In Eloqua we have encountered a number of problems and they all stem from the fact that we cannot define our own unique identifier. Out of all the systems we use, Eloqua is the only one with this limitation. When a customer registers with us we give them a 7 seven digit unique identifier. We would like to use this pin as the identifier in Eloqua.
We operate across multiple countries and in some countries we have more than one brand. To the customer, these separate brands appear as competitors, so it is important that we communicate to them separately. However, if a customer registers on both brands we cannot have both accounts in Eloqua because Eloqua only allows the email address in once. 80% of our business comes from territories that have multiple domains so it is fundamental that we get a workable solution for this.
As a workaround we use data cards. Initially the contact is created in Eloqua through our daily syncs. Then the data cards are created and associated with the contact record. The data cards are matched to the contact based off the email address and we use the pin as a unique identifier at the data card level. Therefore is one person has an account on two of our brands they will have one contact and two data cards in Eloqua.
Our main frustrations with this workaround are:
- - Contacts overwriting each other. All the information at the contact level is useless because we have no way of knowing which brand it refers to. The only information we can be sure of is the email address.
- - Having to use datacards rather than contacts.
- - Cross over with merge fields. If we have a data card send and the email has a merge field looking at the data cards username, it is not guaranteed that the correct username is chosen. Eloqua takes the merge field from the most recently updated data card, rather than the one the campaign is filtered to use.
- - Less fields available on data cards.
- - Customer has to be synced to Eloqua twice, once as a contact and once as a datacard.
- - Cannot use data cards in campaign canvas.
- - Cannot upload a list of data cards directly to a program anymore (E10 change).
- - Searching for individual datacards is much harder now because you cannot view them at the contact level.
- - The global unsubscribe is at the contact level so if the customer globally unsubscribes from one brand, Eloqua unsubscribes them from the other brand too.
- - Affects user adoption of Eloqua because data cards involve extra steps and doesn’t offer the same functionality as contacts.
- - This workaround is used for 80% of our business. So basically we very rarely get to use Eloqua as it should be.