Kubota unlocks deeper insights into customer relationships with Oracle Eloqua
The Canadian company collects data from customer touchpoints in real time with Oracle Eloqua, driving personalized customer experience and sales.
“Oracle Eloqua has helped us build up our customer data, know who we’re marketing to, and utilize that data as much as possible to provide value for our company and for our customers. It has really set us up for the future.”
Business challenges
Kubota Canada distributes heavy equipment such as tractors, mowers, and excavators for the agriculture, construction, commercial, and residential industries. The company works with more than 130 independent dealers to organize the entire customer journey, including sales, financing, and product support.
Kubota’s customers engage with the company through local dealers, Kubota’s website, and several other digital channels, as well as in-person events. This multitude of engagement channels made it difficult to track customer touchpoints. Additionally, these touchpoints produced a large quantity of data, but Kubota was limited in its ability to act on it. Moreover, the data was scattered across diverse systems—from third-party APIs to Excel documents—without consistent tools to collect, combine, and report on it.
Kubota also needed to better understand the unique needs of its varied customer base. For example, a large farm has vastly different demands compared to a smaller residential customer, so aligning personally relevant messaging at the right time was a top priority to drive growth for the company.
In addition, compliance with Canadian antispam legislation (CASL) is very strict and complex. Kubota had to carefully manage the consent given by its customers for sharing information and distinguish between implied and expressed consent. The goal was to remain compliant while providing customers with the personalized experience they were familiar with from their local dealers.
Eloqua has helped us drastically in how we market to our customers and provide a complete customer experience, and our engagement levels are telling us we’re doing a good job at it.
Why Kubota Canada chose Oracle
To find the ideal marketing automation service, Kubota engaged with different internal teams to audit existing systems and home in on its exact needs going forward. In total, the company defined over 100 requirements for the desired marketing automation service to be successful.
After assessing several vendors such as Salesforce, SAP, IBM, and Oracle, Kubota selected Oracle Eloqua, part of Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, because it was the only solution that met all the company’s criteria.
Results
Kubota leveraged Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation to revolutionize its marketing strategy. The company identified the unique journey of each customer across its business channels and consolidated the data from those touchpoints on its central K360 master database. The company was then able to proactively leverage this data to automate and personalize customer communications.
With Eloqua Custom Objects, Kubota could collect more data about existing or potential customers. Eloqua enabled Kubota to set up highly personalized email campaigns that targeted customers based on various criteria, and automatically engaged those customers with incentives.
As a result, Kubota gained better insights into the relationship between the company, its dealers, and its customers. Kubota also gained the ability to track the contribution of each marketing channel.
Since managing customer touchpoints with dealers was paramount, Kubota mapped each contact in Oracle Eloqua to the appropriate dealer based on the customer’s postal code or last purchase. The company used Oracle Eloqua to ensure that all email communications to customers contained personalized dealer information to respect the relationship the customer has with Kubota and their local dealer.
Kubota also used Oracle Eloqua to ensure compliance with complex CASL regulations. The company logs the date of a customer’s express consent and automatically removes customers from the mailing list when their implied consent expires. This allows Kubota to maintain positive customer relationships and comply with strict privacy regulations—all while preparing the company for the future.