There are some factors we considered when looking at the two solutions, including email marketing, pricing, and configuration, as those are what companies are most interested in when they put together shortlists of vendors. However, before comparing these companies, let's look at their business model and their details.

Oracle Eloqua

With Oracle Eloqua, your marketing campaigns can be planned, created, and deployed across a number of channels. Using marketing automation tools, you can target individual audiences with more relevant content. By monitoring social media and website analytics, you can analyze customer behavior. 

It enables you to create campaigns for content, promotion, onboarding, lead nurturing, and more. Create SEO-optimized content in accordance with the stage of engagement or customer personas. Create forms and landing pages, and share content on the best platforms for your audience. 

Apart from marketing automation, It is also a useful lead management platform. Build activity profiles of website visitors, email subscribers, or database contacts, prepare contact profiles and segment your leads, and view prospect activity from your CRM. 

Define a variety of lead nurturing pathways and branches to meet the needs of customers. Your prospects' activity profiles can help you figure out what topics will be of most interest to them. You can send pre-built emails directly from your CRM or website and monitor visitor notification alerts.

Salesforce

Salesforce.com was launched in 1999 by Marc Benioff, a former Oracle executive, in partnership with Dave Moellenhoff, Parker Harris, and Frank Dominguez. Three former Clarify employees, Moellenhoff, Harris, and Dominguez, wrote the first version of sales force automation software.

Salesforce.com, Inc. provides enterprise software apps distributed as SAAS or on a cloud computing platform. A core product of the company is a CRM system for businesses and organizations of all sizes. 

Additionally, the company offers a PAAS solution named Force.com and maintains a portfolio of third-party integrations known as the AppExchange. Salesforce.com sells enterprise software and CRM on a subscription basis, mainly via direct selling as well as through business partners. In addition, a Salesforce consultant is always there to help any customer in case of an issue.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Eloqua

Basically, Eloqua is a powerful marketing automation system that is perfect for large enterprises. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is designed for small and midsized businesses. Check out a few features that make both platforms unique.

1. Pricing

The price point for Eloqua starts higher than the price for Marketing Cloud. The pricing for Eloqua appears to depend on how many contacts and licenses you need, and each customer appears to get all functionality. The starting price is $2000 per month, featuring a price of $6400 per month, a Setup fee of $2000, free demo not available.

With Marketing Cloud, users can customize their features with prepackaged configurations Salesforce has created for different company sizes, industries, and markets. Free demo is available in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, for other pricing details you need to contact the Salesforce sales cloud team.

If a company or organization is considering both solutions, Marketing Cloud offers a variety of video demos that demonstrate its features & advantages. Oracle offers a free trial for some of its integrated Oracle services, but not for Eloqua. The Eloqua website does not make it easy for you to contact someone if you need to schedule a demo or sales call.

Best Option: Marketing Cloud since it offers customers more packages and options. 

2. Implementation and configuration

Due to its customizations and bundled features, Marketing Cloud is confusing and takes time to configure. Once configured, the application is easily customized and usable with pre-defined templates, functionality, and features for specific industries and markets.

Because Eloqua places such a high priority on data management, there is a lot of cleaning and processing before it can be implemented. As a result, custom data management becomes complicated over the life of a customer because bulk uploading of data is time-consuming and requires significant work. 

There are many training options available in Marketing Cloud to help users become familiar with the platform. Nevertheless, depending on the options chosen, the software may not provide a flexible enough solution to begin using it effectively. 

Additionally, Eloqua offers many training resources, but the personalized sessions could be more organized and focused on the marketing experts' needs. 

Best Option: Tie. There are challenges with both regarding pre-implementation cleanup, training, or configuration.

3. Email Campaigns

With Eloqua, you can create visual workflows to create email campaigns, organize contacts, build drip campaigns, and much more, as well as making it simple to use. Simple leads can be triggered with this, including those who open emails and click links. Eloqua does not appear to have a non-mail-based lead trigger feature, like online searches triggered by email open events. 

Marketing Cloud is particularly good at personalizing emails. Marketing professionals who want to design customize emails from scratch or by using a template can make use of Email Studio. It is possible to segment an email list using drag and drop so that you will send the appropriate message to the right person at the right time. 

Moreover, it applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to schedule emails for maximum impact based on customers' positions within the customer lifecycle. 

Best Option: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which allows segmentation with ease, is essential nowadays.

4. Personalization

With Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud, marketers can create responsive, interactive marketing campaigns that are close to their target markets. With Einstein AI, businesses can improve the experience for subscribers by providing content that speaks directly to them, providing content that addresses them directly. 

With Eloqua, brands can create personalized, cross-channel promotional campaigns in a dynamic way. Automated features enable marketers to stay updated on trends continuously by adapting content and campaigns based on the latest information. 

Eloqua's database provides Eloqua with a wealth of insights allowing marketers to tailor their campaigns efficiently so that they convey the most relevant message at the right time to the appropriate audience. 

Best Option: Salesforce Marketing Cloud has an edge over Eloqua because the contact databases are better integrated. These tools enable marketers to reach potential customers wherever they feel comfortable using omnichannel communications. 

5. CMS

Oracle CMS provides content management across all of your applications. Connect the data, experiences, and insights derived from your customer experience applications to create and find relevant content and reduce costs associated with content creation and finding content. 

As opposed to Salesforce, Oracle Content Management tags images automatically in order to make them easier to discover and reuse. When creating content, Oracle's machine learning content can automatically detect the intent of the content and recommend images as needed. Oracle CMS lets you manage workflows, create videos, curate, edit, publish, and stream videos.

Salesforce does not provide a similar platform for creating or editing video, and the streaming process is handled by third parties, adding cost and complexity. Using Oracle CMS, you can manage content across Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, macOS, iOS, and Windows using native integration features. 

Additionally, the Oracle Content Management system includes an embeddable UI that can be incorporated into other applications, either third-party or customized. Salesforce only has a web-based user interface.

Best Option: Oracle

6. Native loyalty

Utilize Oracle CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement to implement and manage your B2C marketing campaigns via Oracle Responsys Campaign Management. Create personalized customer loyalty and reward programs to increase customer retention, increase purchases, and strengthen relationships with the customer. 

Salesforce does not provide loyalty programs and instead tries to grow relationships by using CRM.

Best Option: Oracle

Pros and Cons of Oracle Eloqua and Salesforce Sales Cloud

Eloqua: If you need a powerful marketing automation solution for large organizations, Eloqua is the top choice

Pros

1. Having a well-crafted campaign builder
2. Users can quickly create customized microsites with their HyperSite builder
3. Their Marketing automation is regarded as among the most effective solutions for enterprise

Cons

1. Costly plans begin at $2,000 per month with long-term subscriptions
2. Google Ads integration is not available
3. Oracle Marketing Cloud implementations take longer than expected due to the typical organization

Salesforce: Salesforce is a great choice for small and mid-sized businesses as well as large organizations

Pros

1. You may add or delete features according to your needs
2. A complete and comprehensive CRM solution
3. It's easy to get sales representatives who are already familiar with its use since it's one of the most popular CRM solutions

Cons

• Configuration and setup can be difficult and time-consuming
• The interface is cluttered and can be hard to navigate
• Need to purchase add-ons to get the most out of the software

Conclusion: 

Both marketing automation tools have advantages and disadvantages, but Salesforce sales Cloud has a slight edge over Oracle Eloqua. In addition, it has greater integration capabilities with external products than Eloqua does. With greater integration, more organizations can send out effective marketing campaigns.