• General Eloqua documentation 🡥 (UW-Madison wide)
• How to Request access 
• How to Login _▼
• Using WSB Email Templates _▼
  • Parts of the email
• Common pitfalls/mistakes to watch out for
• Accessibility quick tips
• Uploading Contacts _▼
• Presend Checklist for WSB (UW Presend Checklist 🡥)
• Sending your first email
• File Organization within Eloqua
• WSB Brand Guidelines for emails
• How to create a non-Eloqua sent email in Eloqua
• Creating engaging email content 🡥  (UW-Madison IT)

UW-Madison vs School of Business Documentation

Most Eloqua documentation is available on the UW-Madison wide Eloqua Marketing Automation Knowledge Base. Use this to reference basics like navigating Eloqua, uploading contacts, and setting up email campaigns. The Marketing Automation team, which serves all of UW-Madison, can be reached at marketingautomation@wisc.edu, and usually responds to emails within a couple business days. They can answer most questions on how to use Eloqua, but may not be able to answer questions on WSB Templates or other design recommendations.

The documentation below, as well as the subpages of this page on the wiki, are for WSB specific needs, such as using our custom templates, as well as some of our team's guidelines. The WSB Web Team can be reached at webteam@wsb.wisc.edu. We aim to complete Eloqua related requests within one week of receiving your email.

Eloqua Canvas Course

Basic Eloqua training is done through the UW-Madison's Eloqua Canvas course (created by the Marketing Automation team). All new users will automatically gain access to the course. How to Request access to Eloqua.

If you are an existing user and would like access to the Canvas course training, please fill out the Redwood Canvas Access Form.

The canvas course was created for all UW-Madison users, and we do a few things a little differently at WSB. Please refer to the documentation below for WSB specific information.

A few WSB specific notes on the course: 

• References to your “Department” and “Team” refers to all of WSB. We are the biggest Eloqua user group in UW-Madison! Everything WSB users create is visible to all other WSB users.
  • Please review our guidelines for file organization.
• We have custom WSB templates for you to use. Outside of the canvas course, you will not be making your own email Templates, nor will you need to use the built-in Eloqua templates.
  • If you need a new custom template created, please contact the WSB web team!
  • You can skim over the sections on Templates and Advanced Styling, as these are managed by the Web Team.
• When uploading contacts, your “Contact Label” should always be “WSB”

• Your “email group” is usually just your department within WSB.

• Review our documentation for WSB specific rules and guidelines on email settings.

How to Login to Eloqua:

1. Open up the Firefox browser (you may need to download the most recent version). Eloqua is buggy with other browsers.
2. Go to login.eloqua.com
3. Ignore the sign in fields and select "Sign in with SSO or another account"
4. In the "Company Name" field, type in "uwmadison" (one word, not case sensitive) and click "Sign in"
5. It will redirect you to your typical wisc.edu login, where you can login as usual.

Using WSB Email Templates

Please wait to reference this section until after you've completed the Eloqua Canvas Training.

Finding WSB Email Templates

1. Go to Assets > Emails, and click the "Create" button in the top right corner.
2.  A sidebar will appear on the right side of your screen, where you can name your email and fill out other details (feel free to skip preview text/subject for now). Click Continue.
3. A bunch of template options will appear. Go to the "All" tab, then open the WSB Templates folder (sorting alphabetically by Name can help you find it).
4. Next you'll see a bunch of folders of the departments within WSB. Select your department, and from within you should be able to pick the appropriate template.
5. Once you select your template, you're ready to start editing!

Editing Your Email

WSB email templates are designed to include everything you need- and a lot of what you don't. You will probably be deleting most sections of your email, keeping only the parts you need for that particular email send.

Do not delete or edit the headers and footers of your email! These are all branded elements.

Common Pitfalls/ Things to be careful of:

• When sending a test email, do not use the "Email Checker" option. It checks emails by clicking on all the links, which includes the unsubscribe button. Always select "HTML email" instead.
• The sender email must always end in "@explore.wisc.edu". Any others will cause the email to bounce, and your email will be marked as invalid.
• Fill out your sender properties according to the guidelines.
• Make sure to select a folder whenever you upload/create anything (photos, emails, etc). If you add something to the root folder, please move it to the appropriate department folder afterwards.
• When creating an email, choose one of the templates for your specific department.
• When uploading contacts, be careful when entering info, since it will override the contact's info for all other groups (across UW-Madison)
• Prior to activating an email, go over the Presend Checklist
• Don't forget to fill out preview text! It's optional, but if you don't fill it out, the first thing a user will see under the subject line will be "Trouble viewing this email?"
• When uploading a photo from within an email, make sure to select a folder for it to go into. Otherwise, it will end up in the root folder "all"!
  • Rather than uploading from your email, it's better to upload your photos from within the image library itself (you can open another tab in Eloqua if you want to keep your email open) by going to Assets>Components>Images and navigating to the folder you want to upload to, then click "Upload" in the top right corner. From there, you can upload multiple images at a time.
• Eloqua will prevent you from sending the same email to the same person twice, even if you completely change the email. Make sure you're creating a new email, not just editing an old one.
• When adding an email address, you need to make it a link. To add an email address link, highlight the text, click on the hyperlink icon, and on the left sidebar add "mailto:emailaddress@wisc.edu".

Accessibility Quick Tips

Ensuring accessible emails is important both for improving usability and being inclusive of all email users. The following tips are just the basics, and it's recommended you take your own time to research accessibility strategies. Review campus's email accessibility guide for details beyond these tips. 

• Add alternate text to all photos, especially photos with text.
  • After you've inserted a photo into the email, select it, and type into the alt text field in the left sidebar. 
  • Alt text should include any text that's within the photo, or a basic description of what's in the photo. If it's a headshot of a person, simple type in their name.
• Don't use images that are larger than necessary. Images can slow down your email and consume a lot of data, which is especially problematic for people with limited internet. It also increases the odds of your email being blocked by a spam filter.
  • Full-width images should be 600 pixels wide. (If image quality is a priority, 1200px is okay)
  • Half-width (and smaller) images should be 300 pixels wide. 
  • For bonus points, run your image through tinypng.com before uploading it to further shrink the file size.  
  • Photo editing quick guide
• Only use all caps for acronyms. Screen readers read anything in all caps letter by letter, not as a word. If you wish to emphasize text, use bold. (don't use underlines, those should be reserved for links only).
• Do not use underlines unless it's for a link! Users expect underlines to be links, and it will be confusing if they are not.
• Do not use phrases like "click here", "use this link" for links/buttons. Link text should make it clear where the user is going, with as much context as possible. "Sign up for our newsletter" "Read more about ____" "Apply now" are all decent examples of button/call to action text. When an action doesn't make sense, link text like "student resources", "list of business organizations", "our career team" might be appropriate. (This is done because screen reader users sometimes navigate by link to "skim" content. If the text linked doesn't provide enough context, a user will have to spend time figuring it out.)
  • Likewise, don't include the entire URL as text in your email. Don't use: "https://www.reallylongurl.com/morewordscontinously" (this is because screen readers will spell out every letter in the link. You can imagine how tedious that is.)
• Pay attention to header hierarchy. In the case of our email templates, the H1 is used exclusively for the department name, and after that the main headers of the email are H2s. H3s should be used as subheaders of H2s.
  • Design note: Please don't bold headers. They are already styled to be large.
• Use sentence case for links, buttons, and headings

Please review the Email Template Breakdown documentation for more info on each part of our templates.

Contact Uploads

When uploading contacts, your “Contact Label” should always be “WSB”. Please review the contact upload documentation for step by step instructions.

Excel template for contact lists: wsb-contact-upload-example.xlsx 

Personalized greetings

If you want to have a personalized greeting in your email, such as "Dear First Name", you can use a Field Merge to pull in that name from your Contact list.

Creating and Sending Your First Email Campaign

Once you've completed the Canvas course and reviewed the documentation above, you can start creating your first email campaign. Because you're likely to need extra assistance on your first attempt, make sure to give yourself extra time to ask for help as well as for the review process after creation. (Ideally, 1-2 weeks) 

If you're having trouble setting up your first email, you can contact the UW Marketing Automation team at marketingautomation@wisc.edu, or for WSB-specific Eloqua questions, the WSB Web Team at webteam@wsb.wisc.edu. In addition to answering questions over email, we are also happy to set up meetings with you to walk through the process of creating your email step by step.

Once you think you've gotten everything ready on your email campaign, you will need the web team to review and activate it. Follow the steps on asking the web team to activate your emails. Most likely, you will have a few mistakes on your first email, so be ready to implement any feedback we give you(if you need additional assistance, we can set up a meeting). Once everything is set up correctly, we will activate (send) your email campaign.

Tip: If your email is partially done but is still waiting on some content, please reach out to us with what you have so far so we have enough time to give you feedback.