In my early days of using marketing automation, I kept hearing Eloqua had deeper functionality than Marketo. But I had no firsthand experience until now. And as I now use Eloqua on a daily basis, I think the stories are only half true.
Take lead scoring for instance. In Marketo, you can build whatever you want in terms of scoring with a bunch of smart campaigns. And it’ll work. But if you want to have separate behavioral and fit scores AND a total score, you’ll need to duplicate your logic for every rule to speak to two fields. And if you ever change your scoring model, you’ll have to do a lot of leg work to rescore your existing leads (or just not even bother).
In Eloqua, scoring is a piece of dedicated functionality, that automatically runs on both behavioral and fit dimensions. If you want to change your model, you can, in one place, and it will automatically rescore all your leads.
Eloqua tends to specialize on use cases, while Marketo takes a more sandbox approach. There are pros to each, but the tradeoff I’ve found with Eloqua is it feels terribly disconnected and inconsistent across systems. There’s areas of the system that look like they were released in 1995, speaking to other functionality that feels more modern.
I used to like poking fun at Marketo when they’d do some big UI overhaul, focusing on aesthetics over functionality. But there’s something to be said about a cohesive experience across the platform that is glaringly missing in Eloqua.
Eloqua has always been more function over form, but I wonder if that is enough these days, especially as Marketo has either closed the gap on features, or rendered differences irrelevant with the massive third party ecosystem of integrated apps.