Hi Topliners -
There are a lot of conversations on TL about this, and after two weeks of trying to figure it out on my own by reading and taking EU classes as fast as I can, I'm closer to figuring out the step-by-step but not entirely. I got really close with one class that presented how to do a Welcome campaign but before I could really study the sample forms in the class, it was over and the samples wiped away for the next students. So in a nutshell, this is all I want to do (I say "all" because it should be SO simple like any other email marketing tool).
We have five email groups - news and events, media relations, and our three major business units. I've got that set up.
If your email address is in our Eloqua database and you get an email from us, the out of the box subscription management landing page is connected to the footer and you can edit your subscriptions (those five groups).
Here's where I'm not finding an answer. I want to let people subscribe externally from Eloqua. I want a small form on our web site (or could be a button to a landing page/form on E) which lets them enter email address, first and last name, and check one or more of the five boxes for those aforementioned groups.
So I started building this little form. I naturally thought it made sense to connect the groups already set up in Email Groups to the form but can not figure out where to access them to place on the form. I attempted making custom check boxes which I could process to the email groups but couldn't figure out where the processing step to write the preference to the contact when its added to E. And then further reading on TL said to use Shared Lists - which I can see how to write to from the form processing. But then I had this question. When my colleague wants to send an email to people subscribed to information about Business Unit B, does she segment by the email group? or by the shared list? or both? Do they operate separate from each other? Do they need to update each other? Ack... every answer I find on Eloqua generates 20 more questions
I know people are doing this. The Welcome Campaign in the Personalizing Campaigns has for its first step a Newsletter Sign Up form but like I said, I can't actually go back and SEE it to see how it was done. I see a lot of people asked for help on this topic but not a lot of answers on how they accomplished it. Can anyone point me in the right direction or better yet, provide steps to make this happen?
THANK YOU