Why we left Eloqua

We started this marketing automation evaluation several months ago.  We have been running Eloqua for the past 2 years, but mainly using it for email marketing.  My general opinion of Eloqua is that it is a very powerful platform, but almost everything you want to do in Eloqua requires custom programming.  As a result, it's very difficult for a marketing user to turn on functionality like tracking links or tracking document downloads.  

Some of the other issues that I experienced with Eloqua were: 

• The Eloqua user interace is not intuitive at all.  The layout and controls are not consistent or intuitive.  To do anything, it's a matter of memorizing how to interact with the interface.
• The reporting is very limited.  Eloqua provides standard reports and it's very difficult or impossible to do custom reporting.  For example, I wanted to run a report to segment our database by activity level: no email opens, 1 email open, 2 email opens over all time.  Turns out that the only report that Eloqua can produce is a report that says these email addresses have never opened an email in the past 12 months.  It can't do any other possible reports based on different types and levels of activity.

 We looked at Eloqua 10 which is their attempt to improve the usability of the product.  What we saw were some improvements in reporting and the UI for creating email campaigns.  However, all things that we wanted to do like implementing tracking links, passing document download data into salesforce.com campaigns, and lead scoring seemed to require custom programming.

We're a small company.  We don't have the resources to hire a full-time Eloqua admin with programming expertise or the funding to be hiring consultants to manage and customize Eloqua for us.  As a result, I pushed to look for another marketing automation platform that would be easier to use where marketing users could exploit the platform without having to be programming experts.

We decided to look at Marketo because it claims to be easy to use and Act-On because it has such strong integration with webinar platforms like Web-Ex.