Eloqua was founded in 1999 by Mark Organ in Toronto, Canada, preceding other marketing automation players by several years. The company earned a reputation for bringing powerful marketing features to large organizations. The software is targeted at enterprises, and is used by the likes of Dow Jones, American Express, Sony, Adobe and LinkedIn. Eloqua went public in August 2012. Shortly after, it was announced that Oracle would acquire Eloqua for $23.50 per share, or approximately $871 million. Since then, the formidable marketing platform would be rebranded Oracle Eloqua as part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud. By some measures, Eloqua is considered the market leader in the marketing automation space, generating more revenue for its enterprise clients than any of its peers.  

Eloqua Pricing and Services

Intended Customers Enterprises

Free Trial No

Features

• Lead Management
• Unified Marketing Operations
• Web Marketing
• Sales Management
• Reports & Analytics
• Support
• Integrations

All Available Plans & Services Eloqua offers three subscription tiers - Basic, Standard and Enterprise. Pricing is according to the number of contacts. Some features are available as paid add-ons to certain plans, while certain feature limits can be negotiated during sales consultations.

Editor’s Bottom Line of Eloqua

Eloqua is seen by some as the gold standard of marketing automation - for good reason, because by some measures, it generates the most revenue for its clients than its younger counterparts. Perhaps this is no surprise, as Eloqua is aimed strictly at enterprises. This is reflected in their pricing - at $2,000 per month on their basic plan, Eloqua is more expensive out of the box than any of their industry rivals. That said, Eloqua has more experience dealing with major enterprises than any other marketing automation vendor, and their tools reflect it. Between lead management, web and email marketing, segmentation and targeting, sales alignment, security and its library of 100+ integrations, Eloqua provides more tools in one plan, out of the box, even not including add-ons, than probably any other solution. Its visual campaign builder is well regarded for its polished design and overall usability. The same goes for its ability to quickly create microsites with dynamic content. Eloqua is one part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, which is ranked highly by Gartner for its ability to execute a marketing strategy and for completeness of its wide-scoped vision of marketing functionality. Its customers praise its ability to identify and target anonymous audiences using behavioral, transactional and offline data to complete customer profiles for highly-specific segmentation, after which its predictive analytics and personalization tools allow for highly customized lead nurturing and personalized selling. The few areas of complaint voiced by Eloqua’s clients were for its post-launch technical support capabilities. Moreover, companies subscribing to the Oracle Marketing Cloud need to integrate third-party applications separately with the individual platforms Oracle acquired to build its Cloud; meaning, an app integrated into Eloqua must be separately integrated with Responsys, were the latter channel also employed. (Eloqua is Oracle’s marketing automation solution and Responsys is for cross-channel orchestration.) Overall there are fairly few complaints with the product itself. If you are a small business, this solution would likely be far more powerful than your needs demand, and its price higher than your budget allows - but it’s not intended for small businesses. It’s intended for enterprises, particularly those willing to pay for a powerful solution with far-reaching and highly-specific capabilities to execute a marketing strategy at scale.