How to: integrate Eloqua with WordPress

In our series of integration posts, we’ll be looking into some of the suggestions we made in our most recent free ebook – Supercharge Your WordPress site. For this blog post, we’re going to look at how easy it is to integrate Eloqua by Oracle, with WordPress.

What Is Eloqua?

Oracle acquired Eloqua, a marketing automation tool back in 2012. Used predominantly by enterprise B2B organisations, in particular, software companies.

Eloqua positions itself as a high-end complete cloud service that allows for campaign creation, success measurement and importantly, lead generation. Eloqua, like others of its ilk, automates marketing using a database, which composes information on store prospects and customers. Eloqua also has an emailer which sends automated and personalised emails, a system that monitors websites and tracks customer information and behaviour, whilst all being controlled by the marketer. Eloqua promises to help you get to know your customers better and in turn extract more sales opportunities from your database.

Why would you want to integrate Eloqua with your WordPress site?

Some of the many features that should entice you into integrating Eloqua with WordPress: Quick and easy campaign creation, embedded best practice email and form templates, out-of-the-box lead scoring and routing capabilities, database for storing marketing assets, powerful segmentation and targeting tools, flexible native CRM integrations, easy integration of third-party apps directly into your marketing campaigns, Online reports, dashboards, and Website analytics…need we go on?

Eloqua allows you to Implement and launch campaigns quickly and efficiently without technical skills, capture the digital body language of your prospects and translate it into sales, generate more sales opportunities by nurturing leads and demonstrate marketing’s impact on business results with meaningful metrics. 

How to Integrate Eloqua and WordPress?

To start with, it’s important to note that you can’t directly integrate Eloqua with WordPress with just a few clicks. Eloqua has not created its own Plugin for WordPress, however, don’t let that put you off, as integration can be acheived using third parties, such as Zapier, although, this might incur a small cost. 

There are various options for third parties, all of which have their own pros and cons. An example of a third party that is proven to facilitate the integration of Eloqua and WordPress is Gravity forms using the gform_after_submission hook to submit to the Eloqua REST API.  Ultimately, however, we would advise that you consult with your WordPress agency partner to get this right, based on the extent of the integration you need. Eloqua is an extremely costly investment, and you need experts to get it right.

Conclusion

If we were to describe Eloqua in one sentence would be: ‘A solution that delivers a personalised 1-1 experience on a mass level, helping maximize customer acquisition potential.’ Although Eloqua is probably one of the most expensive marketing automation tools out there, if you can afford it, it is definitely worth investing in. Eloqua clearly works as more than 1,200 organizations across many sectors have utilised its features to automate complicated marketing processes.