How Partnering with Instant Marketing Adds Value for Our Customers at Sojourn

By Chuck Leddy, B2B Brand Storyteller, and Charlotte Currie, Global Head of Customer Success at Sojourn Solutions

Sojourn Solutions collaborates not only with our customers and their Marketing Operations teams to unlock business value, but we also work closely with leading martech vendors to enhance that value even further. Our team of experienced consultants, whom we proudly call Sojourners, bring deep expertise to every engagement. While we may not claim to have all the answers, our strong partnerships and continuous learning ensure we deliver the best possible outcomes for our customers. 

When and who we partner with largely depends upon the specific needs of our customers, in terms of the use cases and needs they have, as well as on the capabilities of the martech vendors we partner with.

“We collaborate with our partners to help our customers,” says Kristin Connell,  Global Head of Strategy & Innovation at Sojourn Solutions. “We partner with Instant Marketing because they help address and solve some important Eloqua use cases our customers have that Eloqua doesn’t support 'out-of-the-box.' IM has, for example, helped our customers save on licensing fees for other systems used for one-off edge cases. They've also help our customers deliver more personalized and timely engagement through Eloqua, with SMS for example. These benefit - saving money, improving customer experience, and driving more measurable business value - are top reasons why we've invested in our partnership ecosystem with companies like IM."

Why We Partner: To Help Customers

When our customers need help, they call on us. When we need help, we call on our partner ecosystem to bring in specialized martech or expertise. One of these partners is UK-based Instant Marketing (IM, hereafter), a technology vendor that offers “instant extensions” for Oracle Eloqua, enabling Eloqua users to easily customize Eloqua features to support their campaigns. 

Eloqua users can decide to build new features and IM can instantly build them for the user. If a customer's Eloqua and/or MOPs team already has JavaScript skills, IM can support them with training, support and consultancy.

We partner with Instant Marketing because they allow our MOPs customers to easily customize and build Eloqua apps and extensions that create business value. For example, IM allows Eloqua users to leverage things like:

• Direct Mail

• App & Web Push 

• Personalized Content and Emails

• Create Custom Apps Directly within Eloqua

The synergy between Sojourn Solutions and Instant Marketing is simple. Sojourn is brought in to help MOPs teams work more efficiently, and Instant Marketing helps Eloqua users and MOPs teams by extending Eloqua and building customized solutions that drive business value. 

“We tend to work best with people who are experts in the Eloqua space,” says Sam Smith, Director of Instant Marketing. “For example, Sojourn’s team is wonderful at high-level, strategic, and hands-on implementation. But there's only so far that they can go, because there's only so far that Eloqua can go “out-of-the-box.” So Sojourn might handle 75% of their customer's implementation and then they'll reach out and tag us in when it comes to delivering new capabilities that might need custom development.”

Partnership in Action

Let’s look at specific examples of partnership creating value for our customers. Instant Marketing provides a product called Advanced Email for Eloqua that enables users to send personalized email messages from personal accounts while including cc, bcc, and attachments, all direct from the Eloqua canvas.

When Sojourn worked with Citeline - the world’s leading provider of business intelligence in the pharmaceutical and medtech industry - the customer needed to quickly migrate its Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Eloqua. Citeline generated subscriber revenue by sending highly-customized emails to medical professionals looking for the latest trends and news within the fast-evolving pharmaceutical industry.

Citeline, working with Sojourn, had to rapidly sunset its SFMC license and migrate to a single instance of Eloqua, migrating all its data, assets, configurations, processes, etc. to the new Eloqua instance. With new tech being implemented across the Citeline corporate structure (in the middle of a restructuring) and across Citeline’s customer journey, the pressure to maintain the quality and continuity of Citeline’s “Insights Email product” (and the business revenues associated with this flagship product) was enormous. 

We knew Instant Marketing could help, so we brought them in.

The Challenge 

Citeline’s complex and highly-scripted email campaigns needed to run without disruption to either customers/subscribers or business revenues. Removing SFMC from the equation required replacing workflows and processes, and connecting a new App, i.e., Instant Marketing’s Advanced Email for Eloqua, that would allow Citeline to customize high-quality emails at scale.

The Sojourn-Citeline project team collaborated with a development agency to ensure Salesforce Marketing Cloud emails could be created and run within the new Eloqua instance using RSS-type functionality, which would be delivered through IM’s Advanced Email for Eloqua.

Project Success 

The partnership worked: the use of IM’s Advanced Email for Eloqua was central to the success of the Eloqua migration project, and it delivered the following results for Citeline:

1. A single instance of Eloqua, with the ability to customize emails as enabled by Instant Marketing, was successfully put in place less than 6 months after the March project kick-off and well within Citeline’s desired timeline.

2. Significant costs (associated with licenses and development needs) related to continuing with the legacy SFMC platform were avoided, including an 88% savings on licensing-related costs, as SFMC was sunset and the new customized Eloqua solution (with Advanced Email for Eloqua) was brought online.

3. Existing SFMC data, journeys and campaigns were successfully migrated and running 'as is’ in Eloqua using IM’s Advanced Email for Eloqua, including 1.6 million emails per month with up to 20 pieces of content each (dynamic content where each recipient can receive different news articles direct from the website). 

4. Because of the low code and no code nature of the Instant Marketing solution, software complexity was reduced and Citeline no longer needed a dedicated developer. Marketers saved about half of their time and were able to manage the work with user-friendly functions such as “drag-and-drop.”

Again, the convenience of having an Eloqua email customization at scale made possible by Instant Marketing and their Advanced Email for Eloqua helped with the speed and effectiveness of the solution. Because Sojourn already had an existing relationship with Instant Marketing, it knew precisely what business value IM could bring to the table for the benefit of Citeline. 

Other Customer Use Cases for IM

Sojourn and Instant Marketing have partnered to help other customers as well:

• A telecommunications customer of Sojourn is considering using Instant Marketing plug-ins to support omni-channel communication with their customers, including the use of SMS/text messaging with customers from Eloqua. 

• That same telecomm customer is considering using the Instant Messaging API to send out service communications based on billings and product data, without having to bring the data into Eloqua. Again, IM is supporting convenience and expanding customer capabilities within Eloqua.

• A healthcare customer of Sojourn is considering leveraging Instant Marketing’s SMS plug-in to increase communication and attendance at their live events.

As these customer use cases show, our partnerships are ultimately about doing whatever it takes to help customers succeed. Learn more about how Sojourn Solutions and its vendor partnerships can help improve your Marketing Operations. Feel free to reach out to us today.