Do you ever get tired of exporting data to Excel when segments don’t quite seem to get at the data you really want? Fortunately, there are 3 powerful features available with Oracle Eloqua segments that allow you to merge, intersect or trim 2 different filters or lists. For those of you familiar with SQL, this is very similar to using a JOIN.
Let’s assume that we have been provided 2 separate lists from recent events at your organization. We have already gone ahead and uploaded the lists to Eloqua and named them as Attended Event – A and Attended Event – B. Below is what we currently have in our segment:
Merge
Merge is a contact list containing all of the contacts from 2 filters or shared lists.
We have been asked to pull a few different results from the 2 events. The first request is to create a new contact list in Eloqua with all of the attendees for both events. To do this, simply select both lists in the segment and right-click. From the context window, choose the option to “Merge”.
Eloqua will create a new Merged List as shown below:
Intersect
Intersect is a contact list containing the contacts that were common in 2 filters or shared lists.
The next request was to see how many contacts attended both events. To do this, you will again select both shared lists and then right-click and choose Intersect from the context window.
The result is a contact list that shows 5 records that are common in both shared lists as shown below:
Trim
Use this option to compare 2 filters or lists and trim/remove all the records from a chosen filter that doesn't have any matches in the other filter.
The last request was to provide a list of contacts that attended Event – B, but did not attend Event – A. To do this, you will again select both shared lists then right-click and choose Trim from the context window.
For this option, you will also need to choose from which filter/list you are going to trim. We will choose to trim from Event – B.
We already know that there were 151 people who attended Event – B, and we learned from the intersect that 5 of those attended Event – A. Therefore, the result for the trim is 146, and we now have a list that we can use for an email follow-up targeted for that specific group.
There are many different ways to utilize the Merge, Intersect, and Trim features. We could have taken this example one step further and created an additional filter with people who have submitted a form or opened an email then used an Intersect to see how many of these people have recently engaged.
Try and do a few tests on your own, and you will quickly see how much time this will save you by not having to export lists into Excel for conducting additional analysis. This will help you scale your efforts for your business when building segments and improve your productivity.
Here are a few Marketing Cloud courses that were helpful with this particular topic:
- B2B: Profile & Target
- B2B: Relevance and Retention
Good luck!