Eloqua is a marketing automation platform, allowing marketers to easily create campaigns consisting of emails, landing pages, social media etc. via its ‘campaign canvas’.
Campaigns can be created via a WYSIWYG interface, allowing you to visualize marketing campaigns easily as you build them. It also integrates with CRM tools, automatically passing any lead data generated onto your sales staff.
My interest in Eloqua, and specifically its API, relates to the localization of email campaign content. This can be achieved manually by exporting the created email (as a standalone HTML file), then re-importing the localized versions post translation, creating a new version of the original, one for each language you have localized for.
Manual exporting of email content for localization is of course a perfectly valid approach, but the more languages you have, the more manual steps in this process, and the longer it takes, potentially tying up a resource.
The Eloqua REST API can be used to easily reduce the transactional costs related to localization of email campaign content. Using the API, you can quite easily automate the extraction of email content, and potentially send this content directly to your Translation Management System (TMS) such as GlobalSight or WorldServer, or straight to a translation vendor in the absence of a TMS.
The API documentation is pretty good. I also came across this samples project on GitHub released under the Apache license which I was able to use to knock up a proof of concept pretty quickly. It’s written in C# and includes functions to manipulate most asset types in Eloqua.
The email sample code in this library illustrates how to create, edit, and delete emails in Eloqua via the REST API. For example, it’s this easy to grab an Object that represents an email in Eloqua:
EmailClient client = new EmailClient(EloquaInstance, EloquaUsername, EloquaPassword, EloquaBaseUrl); try { Email email = client.GetEmail(emailID); return email; } catch (Exception ex) { // Handle Error... }
Some notes:
- When retrieving the Email Object which represents an email in Eloqua, you need to specify the ID of the email in Eloqua. For automating the localization process, it could be difficult to determine this without user input. What I plan on doing is providing a nice UI so that users see only the emails that they have created in Eloqua (i.e. not all emails created ever), and can click on one and submit it for translation in one click.
- The Email Object also contains other useful metadata like when the content was created, when it was last updated and by whom, the encoding, and the folder in which this email resides in Eloqua, useful for when you want to upload the localized versions.
So, that’s how easy it is to automate the retrieval of email content from Eloqua. The library I referenced also has support for other asset types like landing pages etc.
Next I plan on using ASP.NET Web API to turn this library into a HTTP service I can use to talk to Eloqua from other applications, such as the application that manages content submission/retrieval from our TMS.