Abstract
With the exponential growth of Salesforce in the last few years, we often hear the same questions:
Should we migrate to Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Is Oracle Eloqua better than Salesforce? etc.
Even though both solutions classify as Marketing Automation platforms, the answer to Eloqua vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud is really not that simple.
In the last decade or so there have been thousands of new MarTech solutions launched on the market.
In a matter of fact, in an analysis done by Scott Brinker, just in 2020 there have been listed over 8000 solutions, a 13% increase from the year before.
Though they all try to solve more or less the same problem, somehow they are all different.
Or at least they serve a different purpose, so they say.
In the Marketing Automation category, both Marketing Cloud (ex. Exact Target) and Eloqua have dominated the market for a long time.
Both have significant differences and different pros and cons, and both are amazing in what they can do.
| Fun facts! If it means anything to you, Oracle acquired Eloqua in 2012, to build the Oracle Marketing Cloud. A year later, Salesforce acquired ExactTarget, to do practically the same. It was the time of the “Great War” – the war of the marketing clouds. |
Introduction
So, if you got this far in this article I can assume you are currently using either Eloqua or Marketing Cloud and considering a switch.
Or you are not sure which one is the right tool for your organization so you want to learn more.
No matter what is the reason, one thing we should make clear. Both platforms are very different and have been built for different segments and slightly different purposes.
Officially Eloqua has been branded as a B2B platform, while Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a B2C.
Additionally, Eloqua since its inception has been strong in Inbound (data tracking), while MC is more of a powerful Outbound engine.
There is however one more thing.
Very often when we compare Marketing Automation solutions we do that primarily from email orchestration and data automation capabilities.
And, that’s another reason which makes this comparison quite challenging. In recent years, Marketing Cloud has grown to a full 360, omnichannel, AI-driven solution.
Basically, nothing compares to it!
That being said, it is really not fair to compare these two platforms head to head, but as requested by many of you, we’ll give it a try.
Talking to myself: Perhaps, it would make more sense to compare Eloqua and Salesforce Pardot, which both belong to the same category. I guess another time!
One reason why we even try to run this comparison is that by many companies Eloqua has been used as a B2C marketing automation tool.
In a matter of fact, we have configured dozens of such instances. For the most recent you can read more here.
You might ask why would somebody onboard a B2B platform for B2C needs, and I agree, it sounds a bit off, but there is a reason, and we’ll try to demystify it throughout this article.
About this Post
Before we continue, due to the extensive material coverage around “Eloqua vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud”, we have decided to split this article into five parts, as listed below.
This should make it quite a bit easier to navigate and find your topic of interest.
Additionally, in order to keep this article brief, we cover only the features which can have a critical impact on your business requirements, budget, and IT architecture.
So, here they are:
- Platform Architecture and Security
- NEW: Data Model and Processes
- Campaigns, Automation, and Reporting (coming soon…)
- AI/ML, and APIs (coming soon…)
- Platform Maintenance and Support (coming soon…)
