Hey Eloqua users, brace yourselves! It’s that time of the year again when we get presents. Not from Santa, but from Oracle.
WHEN WILL THE NEW VERSION BE RELEASED?
This usually depends on the POD your instance is running on. You can identify your POD (server) just by checking your URL when you are logged into Eloqua.
The 21B release is scheduled as follows:
- For POD1, POD2: May 14, 2021
- For POD7: May 15, 2021
- For POD3, POD4, POD6: – May 28, 2021
Update Overview
- New Form API
- Form Spam Protection
- Branding
- Date Filtering
- Analytics
- Sales Tools
- Admin
- Advanced Intelligence Add-On Package
- App Development Framework
- App API and Bulk API
- Content Marketing Tools
21B ENHANCEMENTS
NEW FORM API
To start off, here’s a pretty significant one that will affect all form users: The form API will be going from synchronous to asynchronous form processing.
Granted that this feature will only be fully available with the 21C update, you’ll already be able to get an early preview of it with the 21B update.
What does this mean for form users? Well, in a nutshell it will increase the system’s stability, prevent the loss of data, and make response times faster and more consistent!
I personally can’t wait for this implementation, as it’s not uncommon to experience huge delays on the server side that force users to make multiple unnecessary clicks, and therefore multiple unnecessary form submissions. With this new update, these pain points could be solved.
FORM SPAM PROTECTION
Finally.
For me and many of our clients, this is an overdue feature: Eloqua will now allow you to add out-of-the-box spam protection to your forms (available in preview with the previous release).
We’ve seen it time and time again. You launch a new website with integrated forms, then bots immediately find you and start bombarding your forms with nonsense submissions. Our team has worked around this by developing our own custom solution. However, with this new Eloqua 21B release, we don’t need those additional steps anymore.
This feature supports both forms within native landing pages and forms connected via external websites. It won’t be enabled by default when new form is created, but activating it takes a matter of seconds.
If you’re asking how exactly Eloqua is preventing spam bots, it’s a combination of validating timestamps (how quickly a form is submitted) and applying a hidden “honeypot field” (a bot would fill in the field, while a real person wouldn’t be able to see it and so leave it empty).
BRANDING
This is a fantastic feature that will be especially handful to big enterprises who operate multiple brands within one instance.
Eloqua will now allow you to select a brand within your email editor settings. Once a brand is selected, Eloqua will use pre-configured image domains and email settings like bounceback domain for that specific brand. Prior to this feature, all of your assets had to live in the same domain, which could negatively impact deliverability as email clients (e.g., Gmail, Outlook) could identify your email as a spam due to having various domains.
DATE FILTERING
Before this release, all date filters were evaluated based on Eastern Time (remember Eloqua started in Toronto), which affected canvases, dynamic content, and segments. What’s more, users would typically not realize that that the system always used the same time zone.
With the 21B update your instance will start evaluating dates based on the executing user’s time zone.
Note: You’d have to request this feature via support, and once it’s applied it can’t be reverted. If you don’t make a specific request, the date filters will work exactly the same way as now. However, all new Eloqua instances that are set after the 21B release will come with this feature enabled and the time zones will always be localized to the users.
ANALYTICS
New UI that’s continuously being rolled out will, of course, touch analytics.
Several Eloqua dashboards will be updated, including ‘Email Analysis’ and ‘Account Performance’ dashboards.
European users who are running translated versions of the system will be glad to hear that another part of the ‘Insight Intelligence’ application is being translated. This time, ‘Catalogue’ will be available in all of Oracle’s supported languages.
To get more info on supported languages, check out the full list here.
To switch your language, you need to log in to a specific parameter. For example, the parameter for Czech users is: ?culture=cs-cz or ?culture=ko-kr https://login.eloqua.com/?culture=it-IT.
SALES TOOLS
As archived emails will no longer be available to Engage users, you’ll have better control over what templates your salespeople use and can make sure they are up to date.
ADMIN
The ’License Usage Overview’ report, which is designed mainly for platform admins, will now include two new fields:
- No. of enabled users (with a specific license)
- No. of disabled users (with a specific license)
In particular for bigger enterprise accounts with dozens of users, this is a blessing from the sky.
ADVANCED INTELLIGENCE ADD-ON PACKAGE
Oracle continues to focus on this additional package. But this time, it’s mainly about the ‘Fatigue Analysis’ dashboard.
Oracle is now normalizing metrics on the Y-Axis, which will show the latest refresh dates and times of the report. Note: The dashboard is updated every two weeks and uses data from the last 6 months.
As for the ‘Account Engagement’ score summary, there will be a new chart summarizing key data points for an account’s engagement score. The chart includes score, scored activities, engaged contacts vs. reached contacts, and many more metrics.
APP DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK
If you’re developing applications for the cloud market, there are a few minor updates to take note of. These include detailed status messaging for stuck records and improved API exporting.
APPLICATION API AND BULK API
For Application API:
- Change in form submission endpoints (depth of retrieved data)
- Added validation to custom objects endpoint (prevents duplicates)
- Option to update custom unique code
For Bulk API:
- Email sent from the outlook plug-in will be finally grouped correctly as a new send type “OutlookPlugin”
- Events will now create dependencies (and will be easier to identify them)
CONTENT MARKETING TOOLS
Say goodbye to Oracle’s content marketing tools, including apps you might be using in Eloqua. For instance, if you’re using ‘Oracle Marketing Calendar’ or ‘Dynamic Cloud Content’ apps, then it’s time to mark your calendars.
As of September 30, 2021, Oracle will be decommissioning these applications and they will no longer supported. What’s more, Oracle hasn’t mentioned any plans to replace them either.
RELEASE SUMMARY
This new release may not have as many updates as previous ones, but there are still a number of cool features any Eloqua user can get excited about, especially in terms of form enhancements!
After all, it’s often the little things that make life better for the average Joe users. In the past couple of releases, we’ve seen a number of notable updates across different areas:
- Asset creation (content blocks) and HTML exports
- Rich media (e.g., videos in your emails, automatic thumbnails, and landing pages)
- Email and form archiving (first available with the 20D update)
- Account engagement dashboards and activity sorting by accounts rather than by contacts (ABM, anyone?)
While it is a bit disappointing that there are no updates for the Salesforce Integration app, especially as this has gotten intensive support in previous updates, we can hope for more related features and bug fixes with the next updates.
If you like Eloqua content like this and want to learn more or share your opinions, we’d love to hear from you! Just contact us here.
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