Visma invigorates its marketing strategy with Oracle Eloqua

With over 25 years of experience and innovation, Visma develops and delivers software to small businesses, medium and large enterprises, and the public sector. Servicing over 1.6 million global customers a year, including those in the company’s native Norway, Visma aims to empower people by simplifying and automating complex processes.

Thanks to numerous acquisitions, Visma transformed from a local Nordic player into a leading global software provider. However, this growth was not achieved without challenges. As companies were acquired, they brought along their own systems to support marketing operations, resulting in a convoluted landscape of disparate technology. The company’s larger business units were left with networks of siloed legacy tools that lacked the advanced capabilities and integration needed to support sophisticated marketing strategies. The existing ecosystem forced these entities into manual workflows across key functions such as audience segmentation, lead management, and campaign orchestration. Data volume continued to increase, but there was no single source to capture it and glean insights to optimize campaigns. With data scattered across multiple systems, it became increasingly difficult to maintain security, monitor performance, and nurture leads through the marketing funnel to support sales teams.

Visma recognized the need for a more robust marketing platform to bolster the growing needs of its larger business units. After considering several vendors, the company selected Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation, part of the Oracle Marketing suite.

Oracle Eloqua would serve as the nerve center for more sophisticated marketing strategies, capturing data from various sources for a single view of operations. Contact-level security tools for each entity would allow filtered access to Visma’s databases and assets without compromising security or data quality. The platform’s consent framework also supported data storage in European data centers, a crucial regulatory factor given most customers are located in Europe.

Advanced automation capabilities would accelerate and simplify workflows while assisting users in nurturing leads and crafting personalized messaging for more relevant engagements. This would help improve campaign performance by ensuring the right audiences get the right content at the right time, ultimately helping these business units convert more leads into deals.

By adopting Oracle Eloqua, Visma business units gained a unified platform for their marketing operations and eliminated the vast network of disparate systems and processes. Having this core system in place drastically simplified key functions such as launching email campaigns or capturing leads. Oracle Eloqua contributed considerably to the results of Visma entities who relied heavily on sophisticated email nurture workflows as a large part of their marketing mix.

Oracle Eloqua allowed Visma companies to orchestrate campaigns much more quickly compared to the previous web of marketing systems. The user-friendly drag-and-drop feature was especially beneficial in streamlining campaign creation. The platform greatly simplified performance monitoring and made it possible to gather critical insights to optimize in-flight campaigns, which improved targeting and retargeting efforts to help teams understand which contacts are most engaged and personalize content that resonates with them.

One of the largest companies in the group’s network, Visma Spcs, saw significant benefits with Oracle Eloqua. To increase sales for the company’s payroll software, the marketing team created Visma Payroll School—a free introduction to payroll administration. Visma Payroll School was set up as a no-touch marketing nurture program in Oracle Eloqua that collects leads for the entity and automatically transitions them from leads to prospects to customers based on engagement across the different stages of the buying process. Without requiring any sales follow-up and limited to a low marketing budget, the campaign maximized efficiency and generated a strong return on investment.

A primary focus for Visma was to bolster security access to critical customer data. This immense amount of data was easily controlled through Oracle Eloqua, allowing teams to maintain brand standards, GDPR governance, and other compliance regulations. This provided business units with the proper access required to effectively launch and monitor their unique campaigns.