Marketing automation is not campaign management and campaign management is still not marketing automation. While the gap certainly narrowed in 2010 these two tools were born and bred to do different things. If you see an Eloqua or Marketo in the room with a Unica or Alterian, someone is in the wrong room.
Understanding the differences begins with an understanding of the tools heritages.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation was born out of the need to help marketers more tightly integrate their activity across email, website, and CRM (SFA really) channels. More specifically, however, these tools also focused specifically on marketers chasing the considered purchase, usually B2B, where an individual sale is worth hundred, thousands, or even millions.
Campaign Management
In contrast, campaign management came into being to help mass direct marketers manage and more finely tune their segmentation strategies. Here the focus is really on list generation and using customer data as branching forks in an effort to get the right number of bodies into a specific bucket.
Common Ground
Where there is overlap between the two, which is a significant commonality – like Presbyterian to Lutheran, rather than Christian to Muslim, is that both are built around the concept of the customer. With any tool worth its salt, you’d expect to find the customer at the core with campaigns and channels building out.
Key Differences
From there though, the differences mount:
Industry
Eloqua
- Business Services
- Consulting
- Investments
- Real Estate
- Software
- Sports
Alchemy
- Banking
- CPG
- Government
- Retail
- Telecom
- Travel
Scale
Eloqua was built to evaluate and move high worth prospects through the sales process. Necessarily, the pipe, or size of the prospect universe the tool was intended to serve numbers in the hundreds or thousands. As trumpeted by a customer quote on the Eloqua site, “… we are sending 1000’s of emails every day …”
Alchemy, on the other hand, was built to handle prospect universes that run well into the millions and consume and serve up environments measured in terabytes (1TB = 1,000GB = huge ass database). The Alchemy email gun doesn’t break a sweat until you get into the 100’s of millions of emails sent.
Channels
Eloqua is focused exclusively on the online channels. As described by their CTO Steven Woods, they are all about “Digital Body Language”. They have tried to wrapper events and “digital to print” services, but really these are shoe horned in.
Alchemy is more channel agnostic. The focus is on getting the customer into the right bucket at the bottom of a tree (e.g., visually, think of a branching org chart). From there, campaigns can be pushed out to direct mail drops, email, SMS, mobile, etc.
Integration
Eloqua was built to integrate really with one thing – the CRM, and it does it well. Eloqua supports 2-way integration to a number of CRM’s like Salesforce.com, MSCRM, SalesLogix, etc.
Alchemy was built to be an agnostic data hub. As such, it’s very easy to plug it into the variety of data sources you encounter across the enterprise. While you get way more variety, things are batch or trigger driven as opposed to a true 2-way synch.
Flexibility
Out of the box, with Eloqua, you get a prebuilt data model and framework for approaching how you do things. If what you do maps to their “lead management methodology”, then it can be a great head start. If, however, you have a different approach, or something customized to your organization, then it will be very difficult to bend Eloqua to what you do. Part of the value of Eloqua is changing your approach to match the tool.
Alchemy was designed to be a framework as opposed to a platform. The ramifications of that is that it is basically a blue sky environment. Alchemy provides the tools and you tell it where to go. For an organization with a clear vision of process and direction this is a great option. For one looking for out of the box, plug and play, however, not so much.
Conclusion
Eloqua and Alchemy were built to solve different problems. They are both head of the class in their respective spaces, and while those spaces have some similarities, they are not the same. Here are some guidelines to help you decide:
| Eloqua | Alchemy | |
| Focus | Lead Management | Customer Segmentation |
| Customer Records | 100,000’s | 1,000,000’s |
| Scale | Breaks a sweat in the 1M’s | Breaks a sweat in the 100M’s |
| Integration | 2-way with SFDC, MSCRM | Easily connect to data sources across the enterprise |
| Flexibility | Out-of-the-box lead management tool | Customizable to any campaign management, marketing program |
| Channels | Online, Social | Online, Offline, Social |
Which tool you should pick is a function of what you are trying to accomplish. Really, if these two tools show up together, someone is in the wrong room.
TheMarketingMojo 