Case Study: A Rapid, High-Stakes Migration from Eloqua to HubSpot

The Challenge

A leading provider in the digital staffing sector, skilled at supplying big industries with AI-powered workers, recently faced a significant challenge. They were hindered by Eloqua's cumbersome marketing automation tools, excessive cost, and support needs. They decided to shift to HubSpot's Marketing Hub Enterprise. The company engaged Orange Marketing, known for implementing smooth transitions to HubSpot, to migrate within a narrow 10-week window before their Eloqua subscription terminated. This task was challenging as the business had hundreds of thousands of contacts and unaligned data sources between Salesforce and Eloqua with their key Eloqua SME departing before the project began.

The Solution

Planning 

Orange Marketing swiftly evaluated workflows and processes and collaborated with the client's marketing leader to understand overall business objectives. With the clock ticking, the complexity of the existing setups became apparent. The client's long-used Eloqua system featured elaborate lead scoring and workflow program automation. With their Eloqua marketing admin leaving the company due to their disappointment with the HubSpot move, the rationale and data behind specific configurations were limited. Consequently, migrating to HubSpot required devising fresh marketing strategies.

The rapid transition from Eloqua to HubSpot would progress by incorporating:

• Marketing Workflows and Assets: Designing new and replicating specific Eloqua marketing workflows inside HubSpot, including dozens of WordPress website forms, email templates, landing pages, and call-to-action assets. 
• Salesforce Integration: A HubSpot integration with the client's instance of Salesforce, optimizing routing to improve lead management and response times.
• Lead Scoring and Email List Clean Up: Simplifying the Lead Scoring System
• Data Simplification: The Salesforce DB had ballooned to over 500,000+ contacts with little insight into the quality of leads, requiring streamlining and simplification for more effective marketing and efforts.
• Customer Nurture: Designing practical customer nurture workflows, as the status quo was elaborate, leading to inefficiencies in managing customer relationships.

Implementation

Workflow Reconfiguration

As the client converted from Eloqua to HubSpot, the overall aim was to enhance lead management and customer nurture by refining workflows. HubSpot's capacity for creating straightforward workflows enabled Orange Marketing to redesign forms, landing pages, and thank-you emails previously managed on WordPress, ensuring a seamless integration with Salesforce.

This shift from Eloqua’s complex, filter-heavy sequences to HubSpot’s more direct and simplified data flow not only improved customer nurture programs but bolstered the client's overall lead management strategy. The transition facilitated a more coherent and focused approach to nurturing customer relationships and managing leads.

Detailed mapping played a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of the new lead management and customer nurture processes during this transition.

Nurture Mapping

Salesforce Implementation

Preparing Salesforce for integration with HubSpot involved four main steps:

• STEP 1 - Create Sandbox: Establish a Sandbox environment mirroring the production setup in properties, permissions, and workflows without necessarily replicating all data.
• STEP 2 - Integration User Setup: Both Sandbox and Production environments were tested.  
• STEP 3 - Create Complete Backup: Ensuring data safety before implementing Salesforce Selective Sync, with a note that settings might differ based on specific requirements.
• STEP 4 - Testing: Multiple test scenarios were carried out to ensure a variety of scenarios would behave as expected in Hubspot, including testing for:
  
  • Lead Updated in HubSpot by form fill 
  • Lead updated in Salesforce
  • Lead updated in SalesLoft
  • Opportunity Closed Won/Lost
  • New Lead/Contact for existing Account

Lead Status Testing

Extensive testing helped ensure the best data was set in HubSpot.

Many Contradicting Lead Status Fields in HubSpot

Lead Scoring Implementation

Lead scoring simplification involved refining criteria to manage lead categorization effectively. Key actions included:

• Profile and Engagement: Updated scoring combined industry, country, and job criteria with engagement to classify leads as Suspect, Inquiry, or MQL.
• Profile Fit Criteria: Focused on the client's targeted industry, with specific countries and job titles influencing MQL qualification, unless mitigated by certain form submissions.
• Engagement Differentiation: Automated MQL status for demo or contact form submissions, while other interactions like white paper or webinar engagements required meeting predefined criteria.

This streamlined approach aimed to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of the lead qualification process. It simplified the process, allowing any marketing manager to edit qualifiers without configuring complex Eloqua rules. 

Email List Cleanup

The email list cleanup involved a thorough audit and revision of the existing database, filtering through over 500,000 contacts to identify and retain only high-quality leads. This process entailed applying new criteria to assess lead relevance and engagement, resulting in the removal of outdated, inactive, or irrelevant contacts. 

The aim was to refine the list to a manageable size, focusing on leads that demonstrate genuine interest and potential for conversion, thereby improving the overall efficiency of marketing campaigns and communication strategies.

New Marketing Email-Sending Domain

As part of this project, the team moved to a dedicated email-sending domain on HubSpot and utilized this email transition to warm up their marketing email list by sending strategic communications daily to a small portion of the email list (hundreds at a time). By the end of the project, they had a dedicated marketing email-sending domain and no longer had to send their marketing outreach against the corp dot-com email domain.

Results

Creating Simplicity

With Orange Marketing's support, the client successfully migrated from Eloqua to HubSpot by creating simpler processes and eliminating the need for a full-time Eloqua admin. 

The client moved forward with:

• A Simplified Lead Scoring System: The lead scoring system was overhauled to focus on the quality of leads rather than the quantity.
  
  
• Streamlined Customer Nurture Workflows: Customer nurture workflows are more efficient and easier to manage. This helps with better engagement with their customers through targeted communication.
  
  
• Improved and Transparent SalesForce Integration and Lead Routing Simplification: The integration between Salesforce and HubSpot employs a basic lead routing process, which improves the speed of passing leads between sales and marketing, enhancing lead management capabilities.

• Debugged Email List: The client now has 25,000 identified qualified marketing leads to nurture, rather than a cluttered list of low-quality leads negatively impacting send rates and SEO ratings.  

• Dedicated Marketing Email Sending Domain: This protects the corporate domain from marketing email experiments and allows marketing to strengthen their sending email scores independently from the corporate domain, increasing marketing email deliverability.

Strategic planning and expert guidance enabled a seamless migration from Eloqua to HubSpot, optimizing marketing workflows, lead nurtures, and lead management to drive better business outcomes and efficiency.

Said the marketing leader about the project:

“Thank you guys so much -- the timeline we did this in, and how complicated it was. There was so much stuff done in Eloqua that we did not know, and we were going in with blinders on. While we moved to HubSpot from Eloqua for multiple reasons, the primary driver was cost, and I think there can be a negative perception associated with "downgrading" an enterprise platform ... I would say, it was far from a downgrade for us and absolutely the right decision for multiple reasons.”

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