Everywhere you look, tech companies are enhancing their technology capability with AI - either through acquisition or in-house development. It’s no different at Oracle. Their flagship marketing cloud product, Eloqua, has undergone massive improvements in recent years including having AI built right in.
At Oracle, the AI doesn’t stand for artificial intelligence. There actually isn’t any artificial intelligence anywhere - yet. It stands for Adaptive Intelligence. To me, this is more apt. The new Eloqua model gives users the ability to adapt either through recommendation or actions taking place within the platform. To enable these additional features, you must subscribe to the Adaptive Intelligence Add-on.
What might be news to you is that Oracle’s AI isn’t the only AI available to Eloqua users. Motiva AI jumped into the ‘AI’ game long before AI was even on the Eloqua roadmap. As an innovative alternative, Motiva is giving Eloqua users seriously interesting choices in how they’d like their AI to operate.
Motiva provides a series of CloudApps that plug into Eloqua and allow for native integration within the platform. It’s AI focuses on multi-variant testing (like A/B testing but on steroids), as well as send-time optimization, subject line and pre-header analysis, auto segment discovery, and email frequency management. As users are always looking for fewer tools that can do more, Motiva is meeting you where you are.
Oracle’s AI vs Motiva’s AI; what do they offer?
Let’s break down the tools at your disposal! Oracle and Motiva offer great capability to an already feature-rich platform. And, as you’ll see, there is some overlap between them - largely around send time optimization and subject line recommendations.
| Oracle Eloqua AI | Motiva AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Send Time Optimization (STO) | Send based on best time or day or week - based on past email open performance. | Send at the best possible time during your desired time frame based on past email open performance. |
| Subject Line Optimization (SLO) & Pre-Header Optimization | SLO Only. Give your subject line a rating for how well it’s expected to perform with your audience - either above or below the average subject line performance of your Eloqua instance. | SLO & Pre-header Optimization - Each subject line and Pre-Header text will be scored across 5 dimensions: Clarity, Spelling, Length, Concision, Engagement. This is done through advanced Natural Language Processing. |
| Multi-Variant-Testing (MVT) | N/A | The execution of 2+ email tests concurrently in which the AI determines which email is best for which sub-segment of the email audience. This means the AI will automatically scale down the poorer performing emails and scale up the ones that are showing better performance. |
| Fatigue Analysis | Use data science to understand the optimal level of engagement for individual contacts to avoid burnout. | N/A |
| Email Frequency Management | N/A | Prevent and/or delay email sends to contacts that have been sent more emails than desired. |
| Account Engagement Score | Capture the overall engagement of an account based on engagement from contacts associated to the account. The score becomes available as a field value in the Account Table enabling segmentation and lead prioritization. | N/A |
| Segment Discovery | N/A | As part of the STO email sends, Motiva uses your Eloqua data to identify sub-segments in your audience. This allows you to have smaller segments that more accurately group people together based on their preferences. The outcome? Even greater email performance improvements. |
| Account Performance Dashboard | The new dashboard supports your ABM initiatives by allowing you to identify the accounts with the highest score. | N/A |
| Weak Campaign Finder | N/A | Scan through your active campaigns and identify some low hanging fruit for optimization. |
The Importance of Strategy
If you’re thinking of leveraging either of these tools (or both!) then you’ll want to make sure you have a strategy in place. If not, you’ll just end up wasting your marketing budget for the idea of AI rather than its value.
Oracle AI Strategy Changes
Opting for Oracle’s AI means you will need to review your strategy. Fortunately, most of the features are enhancements to existing functionality. This means there shouldn’t be sweeping changes required, but you will want to make improvements to get the most value. You’ll need to update your training and processes to incorporate these tools into your existing workflow.
In practical terms, for STO, enable it and let it run. For SLO, if the feedback says your subject line would underachieve, change it to something that will outperform the average.
Bear in mind that fatigue analysis provides an opportunity to enhance your existing strategy. Leverage the analysis by adding or removing people from email sends or adding additional nurtures to support your existing initiatives.
Motiva AI Strategy
With Motiva, the AI functionality will require an evolution to your existing strategy. This is because Motiva advances your testing capabilities giving you richer information. When regular testing is included, you generate results that continually improve your performance metrics.
Ultimately, this will be more work. However, the reward is higher engagement from your prospects and customers. The testing outcomes extend to enabling smaller segments with specific email design/subject line/content/CTA preferences. The enhanced segmentation results in higher engagement and more leads and conversions. In a nutshell, the advanced testing capabilities mean you can personalize communications, improve engagement, and boost conversions.
What to choose…
While Oracle’s offering improves engagement and is a fantastic add-on, it doesn’t go as deep as Motiva. Oracle AI still doesn’t offer testing capability which is a surprise because testing has been a weakness of Eloqua for quite a while. Fortunately, Motiva’s got you covered in that department!
If I had my choice, I’d go for both. The overlap is minimal, and both offer compelling, unique value. Oracle gives you powerful fatigue analysis and account engagement scoring. Motiva delivers advanced multi-variant-testing, segment discovery, and subject line and pre-header text analysis. Coupled together, they create as robust an optimization AI as you are likely to find anywhere on the market.
Need help in choosing the right tool for you? Talk to us, we are happy to help!
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