How UCLA Health used 2 Eloqua's to extend marketing's reach and manage global subscription data

UCLA Health faced challenges with the integration of two Eloqua instances. While quick integration was implemented to send global unsubscribes, it caused several problems such as an increase in contact volume, compliance risk, and cumbersome manual solutions. UCLA Health approached Sojourn Solutions to find a new solution that could integrate subscription data between the two systems, ensure data alignment and consistency, limit the creation of net new contacts, and eliminate manual list scrubbing. 

In this post, we'll take a closer look at the challenge and the solution designed by Sojourn that helped UCLA Health stay within their contract threshold limit and eliminate the risk of emailing unsubscribed contacts.

The Challenge

UCLA Health implemented a second instance of Eloqua in 2021 to allow their Strategic Marketing team to do larger list purchases and outreach to net new prospective patients without harming the domain of their main patient instance of Eloqua. When this second Eloqua instance was implemented, some quick integration leveraging form reposts was implemented to send global unsubscribes between instances by simply creating mirror contacts in each instance. However, in this case, quick didn’t mean better. The initial integration created several problems:

• First, when recording the unsubscribe in the secondary instance, the process created unnecessary net new contacts and increased UCLA Health’s Eloqua contact volume, causing them to go over their contract threshold.

• A more important problem was that the quick integration didn’t take into consideration when a contact changed his or her subscription preferences, which added a huge compliance risk.  

• Finally, the manual solution designed to manage and vet the subscription data against the two systems was too cumbersome to continue.

The Solution

UCLA Health challenged their marketing operations consulting partner, Sojourn Solutions, to find a new solution to not only integrate the global subscription data between the two systems, but to also:

• Ensure data alignment and consistency of Global Subscription preference status (Unsubscribed AND Subscribed) between UCLA Health’s two Eloqua instances;

• Keep the overall contact volume in mind and limit the creation of net new contacts that are not needed in the opposite instance;

• Ensure if a record is deleted, and later re-created, their previous subscription status remains;

• Eliminate the need to manually scrub list purchases against the older “Main” instance of Eloqua before uploading into the new “Strategic Marketing” instance of Eloqua.

So how did Sojourn achieve all this?

1. A Program Canvas was created using the Form Submit App. The Program sends the most up-to-date subscription status data to the opposite instance of Eloqua.

2. That data is received using a new form, created specifically for subscription status updates, which in turn creates a full set of new contacts.

3. Once the new contacts are received, the program triggers necessary processing rules to find and match any contact records and update the subscription field.

4. Once the fields are updated, then a secondary program automatically deletes the net new contacts from the contact table.

The Results

The new integration eliminated hours of monotonous, time-consuming manual work to compare lists against each instance of Eloqua to ensure an accurate reflection of global subscription data. Instead, UCLA Health was able to quality control all of the contacts in the Strategic Marketing instance of Eloqua and delete all unnecessary contacts that were previously created just to log the unsubscribe.

By implementing the solution, UCLA Health was able to stay within their contract threshold limit and remove the risk of emailing unsubscribed contacts they should not be reaching out to, saving UCLA Health both time and resources while enhancing their contact data reliability and engagement quality.

To learn more about how Sojourn can help you improve data quality plus engagement quality - while staying within contracted thresholds - for your organization, contact us today.