Achieve's Eloqua Module

Achieve Internet is happy to announce our newest contributed Drupal module on www.drupal.org named Eloqua. The module allows posting of data from Drupal into Eloqua, which is a popular email marketing campaign platform designed for enterprise level companies with a web marketing strategy. It enables the creation, management, automation, and detailed tracking of marketing campaigns. Objectives include targeting the right buyers, converting leads to sales, and delivering sales intelligence.

 

Achieve Internet has implemented Drupal/Eloqua integration for several clients, including Bella Pictures, a wedding photography company; and APQC, a knowledge management and performance improvement non-profit group. Most recently we have deployed the module to the Digium website, a telephone system provider and the maintainers of Asterisk Open Source project.

 

The module immediately caught the eye of the Chief Technology Officer of Eloqua, Steven Woods, who recently reached out to Bill O’Connor, the CTO of Achieve Internet and the creator of the module, saying “Just came across your Drupal/Eloqua plug in. Thanks for creating and sharing that!”

 

First the Eloqua form itself is created, along with a set of fields on the form. Then a duplicate Drupal Webform with fields named the same is created. 

 

When the Drupal Webform is populated with data and saved, the Eloqua module pushes the Drupal data and certain additional parameters, such as date and browser used, to a holding table. When Cron is run, the data is posted to Eloqua. 

 

If the Drupal Webform contains fields that don’t have a match in Eloqua, Drupal captures and stores the data without pushing it to Eloqua.

 

This Drupal/Eloqua integration is especially useful for companies that ask their sales prospects to sign up on their website, such as signing up for an email newsletter or for more information about the company. The prospect’s contact information, including name and email address, flows to Eloqua, and the prospect is automatically signed up for email marketing campaigns.

 

This Drupal/Eloqua integration also makes it easier for companies to perform AB testing on their websites. For example, they could have essentially the same Drupal Webform with different front ends, and then analyze the Eloqua data to see which had a better user reaction.

 

The Eloqua module has both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 releases. A beta release was posted in October 2010. An updated release was posted in January 2011, which includes some cleanup and now works with the Webform 3 module.

 

Achieve Internet plans future releases for the Eloqua module to include more flexible and seamless functionality, such as automatically creating an Eloqua form based on a Drupal Webform, and adding click tracking to the existing form tracking. Improvements will also be based on client requests for functionality.