Top 10 Eloqua Privacy Workflow Management Challenges

The power of technology has changed over time, bringing in a significant difference in how modern marketing is applied. The “unprecedented challenges” posed by cybersecurity threats lavish around technological and legal complexities.

Businesses are aware of data privacy in a way they were not, even just a few years ago.

To determine the growing number of issues, we’ll take a step back and get a bird’s eye view of the major compliance topics impacting enterprise companies: information privacy, data access, and cybersecurity.

With increasingly better data intelligence tools, companies process and maintain large amounts of data from their customers. Eloqua is going to be only as effective as your data management policies are.

Setting up a privacy workflow is nowadays imperative in marketing automation, but it also turns problematic rather fast. Still, you can help your customers have safer, more comfortable interactions – by making privacy a priority.

During our years of expertise in Eloqua’s best practices, we gained invaluable industry knowledge that now allows us to put together a list of significant privacy workflow challenges commonly encountered, shedding light on means to turn these into opportunities for improvement.

1. Data Privacy Protection under the GDPR

After seeing serious data breaches become almost a daily occurrence due to new hacking threats or negligence, some governments have begun taking steps to regulate how personal data is handled online.

A prime example is the General Data Protection Regulation, which was instituted by the European Union in 2018.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation, which impacts all companies that do business with individuals or businesses within the European Union, data privacy is a fundamental right for all individuals.

Many regulations around data privacy mandate external compliance audits to detect and remediate vulnerabilities and data exposure. In between these external audits, IT organizations should schedule internal reviews to maintain compliance and safeguard systems and data. These reviews should result in exhaustive reports that cover current and evolving risks, incident reports, and security recommendations.

Within Eloqua, data is part of the foundation. The key to overcoming the particular issues stands behind being as transparent as possible.

For further insights, explore our blog article on GDPR Compliance in the Era of Marketing Automation to shed more light on how the General Data Protection Regulation affects the collection, usage, and storage of private consumer data.

To paint a more descriptive picture of privacy management under the GDPR, here are the standard email marketing consent types:

Explicit Consent

This is also known as “Expressed consent“, and this consent is given when users take actions such as checking a box or selecting the ‘Yes’ option when asked to opt in to marketing communications.

Implicit Consent

This is also known as “Implied consent“, and applies to situations where it would be reasonable for you to assume that users want to receive marketing communications. Examples include existing customers, partners, people that stopped by your booth or attended one of your events.

Double Opt-in

We refer to this as “Double/Verified“, and this is when users take two separate actions to confirm interest (e.g., someone who gave explicit consent is then sent an email with a link to re-confirm the consent for marketing communications).

Unsubscribed

This is for users who globally unsubscribe from all marketing communications.

Refused Consent

This is for users who explicitly say ‘No’ when you ask them for Explicit Consent.

No Data

This is a fictional consent status that we created to indicate that no data was collected one way or the other, useful for those use cases where you have a consent checkbox. Check means ‘Explicit’ consent, and unchecked means ‘No Data’.

2. Data Transparency under the CCPA

The California Consumer Privacy Act represents a top priority for most businesses. Live since January 2020, CCPA adds more privacy protections with broad implications for marketers nationwide.

Essentially, the CCPA is the most sweeping consumer privacy legislation ever passed in the United States, giving consumers broad control over personal information collected by businesses. The law is not specific to a particular digital channel but spans across all mediums where personal information is collected, stored, and used. The following consumer rights fall under this law:

• The right to know what personal information is collected and whether it is sold or disclosed and to whom
• The right to refuse the sale of personal information
• The right to access personal information
• The right to equal service and price when privacy rights are exercised

Only companies that cede control to their customers and adapt to this new reality grow, while those who do not are more at risk. By giving customers control, only then can you accurately target and engage these motivated customers.

Moreover, by giving full ownership and providing transparency of data activities, you can genuinely solve privacy issues.

With user ownership, control of data, and a transparent process of securely sharing data, it becomes difficult for hackers to attack any information, liability being shifted to you.

3. Securing Data Access

Beyond GDPR, in specific industries, such as finance and healthcare, additional regulations regard access to confidential information.

It is paramount to maintain proper security and confidentiality of customer data. Oracle Eloqua brings forth the ability to configure granular access controls.

Because organizations commonly share customer or patient information across servers and departments, a common issue is access drift. Individuals’ roles and responsibilities within the organization often determine access to confidential data.

But roles or responsibilities (and with them, the need for access to specific data) may change over time. For example, when internal employees change departments, they may accidentally maintain access to confidential information that they’re no longer authorized to have.

The solution is two-fold. The first part is maintaining a role-based access control (RBAC) policy that bases access control decisions on the functions a user is allowed to perform within an organization. It also ensures that unauthorized users are unable to pass access permissions on to other users.

A security administrator should be responsible for maintaining and enforcing this policy. Included is the duty to stay up to date with changes to privacy regulations, and to adjust the RBAC accordingly.

It is challenging to define the roles and the corresponding group for each user because they are all set on a group level. Based on specific groups of users and business roles, Oracle Eloqua enables a better way of managing access controls for data security systems.

When talking about security groups, another privacy capability Eloqua encompasses is multiple user access protections, so administrators can manage the password requirements, login security, and restrict access to a specific IP range. Into the bargain, Eloqua offers various protections to secure user access for the right internal security of documentation and confidential information.

Concretely, a user management feature can be developed. It works through the issuance of admission levels to our client’s employees in the administration department. When users require access to specific files, clearance is first approved by the administration, granting users the permission needed.

Interested in finding out more about this solution?

Check out how we helped our client implement such Eloqua functionalities in just 2 months within the Customer Case Study.

4. Undergoing Data Cleansing

When talking about a data cleansing program, the process implies the collection of “dirty data” from uncontrolled sources. Clients that encounter this challenge are risking data quality loss. At a glance when thinking about personalization, segmentation, and reporting, they all depend on the quality of data.

Systems are usually reliant on unified data to make decisions and take action. Faulty platform governance, in this sense, also leads to increased configuration times, loss of data, and higher risk exposure.

Data quality can be improved through standardized platform use approaches while misusing these can generate the most abundant negative consequences on your marketing automation activities’ well-being.

Adequate platform management helps to turn leads to results.

By ensuring access to clean data, you pave your marketing and sales teams’ way to success.

To check out for yourself how to incorporate standardized approaches for platform use, dive into our in-house article presenting four ways in which you can enhance your Eloqua platform functionality and performance.

On top of that, Eloqua’s Data Cleansing Program continually monitors contacts and initiates cleansing if it encounters erroneous Contact Data. It is essential to clean up your Eloqua database regularly. Quality over quantity. The negative ramifications turn out to have a severe impact on marketing analysis accuracy.

Read more about our client custom-tailored Eloqua Platform Clean-Up solutions and many other such innovative workarounds to Eloqua out-of-the-box reporting solutions within our Customer Case Study.

5. Building Governance in Digital Ecosystems

Reaching an optimal level of governance in the digital ecosystem can be a substantial change. Digital governance acts as the brakes of the car, enabling your company to proceed faster on the path to digital maturity.

It is paramount to have a well-defined policy to optimize and secure your data, aligning objectives between multiple functions. By always making sure that you’re aware of who touches what and where you’ll be able to avoid unwanted or unknown vulnerabilities and stay on top of your data security.

Additionally, you should make sure concepts like granting transparency, protecting the story and keeping data away from the wrong hands are given the necessary time to be achieved.

Want to know more? Read how we build governance in digital ecosystems around four focus pillars.

6. Honoring Subscription Values

This challenge consists of collecting and distributing downstream only accurate and complete information on leads’ subscription statuses. While the volume of unsubscribed contacts or reasoning behind the choice to opt-out are naturally problematic for any business, still the most challenging of all is avoiding any possibility to incorrectly honor users’ choice to opt-out of communication.

In this sense, incorrect privacy workflow management can rather dramatically affect sender reputation and brand value.

To talk about what actually leads to improper privacy workflow management would take substantial time, though, given the volume of matters factoring in.

From one perspective, this can stem from platform administration issues such as consent values being improperly tracked, not normalized, or not accurately distributed to the CRM. You can explore more on how we manage these platform administration issues in order not to run the risk of emailing unsubscribed contacts in our blog article.

So, how do you know the system is managed correctly?

It is mandatory to identify which contacts are available and which should be deleted, considering the contractual threshold maximums. Right from Eloqua, you can ensure ease of use and accuracy that would be better managed by a single CDO (Custom Data Object) capturing all opt-out and preference information for each contact.

On top of that, from a business development perspective, monitoring unsubscribe rates in terms of list quality and looking up whether there is a content relevancy issue or email frequency misalignment can work wonders for your marketing technology efficiency.

7. Building a Validated Eloqua Privacy Workflow

When companies maintain fragmented, non-standardized administrative controls across their tech stack, it creates security risks and gaps.

Oracle Eloqua helps protect data with capabilities like encryption, user access controls, anonymization, and more within the database, at the highest possible standards. The software allows you to properly secure your technical and organizational security control preventing data loss, information leaks, or other unauthorized data processing operations.

A well-designed privacy workflow regards normalization and standardization of data while also contributing to leads’ subscription status updates occurring autonomously. The valuable information stored within the privacy history table is shared downstream, allowing end-users to easily manage subscription statuses for various email campaigns through the Eloqua Preference Centre.

8. Seamless Interdepartmental Coordination

Considering that data privacy is inherently a cross-functional discipline, it is necessary to have a good agreement on the roles and responsibilities of the people involved. To achieve that, key stakeholders indeed need to collaborate as effectively as possible.

There are many risks faced with the involvement of many stakeholders, departments, or third parties in the privacy workflow management activities. Due to their various needs and specific requirements, multiple departments’ involvement in cybersecurity can all risk lacking alignment and proper coordination creating a time-consuming decision-making environment.

Setting typical duties to determine role assignments can untangle these issues with a well-built process and workflow supported by the governance infrastructure. The interconnection between people, process, and technology may require dedication and focus but managed successfully, it can deliver significant business benefits.

9. Debugging and Troubleshooting Processes

What is challenging here is to actually conduct regular tests and troubleshooting processes to shed light on any potential errors in the Eloqua Privacy Workflow, and establish the right approach and frequency for these activities.

Oftentimes, unpredictable system outages happen due to workflow logic failures. Automated workflow processes can function well if they are provided with correct data inputs. The reason why periodic audits are indispensable is due to the need for certifying that there are no errors, nor bugs, or any problems, practically nothing harmful to the workflow.

As a consequence of errors going unnoticed, data breaches may happen. One of the most significant impacts of a data breach on a company’s bottom line comes from the loss of customer trust.

With data breaches continuing to topple both big and small names like dominoes, companies across all sectors are desperate to tighten the security around their data – and those that aren’t are almost certain to pay the price.

There has never been a better time than now to enhance your business value by boosting IT security knowledge. It is essential to keep data security policies up to date, or you may risk not determining where errors occur and fixing them in time.

10. Change Log Tracking & Documentation

Not having comprehensive documentation in support of every privacy workflow functionality, and a change log tracking place creates added problems that could have otherwise been very easily avoided.

Whenever an integration failure appears, for example, the issue can be figured out rather easily, simply by starting a backtracking process. Consider searching through numerous program canvas, update rules, lookup tables actually to find what caused errors.

Setting up well-documented processes also helps by providing a direction, avoiding errors, and supporting any change management efforts.

Final thoughts

We hope these opportunities packed as challenges can lend a helping hand on how to build successful customer relationships by respecting users’ right to privacy and data protection.

Eloqua offers a tremendous selection of integrations and features to improve marketers’ efficiency both in managing their efforts and in better understanding users’ behavior.

Surpassing these overarching challenges can, however, ensure long-lasting success. Doing so requires continuous security and privacy strategy devising, but ultimately, your customers’ privacy should be handled with the utmost precision.

Within an elaborate mix of databases and priorities, it proves challenging to ensure perfect compliance with changing regulations and adapt to new risks in real-time. Get to the real root of the problem and boost your Eloqua privacy workflow management with our help.