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A Marketing Geek’s Guide 1

ABOUT THIS SERIES

Oracle Eloqua is the most powerful marketing automation platform on the market. It has the ability to scale to the

needs of the largest enterprises and the flexibility to solve just about anything

you can throw at it.

With all this power and functionality, sometimes complexity enters. That’s

where these eBooks come in. We took some of the areas of the application

that we get a lot of questions about and tried to unpack them in a way that makes them simple to understand and easy to implement. At Relationship One, our

mission is to “Inspire Success.” We hope that reading through this eBook series will

inspire you to try something new, solve a problem you’ve been dealing with,

or invent something that will take your marketing efforts to the next level.

Let our experts help you dive into an area of Oracle Eloqua that you’re curious about and watch the inspiration flood in.

Happy Eloqua-ing!

A Marketing Geek’s Guide to:

Data Hygiene and Governance for Oracle Eloqua Data. The word seems so simple but can also be very daunting if you don’t know how to handle it. At Relationship One, we love data. We have found that good, clean, accurate data is the lifeblood of the modern marketer. We all know this, but without proper data governance and routine cleansing/normalizing, it doesn’t take long for a clean data set to become polluted.

We pulled together some of our favorite tips and tricks to get you headed in the right data direction. Dig into this eBook and start thinking about how you can ensure that your vital data stays healthy.

A Marketing Geek’s Guide 2

We always hear modern marketers proclaim, “I love data.” Many of us say we love data, but chances are, we don’t actually love the data itself. What we really love is the insight gained from data after the analysis, which is NOT the same thing.

The insight and analysis are what help make the business decisions that ultimately drive the business forward. As useful as that is, it’s important to show some love to the actual data in your sales and marketing systems. Without proper data governance, it will quickly become impossible to acquire accurate analysis.

Since insight is what we’re after, we have to find a way to organize and prioritize all the data that’s out there and weed out anything that detracts from further understanding. Data that creates noise and chaos is what we call “bad data.” Bad data contains missing values, unknown metrics, unfinished records, strange file formats, and any number of things that can prevent the type of analysis that leads to understanding and action. This is the data that takes up hours of your time, causes you to stay late in the office, pull out your hair, and maybe even instant computer combustion. This includes data that you had and then lost, data that you swear is not the same today as it was yesterday, and all the stuff that gradually became sloppy over the years. Hopefully, we can help you avoid bad data with these four steps of good data governance.

STEP 1: Get your organization on a balanced, lean governance diet

Data governance is a political challenge that requires building consensus among many diverse stakeholders within an organization. Quite often, organizations will either over-apply data governance in their enthusiasm for tighter control, or under-apply governance based on their lack of experience. To help ensure the pendulum doesn’t swing too far in either direction, an organization should consider forming a data governance council.

Members of the council should include stakeholders from different areas of the organization who make use of the data. These individuals should meet and formulate written stewardship policies to ensure all data governance needs are met. The council serves as the data stewards who are invaluable to the success of your governance objectives. Disseminating the policies across the organization will help ensure everyone remains on the same page of governance.

Because many organizations remain siloed yet interact with data that flows horizontally across business lines, it‘s essential that all stakeholders be represented in this establishing-the-governance process to capture all the different perspectives while creating buy-in from the beginning. When in doubt, govern less, not more. Keep it lean. Solicit feedback and iterate. There is no need to have every possible issue worked through from the get go. We are shooting for nimble, not rigid.

STEP 2: Ensure good data quality as soon as possible

Overseeing and ensuring quality data is probably the single most important function of data governance. When you realize that low quality data has a negative impact on accuracy or timeliness of organization decision-making, the data governance council must be capable of quickly reacting to these issues and enforcing changes required in the data systems that will benefit all stakeholders.

Workflow must be capable of continuing a process of ongoing improvements to data quality. The council must make each of the variables in the data quality equation a priority. Establishing your data governance council early and creating policies for continuous data health improvements will be vital for your long-term analysis needs.

Chapter 1:

The Council Has Spoken

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STEP 3: Giving data access to those in need

Increasing access to data across all members of an organization must be balanced with providing access to external stakeholders. This is something the council must focus on. While there may already be a security team in place who watches closely over who does and does not get access to the data, the data governance council should create a productive tension in the opposite direction to move toward inclusion not restriction. In most effective organizations, both the data governance and data security committees are combined, thus forcing members to balance the tension internally and streamline what may otherwise be lengthy decision-making processes between the two committees. This creates a healthy give-and-take that strikes a nice balance between access and security.

STEP 4: Increase data literacy within your organization

So, what’s the point of ensuring good data quality or providing access if members of the organization still remain data illiterate? From our experience, we find that data is more transparent than ever within organizations, but individuals are unsure of how to process it. Data literacy may be increased in a few ways: 1) Teach the user how to distinguish good data from bad data in the context of their decision-making and role in the organization; 2) Provide data analysis tools that offer high functionality with ease of use; 3) Enforce process improvement techniques that are data driven; and 4) Share statistical techniques that can be applied to improve decision-making when data is incomplete. The data governance council should provide input on all of these functions.

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If you’re struggling to implement or understand how to break bad data habits within your organization, following these four steps will help you avoid many of the major pitfalls of poor data governance. To manage the risks involved, organizations must put in place a consistent method of documenting organizational best practices. A lean and balanced data governance process will maximize the value of your data to deliver the best possible data-driven decision-making practices within your organization.

A Marketing Geek’s Guide 4

Have you ever given a bogus email address when filling out a form online or at the register when you’re out shopping? Of course you have. We all have.

As marketers, we need to ensure we’re providing value to our contacts so people aren’t tempted to give us the dreaded mickey.mouse@email.com. We earn the “privilege” of getting legitimate information by proving that we understand the needs and desires of our customers. We send out relevant communications that people want, not generic emails that have no bearing on their interests, and they provide us with clean data in return.

As good stewards of this data, we need to ensure that information is up-to-date, clean, and helps improve the relevance of our messaging. Marketing truly is built on a foundation of data, and before you can be a champion marketer, you need to be a champion data analyst, and more importantly, a data hygienist.

So as a marketing champion, how can you go about making your data as complete and clean as possible?

CONDUCT AN AUDIT

Data quality is one of the most critical components of your marketing efforts, if not the most. Why? Because it impacts every facet of your game: segmentation, personalization, lead scoring, re-targeting, and most importantly, return. And, as proven by my own actions, it can severely impact the way customers see and experience your brand.

To start, you want to make sure that you are collecting and cleansing the right data. Take a step back and start analyzing which pieces of information are most important to you. How are you currently segmenting your customers? How do you envision personalizing your digital marketing assets? Which pieces of

information are most important for your scoring model? What values are imperative to share with sales?

You likely have information within Oracle Eloqua that needs to match the information you have in your CRM platform. Maybe you also want to create consistency among your contact field values, or you simply want your contacts’ names in proper case before using them as field merges in your emails.

After this audit, you will have the knowledge to identify key fields that are imperative to your data cleansing efforts.

GET PROACTIVE

Now that you are armed with information, formulate a plan to standardize and cleanse data before it even hits your database. Taking it a step further, look for ways to enhance your data to strengthen personalization, segmentation, and lead scoring.

AcquisitionThink about how you acquire data in the first place. For example, when you ask for data on your forms, are you using standardized picklists or open text fields? (The best answer is picklists). Review your most commonly used forms to confirm that you are acquiring the right information in the best fashion. If your audit uncovered a large number of important fields to collect, consider implementing progressive profiling on your forms or utilizing 3rd-party services that can append data information upon form submit.

StandardizationStandardization is becoming increasingly important, especially in relation to CRM integration, lead scoring, and reporting. You can accomplish standardization in a number of ways, the easiest of

Chapter 2:

Making Your Data Work for You

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which is picklist enforcement. It’s best practice to always match your picklist values with your CRM values, even if integration is still on your wish list. Some fields, like Lead Source Most Recent, may not have associated picklists, but it can be helpful to establish “acceptable values” for these fields.

AugmentationAmplify your data collection by adding valuable information to contact records or CDOs. For example, are you capturing relevant campaign data on your contact? If not, would it be beneficial to start capturing data on the lead source, offer, response type, etc.? What about communications preferences or interests? Anything that may help reporting, segmentation, lead scoring, or personalization is worthwhile to capture.

GET DEFENSIVE

Now that you’ve planned a proactive approach, you have to prepare for the worst-case scenario: bad data. It’s bound to happen no matter how much we try to prevent it. Dirty data comes from a variety of sources: integrations, list uploads, form submits, manual entry, and the list goes on. However, if you are prepared, you can cleanse the data before it causes issues.

ValidationValidation services range in complexity and cost, but they’re a worthwhile investment. Whether it’s adding a valid email check to your email address fields or partnering with a 3rd-party vendor to do a real-time authentication of the address itself, there are plenty of options available to validate your data. Some services will even cleanse the data before populating the contact record. With that said, you’ll want to do your homework and make sure that these service providers have the data you need in the time you’ll need it. In addition to 3rd-party services, there are quite a few Oracle Eloqua Cloud Connectors available that will check and validate any commonly required fields such as phone, zip code, name, and address.

CleansingGather your list of key fields that are in need of standardization and/or cleansing and formulate a list of acceptable values for each field. Then, pull field value reports from Oracle Eloqua to see the current values in each of these fields. From there, create a spreadsheet that maps each of the current values to one of your acceptable values. Once complete, create your data washing machine programs to replace the dirty values with the new ones.

MAKE IT HAPPEN

This is where all of your dreams are realized, so to speak. The actual execution is on the playing field in your marketing automation platform. It’s the ability to make all of the above happen within Oracle Eloqua. It’s creating and using picklists to your advantage. It’s using a combination of lookup tables and update rules with a side of program builder to create your data washing machines. It’s setting up your validation rules using data tools, form field validation, and/or 3rd-party connectors and components. It’s finding creative ways to use form-processing steps to augment your data collection. It’s being a marketing champion by ensuring your data is working for you.

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A Marketing Geek’s Guide 6

Now that you’ve thought about the importance of creating a data governance council and have started the process of cleaning, augmenting, and normalizing your data, it’s time to move on to planning for ongoing data governance.

WHAT EXACTLY IS DATA GOVERNANCE?

With many definitions to choose from, we think ZEDcenture nailed it with this explanation:

Data governance is the set of policies regarding decision rights and the accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the valuation, creating, storage, use, archival, and deletion of data and information. It also includes the process, roles, standards, and metrics that ensure an effective use of data information in enabling your organization to achieve its goals.

Data governance is meant to set up a framework for long-term success when it comes to how your data is utilized.

DOES MY TEAM NEED A DATA GOVERNANCE PLAN?

In short, yes!

As more companies pursue active strategies for unlocking the power of customer information, data governance is steadily emerging as a “need-to-have” commodity at the most senior levels within a marketing organization.

Data governance may well be one of the top five most important challenges faced by organizations today. Your marketing team undoubtedly runs on data, some of it is critical to operations, and most of

it is confidential. Your data might be your team’s most critical asset, so a plan to manage it deserves time and attention.

THE 5 PILLARS OF GOOD DATA GOVERNANCE

Maintain an evolving catalog of your customers’ information

Create and define a plan for maintaining a centralized, permanent, and evolving catalog of all customer data resources across your team and the enterprise. We’re talking everything from new lead touch points to customer purchase to renewals, cross-sells, and up-sells. Use this to establish a master taxonomy that aligns with industry classification best practices.

Develop a unified data strategy

Identify a long-term data strategy for how customer information will be sourced, compiled, deployed, maintained, and safeguarded to suit the needs of your business. Begin with a discussion of use cases tied to the available data and the potential marketing applications of that data. A key element in any data strategy is to design and implement a data governance program. The fundamental premise of a data governance program is that the business designs and runs the program, and the IT department (or data management team) executes the policies and procedures defined by the data governance team. In addition, a good data governance program incorporates change management practices that accelerate user adoption and ensure long-term sustainability.

Chapter 3:

The 5 Pillars of Good Data Governance

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Build an underlying infrastructure to support your marketing data utilization

Examine and document marketing workflows, database structure, and access requirements needed by your team to execute on the applications defined during the last step. You will need to evaluate data supply chains and consultant partnerships, identify your ideal toolsets and supporting technologies that align with your vision to allocate data internally and externally. The goal here is to develop a unified cross-functional infrastructure that can support the deployment of a company-wide data strategy.

Consider the needs of ALL stakeholders

This one is pretty self-explanatory but easier said than done. Rather than building an infrastructure to support the fluid needs of the company, engineer the data to support the granular needs, interests, and long-term engagement of all individuals who are affected by the use of your marketing data. We know we mentioned earlier to deploy company-wide, but wanted to reiterate here how important it is to keep everyone in mind during your implementation process. Here is a list of individuals to consider beyond your core team:

• Shareholders • Business partners • Business units • Outside venders • The customers themselves

Develop a “data culture” grounded in continuous improvement

Develop and reinforce an institutional mindset built around the power of the insights and knowledge gained from your data. Keep that initial goal in mind: infuse proper data governance into your team from the start, or as soon as possible into the process to make your task significantly easier. Make it clear that in order for information utilization to be successful as your data grows, everyone needs to take responsibility for the management of your data.

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Your organization’s data will continue to evolve and grow

in years to come. And with that, more and more markers

are seeing data as a fundamental driver of real and lasting

business advantages. Best keep that data in check! In

order to execute a well-engineered marketing strategy,

your team will need to leverage high-quality, secure data in

increasing complexity. All organizations, and teams within an

organization, need to be able to make decisions about how

to manage their data and find value in it. The governance

of your marketing data should be a centerpiece within your

organization’s strategy.

You’re eager to get started practicing good data hygiene and

governance, aren’t you? Hopefully this eBook got you excited

to improve your data management. Be prepared to be

flexible. Your data governance needs will continue to change

over time, so you have to be ready to change alongside it.

If you have Oracle Eloqua and you need support with your

data governance needs, we are here to help. Please visit our

website at www.relationshipone.com to learn more about

how we can assist! We love helping companies transform

their marketing through strategy, technology, and data.

Wrapping Things Up