3 Methods Of Restricting Access To A Group Of Contacts In Eloqua

Global visibility over the entire Eloqua database is a privilege not usually granted to any team member. Most often, it is only MarTech platform administrators who have unlimited access and permissions. There are many reasons for this, ranging from security considerations to organizational purposes, to achieve better platform governance through carefully stored, labelled, and structured data usage.

But besides platform admins, Eloqua marketers, sales reps, and data analysts contributing to the company marketing automation efforts require specific access to the Eloqua platform. For cybersecurity and platform organization reasons, granting complete global access to the entire database is hardly indicated. Solutions need to work around this requirement.

That said, you might need to restrict access based on geographical location or roles. Otherwise, you may be looking to lessen visibility for members of a specific campaign, or you may have other custom access needs.

How can you achieve these in Oracle Eloqua? Let’s go over three different such ways. Read on to discover our three effective methods to restrict access to a group of contacts in Eloqua.

Three methods of restricting Eloqua access to contacts

Oracle Eloqua is a versatile platform with multiple areas to explore. Its resources, combined with creativity and validated know-how, can transform many ideas into real projects. Below we listed three quick methods of restricting Eloqua user access.

1. Contact Fields & Update Rules
2. Master Exclude
3. LBAC or Label-Based Access Control

Each option has its advantages and disadvantages. Before diving into more details, have a look at the method comparison we designed for you.

Let’s explore each option and find out how you can configure them in Eloqua!

Contact Fields & Update Rules

If you haven’t already reached the 300 Eloqua contact fields limit, you can create another one to control user access to contacts.

For example, configure a numerical field named “TG – Campaign Memberships” (Figure 2) and two update rules to increase (Figure 3) or decrease (Figure 4) its value.

Figure 2. Contact Field Settings

The first part of the rule is translating blanks to 0’s. Because Eloqua cannot apply mathematical operations on blank values, this value translation is paramount.

To control the “TG – Campaign Memberships” field value, we chose to increment the field by positive or negative values.

Figure 3. Increment Contact Field Value

Figure 4. Decrement Contact Field Value

Add the update rules at the top and bottom of your Eloqua campaign flows (Figure 5). Lastly, create a filter to exclude the contacts with “TG – Campaign Memberships” greater than 1. Apply it to the campaign canvases at a global level.

Figure 5. Campaign Canvas with Update Rules

Figure 6. Shared Filter

Master Exclude

Master Exclude is a terrific alternative to isolate a group of contacts.

Eloqua provides a series of options to master exclude the audience, from contact groups (or shared lists) to filters, individual contacts, domains, or even CDOs.

Figure 7. Master Exclude Options

Once you have established your exclusion criteria, select the most convenient configuration option from the list of options as depicted in the figure above.

It’s essential to be aware that master excluded contacts cannot receive emails sent from processing steps. Eloqua master excluded contacts get stuck in email steps from campaign canvases unless they are configured to include sending emails to master excluded contacts.

LBAC or Label-Based Access Control

Eloqua Label-Based Access Control is the most restrictive option of controlling the users’ access to contacts. This method (which we also recommend) successfully reduces visibility to contacts, impacting the segment counts and the active canvases alike.

In this way, Eloqua automatically excludes contacts from active campaigns unless access to their security labels had been granted. All Eloqua campaigns and programs inherit the security labels of the user who had activated them. Meanwhile, segments and reports also reflect users’ accessibility to contacts.

On the slight “downside”, the configuration for this method of restricting Eloqua user access has a higher level of complexity than the previous two options covered above.

The very first action is to configure contact labels. You do this from Settings> Users> Contact Security> Manage Labels, as depicted in the figure below.

Figure 8. Contact Security Label

The second step is to assign each label to a specific user group. You can access this option from Settings> Users> Contact Security> Assign Labels.

Lastly, you need to create a flow to assign the labels to contacts. In Eloqua, you can either use a Program Builder or the Label Assignment Workflow available under Settings> Security> Contact Security. Note that you can only create one single Label Assignment Workflow.

Figure 9. Program Builder – Assign and Remove Contact Security Labels

In the figure below, you can discover the label assignment workflow for a simple welcome campaign.

Final thoughts

Restricting access to specific contacts from your database may sometimes pose a challenge to achieve, especially when handling large volumes of both Eloqua contacts and platform users, from admins to marketers, sales reps, and analytics experts.

On the bright side, Oracle Eloqua has an immense pool of resources to make this happen, and you can always rely on an expert to ease these matters for you. Sign up for a free trial of our trusted Eloqua platform administration services to learn more about your Security Groups' compliance and platform enhancement possibilities.

Together, we explored three different options for controlling users’ visibility and accessibility to contacts. Each option has its benefits and constraints. Select the one that best suits your custom project, and let us know if you obtained the expected results!