Partner Q&A: How Instant Marketing Works with Sojourn to Achieve Customer Success

By Chuck Leddy, B2B Brand Storyteller

Sojourn partners with multiple martech vendors in order to expand our capacity to help our customers. We recently had a conversation with one of our partners, UK-based Instant Marketing, about when and why we partner. 

Participants in this conversation included Sam Smith, Director of Instant Marketing, Carl Cooke, Customer Success Manager of Instant Marketing, and Charlotte Currie, Global Head of Customer Success at Sojourn Solutions. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion.

What should people know about Instant Marketing?

Smith: We help our customers extend Eloqua out-of-the-box, Eloqua might cover half of a particular customer’s use cases. Of the remaining half, maybe 25% are use cases for which we have connectors for out of the box. Eloqua is great, but I wish it did more channels and ad targeting. The remaining 25% of use cases might call for custom solutions. An Eloqua user might have a requirement that's so unique that no one else has ever had it before. So we address two categories of requirements: (1) either the need for Eloqua extensions or (2) a unique need where we can build a customized Eloqua solution.

Cooke: We've seen numerous cases where Eloqua users come to us with an “impossible task” and are looking at Eloqua alternatives. The customer doesn't recognize that the “impossible” use case can actually be done within Eloqua. That's where we step in and help.

How does Instant Marketing deliver value through partnering with Sojourn? 

Smith: We tend to work well with experts in the Eloqua space. Sojourn’s team is wonderful at both defining the vision for the project and for 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 the client's implementation and then they’ll reach out to us when it comes to delivering new capabilities that may need custom development.

Currie: For us at Sojourn, the partnership is about having the shared goal of extending what our customers think is achievable within Eloqua. We're very much about understanding what the goals of our customers are, and then helping them achieve what they’re trying to achieve. Sam, Carl, and the Instant Marketing team work in exactly the same way. Our collaboration works because we’ve forged a partnership based upon going above and beyond for our customers.

What’s the process of working with Sojourn on customer use cases?

Smith: Our working relationship is founded on mutual respect and mutual competence. Sojourn is very good at what they do and we're quite good at what we do, which is the development of add-ons. It all comes down to the client making an ask to Sojourn, who will try to figure out if they can achieve the ask within Eloqua “as is.” If not, the next step would be requesting some kind of customization – and that’s where Instant Marketing excels.

Cooke: The trust and transparency between us and Sojourn are key. We all communicate really well to understand and deliver on customer needs. Again, there's nobody passing the buck or avoiding accountability. We all own the challenges and take responsibility for developing the solutions for customers.

Currie: From Sojourn’s perspective, we know what we can do and we know what we cannot do, but we also know what we can do together, which is a more expansive approach to serving customer needs. Instant Marketing is an extension of our team and vice versa. We're not crossing over in terms of capabilities, and we know there are experts within both entities and in multiple subject areas who can come together and deliver significant and sometimes-unexpected business value for our customers. 

What are the various use cases that Instant Marketing can address for customers?

Smith: A quick win would be adding new channels. So we let you orchestrate across more channels, including SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, web push app, push ad targeting, Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. Direct mail postcards. A quick win might be to take your investment and leverage it in more channels. 

A more complex win is achieving a weird, unique, but necessary requirement. That might mean a custom integration, it might mean some kind of custom logic. It might be calling out to AI, or using AI to generate unique content for each individual. So the simple use cases are around adding campaign channels, and the more complex ones are around unique customizations.

Can you offer a specific example where partnership with Sojourn helped a customer resolve a challenging use case? 

Smith: One customer, a specialized publisher, wanted to take their vast amount of content published each day and let their users provide topic preferences. These content preferences were so granular that each user gets their own unique content subset based on pre-determined keywords or categories. So these were highly-personalized emails, but it would not have been possible to send this personalized content without the client’s use of our Advanced Email for Eloqua. 

The impact was simply that Eloqua became viable because the customer needed to find a way to make it happen, and fast. If they couldn’t do the customized emails inside of Eloqua, then they just didn’t have a good plan B. It would've meant building some staggeringly complex tool from the ground up or migrating to a completely different marketing automation platform. What that looks like to a C-suite executive is a succession of rapid and potentially-costly migrations to different marketing tools because you just can't make it work within Eloqua. That would have been a massive headache on so many levels, which we helped them avoid.

Any other customer use cases you want to highlight?

Smith: One of the most sophisticated customer use cases we’ve addressed was a home service client that used SMS to dispatch third-party service providers. The service client’s customer would get an SMS message saying, hey, we're sending the service engineer to your house at a specific time. And the service provider would text their customers just after the appointment to see if the service technician had showed up. So this customer was using the SMS channel operationally to hold their army of 3rd-party contractors to account.

If you have a second channel, for instance, you can double or increase by a third the impact on revenues, while you're only increasing costs by 3 to 5%. You're also fostering better relationships with your customers. You're getting seen more. You're diversifying your portfolio of communications methods. 

Any final thoughts on partnering with Sojourn?

Smith: Sojourn is highly-competent and very organized, and they know what they're talking about. Their consultants are excellent. It's a team effort, but people like Charlotte have worked to develop the customer relationship in order to make us feel like we’re a seamless part of the team when we come in. We really do go beyond simply referrals – we actually work closely together with Sojourn on behalf of customers so they can achieve their business goals.

Our combined approach can achieve a level of success that the customer just wouldn't have expected otherwise. When you're vetting your consultancies, you can go to Sojourn and say, “what does ‘good’ look like to you? You’ll be pleasantly surprised at just how good good can actually be with a combined approach to achieving customer success.

Note: Our partnerships are ultimately about doing whatever it takes to help our clients succeed. Learn more about how Sojourn Solutions and its vendor partnerships can help optimize your Marketing Operations. Feel free to reach out to us today.