Swisscom automates campaigns and lifts conversions with Oracle

Swisscom is the market leader in Switzerland for B2C mobile and landline communications and digital TV. It also offers a wide range of B2B solutions, including network, cloud, and information and communication technology (ICT) services. With the Swiss telecommunications market being saturated, Swisscom is targeting growth in areas such as Internet of Things (IoT), mobile and smart working, security, cloud hosting, and blockchain-based services. The company’s guiding principle is to offer business customers the best service and inspirational experiences across the board.

While offering customers the latest IT and communications infrastructure, Swisscom found itself ill-equipped to generate new opportunities and sales. The organization’s lead generation and marketing campaign management processes were manual, expensive, and on-premises.

Even though the company was providing first-rate content via its website, Swisscom B2B Marketing lacked modern marketing tools to help convert leads into sales. In 2019, the company began a search to acquire a marketing automation solution.

Swisscom began researching marketing automation products to replace an older on-premises solution. The company issued an RFI with 80 questions to a dozen companies and shortlisted three vendors. They were then asked to provide detailed offers and a series of demos.

Next, Swisscom established its requirements, including a sales leads database, lead generation and scoring, campaign management, email engine, call center connectivity, integration with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and event management. Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation scored the highest.

By choosing Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation, Swisscom not only automated its B2B lead generation and campaign management processes, but also took a first step toward cloud applications.

Oracle Eloqua also meets GDPR privacy directives with a double opt-in method that confirms by email a customer’s wish to download or link to marketing content such as business briefs, newsletters, events, and other collateral. By moving from Excel-based lead generation and nurturing systems, Swisscom doubled opt-in clicks from 40% to 80%, thereby capturing significantly more quality leads that could be converted into sales.

As a result of automating its lead capture and campaign execution strategy, Swisscom has elevated B2B marketing. The company is constantly influencing its 5,000-plus enterprise customers to invest in Swisscom’s cutting-edge business offerings.

“Oracle Eloqua gives us a playground for trying out new things and discarding them too,” says Simon Kaufmann, B2B marketing automation manager at Swisscom. “That drives innovation, allowing our people to do a lot of stuff that they weren’t able to do before.”

In the past, Swisscom’s B2B marketing team relied on an external agency to code new campaign features—a process that could take weeks. With Oracle Eloqua’s A/B testing, marketing managers can create, test, and modify dozens of multistep email marketing campaigns in the first few months of go-live. The use of two-variant testing has strengthened lead nurturing and lead scoring.

Oracle Eloqua also supports Swisscom’s sales funnel with more accurate and measurable lead generation processes, turning prospects into opportunities for commercial teams to monetize as sales. “Management has been happy to see marketing managers excited by doing things more quickly, resulting in more leads and more revenue transparency,” says Kaufmann. “Marketing automation has given us a new mindset.”

The telco’s IT team can easily operate the interface between Oracle Cloud and Swisscom environments, including monitoring, dashboards, and connections to other tools the company uses. “We have spearheaded SaaS inside Swisscom and shown the benefits of Oracle taking care of new releases, security, and infrastructure,” says Kaufmann.

The switch from on-premises to cloud-based marketing automation follows Swisscom’s corporate strategy of supplementing revenue from a saturated telecommunications market via ICT solutions based on three pillars: the best customer experience (CX), operational excellence, and new growth.

Oracle’s bid included Accenture as implementation partner, taking advantage of both Accenture’s longstanding relationship with Swisscom, its expertise in the ICT sector, as well as a track record of successful Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation implementations.