Campaign approvals in Oracle Eloqua

What campaign approvals do in Eloqua

Oracle describes the feature in one line: campaign approvals facilitate the verification of content prior to activating a campaign. Without it a campaign can be activated by its owner or by anyone with the right permissions and nobody else has to look at it first. With it the Activate button is replaced by a request and the campaign waits.

The feature is included in the Standard and Enterprise trims. It isn’t on by default and your security group needs access to approvals before you can configure or use it. Marketo approaches approval differently. It approves emails and landing pages rather than campaigns and the Marketo email approval guide covers how.

Setting up the workflow

An administrator builds the workflow under Settings, then Approvals in the Users and Security area. Oracle’s configuration steps come down to this:

1. Add a stage and name it. Legal review, brand review, regional lead, whatever your process calls them.
2. Add reviewers to the stage by typing their names. Oracle notes that “you can only select individual users from your Oracle Eloqua instance.” There is no option to name a security group or a role.
3. Repeat for each stage and drag the stages into order.

Three rules shape everything that follows. The workflow is global: Oracle says plainly that “you can not create separate workflows for individual campaigns.” Stages can’t be added, removed or changed while any campaign in the instance is awaiting approval, only the reviewers on existing stages can. And “the approvals workflow is not available for simple email and A/B test campaigns.”

Two more settings decide who the workflow applies to. A security group needs the Approvals check box under Settings > Setup > Assets in its interface access before its members can approve anything. And on the Campaigns tab of a group’s Default Asset Permissions there is an Activate check box. A user or group with Activate selected “can activate the campaign regardless of whether or not the campaign approvals feature is in use.” Everyone else has to go through the process. In practice that is how you exempt Ops from a workflow built for everyone else.

Requesting approval

Once the workflow exists a campaign owner opens the campaign and clicks Actions, then Approvals. Under each stage there is a drop-down of names and “only reviewers who were added when you configured the stage will appear on this list.” The requester picks one person per stage and clicks Request Approval.

Eloqua emails the first stage’s reviewer from Eloqua Notifier. The email names the requester, the stage, the campaign and the segment in the campaign’s first step along with how many contacts are in it. The campaign’s status button changes to the name of the stage it is waiting on.

The campaign can still be edited while it waits. If anyone does edit it “the Approve and Reject buttons next to a stage are no longer visible, and the approvals process must be re-initiated from the beginning.” Fix a typo after the first of three stages has passed and you are back at stage one.

What a reviewer sees

The reviewer’s email has a View Campaign link. If they aren’t logged in they land on the login page and have to find the campaign themselves. From there the review happens on the campaign canvas: right-click an asset, choose Preview, pick a contact and see the email or landing page as that contact would. Then Actions, Approvals and a choice of Approve or Reject with a reason typed into the confirmation box.

Approval moves the campaign to the next stage and notifies the next reviewer. Rejection stops the process, emails the requester with the reason and puts the campaign back in Draft. The reason also appears on the campaign’s History tab.

One detail surprises most teams. In a stage with more than one reviewer “the step is considered either approved or rejected after the first person submits his or her approval or rejection.” Adding a second approver to a stage gives you cover for holidays. It doesn’t get you a second pair of eyes.

When every stage has passed the Approvals button turns into Activate and the owner can launch.

Where self-service asks more of it

For a central team approving its own multi-step campaigns the feature does its job. Self-service changes the situation it was designed for, because the people building campaigns become the marketers themselves and the reviewers are often outside Eloqua.

One workflow for every campaign

A product launch, a regional event invitation and an internal HR notice all go through the same stages with the same list of possible reviewers. You can’t require legal on one and skip it on another except by asking the requester to choose wisely from the drop-down. Teams that run several brands or regions in one instance usually end up with a long stage list that everyone has to click through, or a short one that catches little.

Approvers are named people

Every stage is a list of named users. When the brand reviewer leaves or goes on leave, an administrator has to edit the stage. When a region needs its own approver the stage gets longer and the requester has to know which name is theirs. There is no way to say “the marketing lead for whichever country this campaign is for.”

Reviewers see the build and never the brief

The reviewer sees what was built on the canvas. They don’t see what the marketer asked for so a campaign that was built perfectly to the wrong brief passes. And because the review happens in Eloqua the reviewer needs an Eloqua login, the right security group and enough familiarity with the canvas to right-click the right asset and preview it. A country marketing manager who signs off on local campaigns usually has none of those.

Simple email campaigns are exempt

The campaigns most likely to be sent by a non-specialist are simple email campaigns and those can’t be put under approval at all. A team that gives marketers the simple campaign as its self-service path has given them a path with no sign-off on it.

Activation is the only gate

Campaign approvals cover campaign activation. A contact upload that adds ten thousand records with the wrong country values goes in without anyone reviewing it and so does a change to a shared email or a landing page that is already live. Review of the things that cause most of the damage, list uploads and edits to assets, has to happen some other way.

No deadline

The request sits in the reviewer’s inbox until they get to it. Tracking how long campaigns wait, reminding reviewers and escalating are left to the team, so the requester usually finds out by asking.

Approvals in Campaign Launchpad

Campaign Launchpad treats approval as part of each kind of campaign rather than a setting on the instance. When Marketing Ops builds a campaign wizard it decides who has to sign off on campaigns made with it and in what order. A customer-facing announcement might need the brand team then legal. A regional newsletter might need the regional lead. A test send to an internal list might need nobody. Each wizard carries its own chain and a campaign can be checked twice or three times before it goes live when that is what the content warrants.

A few things follow from doing it that way.

• Approvals cover list uploads too so a file a marketer brings is reviewed before a single record reaches Eloqua or Marketo and after Launchpad has already validated it against the rules Ops set.
• Approvers work in Launchpad. They see the marketer’s answers in the wizard, the finished email and the audience without needing an Eloqua or Marketo login or knowing their way around a canvas.
• The decision, the comments and any back-and-forth with the marketer are kept on the campaign, next to the rest of its history.
• Every request carries a deadline and sits in the same queue Ops uses for everything else so a campaign waiting on a reviewer is visible rather than lost in someone’s inbox.

Approval also has less to catch. Because the wizard only lets the marketer change what Ops left open, the reviewer isn’t checking fonts, footers, sender addresses or whether the right email group was used. Those were never editable. What is left to review is the content and the audience which is what a human reviewer is for.