, but if I scroll down, I've added a second step that's going to actually do something completely different: it’s going to do what's called compose or concatenate data.” Concatenation combines the contents of two or more cells into one cell without physically changing the shape of the cell and is often used to join pieces of text (called text strings or strings) from individual cells into one cell.
The proper case, on the other hand, is important If you're doing any kind of personalization mail merging field, says Barrelle, and you want to cleanse leads before they go to sales. This action basically ensures that the first word in this particular case has an upper case for the first letter.
Customizing with the 13 actions. Barrelle notes that you won’t need to use all the available “actions” in the CWM app, but that “there are four or five that are really, really useful and popular.” These actions range from the very simple, such as the ability to upper or lowercase fields to fairly complex, such as performing mathmatical calculations. While you can’t add your own customized actions to the app, says Barrelle, “you can customize within the action itself.”
Conclusion
Oracle’s Contact Washing Machine app is not only simple to implement but also very easy-to-use, as well as highly useful in enabling the cleansing of contact fields. Users of the app are able to define one or more contact fields as inputs, then run actions (as detailed above) such as trim, concatenate, adjust case (propercase or lowercase), and perform lookups to populate fields. The data can then be mapped back to that same field or a separate field.
Since data quality is monumentally important for modern marketing, keeping data clean via the CWM app improves the accuracy of lead scoring, segmentation, personalization, and any other marketing effort dependent on quality data.
To learn more about how implementing and using Oracle’s Contact Washing Machine app can improve your data quality and marketing efforts, reach out to us today.
