Your email campaign is queued up and ready to go. Your copy is attention-grabbing, your design is on point. But when’s the last time you freshened up your email groups in Eloqua?
When you’re ready to schedule a campaign, Eloqua will ask you to associate an email group with it. Are you certain you’re sending your email to the right people?
How many is too many?
I’ve worked with clients who had hundreds and even thousands of email groups in Eloqua. Many hadn’t been touched in years, many looked strikingly similar to other groups, and many were just no longer needed. But still, there they were, faithfully showing up when it was time to make your selection from the master email group list.
Email groups can spin out of control for a variety of reasons. The admin responsible for managing the groups leaves, new people join the company and create additional groups, multiple admins unknowingly create redundant groups, and so on. Pretty soon, email groups become outdated and serve as nothing more than clutter to sift through when managing your campaigns.
A good rule of thumb is to pull a report that lists the last time each group was used. If the number of groups that haven’t been used in more than a year or two is in the double or triple digits, it’s probably time to take another look.
Improve your segmentation capabilities
Even after accounting for multiple departments, products, industries, and individual users with an organization, along with different types of marketing assets and events, hundreds or thousands of email groups can become unwieldy and actually hamper your targeting efforts.
Email groups empower program managers to send an email to everyone in a relevant group. These groups can make or break your ability to segment your messaging, so it pays to invest the time and energy in whipping them into shape — and then maintaining them so they continue to earn dividends down the road.
Audit and consolidate your email groups
A large, global organization whittled down more than a thousand email groups to only 350 by identifying active groups, consolidating regional groups when possible, and creating global groups for their large Global Demand Center. My team pitched in by building a mapping program in Eloqua and pulling subscribers into their new homes, if you will. Their existing email group members now fall into just 25 groups total.
When your organization has a large volume of email groups, be sure to use an intuitive naming convention. A typical naming convention would follow something like:
“<Topic>|<Region>” or “<Region> <Product> <Product Name>,”
where the values in “<>” would be specific to that email group.
You can also get pretty granular with the type of content you’re sending, such as <Newsletter>, <Partner Email>, and <Product Update>. The key is to be consistent with your naming conventions so that users can quickly understand what they are.
If you’re ready to take a fine-toothed comb to your email groups, Oracle provides helpful information on how to create and edit email groups with Eloqua. Just be cautious when removing email groups, since dependencies often exist.
Support your subscription center
The goal of any subscription center is to make it easy for your clients and prospects to identify what types of information they’re interested in, which in turn makes it super easy for you to target them with the appropriate email campaigns (to find out how yours is performing, check out this blog post from September).
Email groups can give your subscription center a boost when you identify your contacts’ interests and map them to the relevant groups. You can encourage additional subscription center signups by including some simple language in your emails, such as, “Thanks for your interest in Product X. Would you also be interested in learning about Product Y?”
Let’s get started
Ready to dust off your email groups and put them to work? Our team can help! DemandGen works with organizations to clean up their current email groups, create new global groups, and map or delete existing groups. We’ll work with you to come up with a strategy that will help you maximize your campaign efforts.
Angela Brock is a Client Engagement Manager at DemandGen. She works directly with clients to help advance their business needs, develop long-range marketing plans, and drive ongoing success with their marketing initiatives. Angela is Marketo Certified and she is an Eloqua Product and RPM Master.
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