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In the digital age, data is a marketer’s ultimate tool. The better and more focused and specific your data, the better you can target and connect with customers. You have to try and take a walk in your customer’s shoes and understand what it is like for them to travel your customer journey from end to end. What are the things they would look for? What questions might they have?

A fragmented set of data would only get in the way.  Clarity and simplification, however, lead to efficiency and success.

RelationshipOne had Dart Bebel II, Director of Demand Gen and Database Marketing at Turnkey Vacation Rentals on as a guest on episode 56 of the Inspired Marketing Podcast. The conversation revolved around how Turnkey Vacation Rentals unified four disparate marketing platforms into a single instance Oracle Eloqua with micro-focused data for targeted customer outreach.

Bebel has years of hands-on experience working with Oracle Eloqua and BlueKai and has executed on hundreds of marketing automation and web integration projects for both B2B and B2C. He views his role at Turnkey Vacation Rentals as helping the company scale, meaning he tries to figure out from a people, process, and technology perspective how they can take their product and grow and ramp up quickly.

Bringing Clarity to Marketing

For some time, the company had several different systems in place with different databases and different teams all working on different platforms for different projects. The push to consolidate came from a need to bring clarity to what they were doing from a marketing perspective and to maximize efficiency.

Bebel and his team chose Oracle Eloqua for the consolidation due to its ability to keep data segmented in a way that made sense for the campaigns they would be launching. They have multiple audiences, including guests, homeowners, and homeowners who are guests on some of their properties.

Oracle Eloqua best fit their data model due to how it could:

• House all their data onto one platform
• Combine all their data but also separated it out when the need arose
• Deliver the right content at the right time to the right audience members using consistent, targeted data

Consolidating to a single, unified marketing automation platform helps you:

• Scale
• Segment data for effective campaigns
• Develop programs to give customers targeted content
• Utilize A/B testing for informed decision-making

Lessons Learned

A little over a year into the implementation now, Bebel and his team are seeing results:

• Before, they had only some basic campaigns set up in various systems. Now those campaigns are fully automated and communicating with each other.
• They are moving people in and out of segments in their programs as new information about them comes in.
• They are always looking for the best ways to deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time but in a methodical and automated fashion, for efficiency’s sake and to move forward with what has been shown to be working.

The lessons learned and what Oracle Eloqua helped with included:

• When new information comes in about prospects, such as they interact with the site or take a call with a sales rep, you have to be able to quickly serve them with relevant content and different experiences based on their preferences and needs.
• Be ready to account for a potentially huge amount of personalization. For example, Turnkey Vacation Rentals is in 55 markets and thus has to learn about the audiences in all those markets and customize emails (perhaps even with localized content) to properly and effectively connect and engage with customers.
• Use data to inform your decisions and the content you produce and when you send it out.
• A/B testing will go a long way toward giving you the data you need to better understand your customers and fine-tune your content.

Begins and Ends with the Customer Experience

Success begins and ends with the customer experience. You will always be building on your understanding of what your customers need and prefer and tweaking your content and marketing to match up to it. However, you need a consolidated marketing automation platform in place to help you segment and target your customers and maximize your outreach efforts to them.

Find out how to “Go Further with Marketing Automation” to reap more of its rewards.

Read the guide.