The simple email campaign in Oracle Eloqua

What the simple email campaign is for

Oracle’s description is short: “If you want to send a single email to a group of contacts, you can create a simple email campaign.” It exists because most of what goes out of an Eloqua instance is a single email to a segment and dragging a segment, an email and an end step onto the canvas for each one is more ceremony than the job needs.

It is also where many teams first look when a marketer asks to send something themselves. The form is friendly and there is no canvas to get lost in. Whether it can safely be handed over depends on what it still exposes so it helps to walk through it.

The steps

In the Redwood experience you go to Orchestration, then Campaigns, then Create and pick Simple Email Campaign. In the classic interface the button is Create a Simple Email Campaign and you have to make sure Simple is selected as the type.

1. Name the campaign.
2. Recipients. Pick a segment. Oracle notes that “you can optionally create a new one or upload a contact list instead.”
3. Email. Choose an existing email, create a new one or upload an external HTML file.
4. Launch timing. Send now, or send later at a date and time.

Eloqua validates the configuration as you go and marks the step that has a problem. Campaign fields such as product and country live under Properties on the Review and submit step in Redwood or under Actions > Settings in classic, along with the CRM sync and closed-loop reporting settings. When the errors are cleared you save and click Activate Campaign.

Advanced sending options

Behind one more click are the settings that decide how carefully the send goes out:

• A signature, either a dynamic signature rule or a single user to send on behalf of.
• The List-Unsubscribe header.
• Breaking the send into batches. Oracle suggests “about 1000 emails per hour” if you aren’t sure.
• Sending only on certain days and hours.
• Send time optimization, if Advanced Intelligence is turned on.
• Allowing the email to be re-sent to past recipients.
• Sending to master exclude members.
• Sending to unsubscribed contacts.

The last two deserve a second look. They exist for transactional and legally required messages. Whether a given user can tick them is governed by the Send Email To Globally Unsubscribed Contacts and Send Email To Contacts On Master Exclude List action permissions which is one of several reasons the permissions of anyone sending simple campaigns need checking before they send one.

After activation

Once the campaign is Active or Scheduled it can’t be changed. To edit anything you deactivate it and on reactivation Eloqua “continues sending the email to those contacts in the segment that had not already been sent the email.” A simple campaign runs for three months from its start date and collects activity for a year. Real-time reporting on the campaign, with the Email Entry and Email Exit operational reports showing who was included and excluded, lasts three months. Older history needs Insight.

What the form takes care of and what it leaves open

The simple email campaign takes the canvas out of a single send. Everything else about Eloqua is still there, which is fine for an Eloqua user and a lot for anyone else.

The sender still needs a seat

They log in to Eloqua with a Marketing Platform license and sit in a security group that has interface access to campaigns, asset creation rights for campaigns and emails and default permissions on the assets they will use. Each of those is a setting an administrator has to get right per group and the group also decides what else the person can open. A marketer who can create a simple campaign can usually open the contact database too.

Every segment is a choice

The recipients step offers the segments the user can see. In most instances that is most of them. Nothing stops a marketer picking the all-contacts segment for a regional event and the only check is the contact count on the review step, if they look at it. Creating a new segment from inside the campaign opens the full segment builder with every contact field and filter in it.

Uploading a list is a database write

“Upload a contact list instead” sounds like it belongs to the campaign. It doesn’t. The upload is an ordinary contact upload that creates and updates records across the whole database according to whatever field mapping the marketer confirms, before any email is sent.

The email is still built in Eloqua

Choosing an existing email is safe enough. Creating a new one drops the marketer into the Design Editor with whatever templates and freedom their permissions allow. Unless the templates are protected that includes the brand’s fonts, colors and footer.

Approvals and caps don’t apply here

Oracle says plainly that “the approvals workflow is not available for simple email and A/B test campaigns,” so campaign approvals can’t be put in front of the send. And because there is no canvas there is nowhere to put a decision step which is how every native frequency cap in Eloqua is enforced. A simple campaign sends to everyone in the segment who is eligible, however much email they had this week.

Results stay in Eloqua

The operational reports are good and they are in Eloqua which means the marketer either has access and knows where to look or asks Ops. It is a common pattern: self-service for the send, a ticket for the numbers.

Oracle Guided Campaigns

Oracle’s own next step is Oracle Guided Campaigns, the app formerly called Oracle Fusion Marketing. It runs on separate licenses: Standard and Enterprise trims are entitled to five and ten and more cost extra. Its Simple Email tactic is a five-step guided version of the same send. The audience can be an existing segment or an uploaded file that becomes a new segment. The email can be existing or created from a template. Then come delivery settings, a follow-up action for responders such as adding them to a list or program and a summary with start and end dates.

It is a better experience for the person sending and it is still built for an Eloqua user. The audience step offers the instance’s segments. The file upload creates a segment in your database. The documentation describes the steps rather than approvals or restrictions. It is a guided path through Eloqua, which is what it sets out to be.

Marketo’s nearest equivalent is the Email Program: an audience, an email, a schedule and an optional A/B test without building a smart campaign and the same full tool underneath.

What self-service needs beyond a simpler form

Put the two needs side by side. Marketers want to send without waiting. Ops wants to know that whatever goes out was built to the rules, went to the right people and can be accounted for afterwards. The simple email campaign serves the first by trusting the sender with everything the second depends on.

Campaign Launchpad starts from the other end. Marketing Ops builds a wizard for each kind of send and decides what it shows:

• The templates the marketer can start from, with the brand locked and only the zones Ops opened left editable, down to a button label.
• The audiences they can pick, from lists Ops set up, or a file upload that Launchpad validates against Ops’s rules before anything is imported.
• The fields they fill in, such as region, product or business unit which Launchpad also uses to name every asset by your convention.
• The approvals the campaign needs before it goes live which can differ from one wizard to the next.

Everything the wizard doesn’t show stays as Ops configured it in Eloqua or Marketo. The marketer never opens either so there is no segment list to scroll through and no advanced option to tick by mistake. Opens, clicks, visits and form submissions come back to them inside Launchpad and Ops sees the same campaign in its queue with the rest.

A simple email campaign makes a single send easier for someone who already works in Eloqua. A wizard makes it safe for someone who doesn’t. If you are weighing it against other tools that promise the same thing, the comparison of Knak, Stensul, Jeto and Campaign Launchpad covers what each one builds.