Within the next couple of weeks, you’ll be seeing some new Oracle Marketing Cloud updates as part of the Fall ‘14 release. Here's a look at a few of my favorite upcoming features:

Documentation Hub

Finally, a dedicated area for documentation on all things Oracle Marketing Cloud — including API documentation! This long overdue feature is a very exciting value add. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a huge advocate of Topliners, but it is difficult to find documentation as it’s often disorganized. With this new documentation experience, you’ll be able to trust that any documentation you reference is accurate and up to date.

More Lead Scoring Options

Oracle Marketing Cloud keeps making their lead scoring module better and stronger. They’ve made it even easier to configure on, with more drag-and-drop functionality and double-click to add components, as well as boosted the efficiency in scoring.

But the biggest value add from this feature is around increased support for page tag groups. For marketers who have adopted page tagging, it is easier to score based on a group than by adding individual page tags. Similarly, we can now score based on specific websites. With this feature, we can create a more accurate model, which should lead to better prioritization of leads.

New Reporting Features

Anytime I see an update to reporting functionality, I get excited. Reporting and benchmarking allows us to know if our efforts are effective, and helps us to make better marketing decisions. Oracle Marketing Cloud has given us increased visibility into asset engagement by providing visual reports that show campaign performance with emails, as well as landing page analysis segmented by campaign type.

The most interesting feature is the new Marketing Operations Center. Not only is it a useful dashboard, but you’ll also notice a much nicer UI. No more drilling into external call failures to see why a specific call has failed, or having a panic attack when you receive an automated message. The dashboard gives you a summary of the types of errors you’re seeing. One of my favorite parts of the dashboard is the CRM integration overview. Here you can see the data that is flowing into or from your CRM. You can see not only the throughput but also the age in minutes as well as what contacts went through in the last hour.

These are only a few of the changes that you’ll see with this release (you can check out in the full release notes here). With these changes, marketers will have documentation at our fingertips, be able to build smarter scoring mechanisms, and have more visibility into our database health. Most importantly, with enhanced functionality, we can become smarter, more revenue-focused marketers.

Want to learn more about Oracle Marketing Cloud's new features? Contact us to connect with our marketing services experts.

See how you can boost your marketing efforts in our guide, 3 Steps to Effective Email Marketing.