Motiva AI vs. Eloqua's Advanced Intelligence: What You Should Know

Cross-shopping Motiva AI and Eloqua's Advanced Intelligence? Here's what you need to know.

If you've been considering adding an extra level of intelligence to your email marketing strategy, you're certainly not alone. Marketers are realizing that artificial intelligence and machine learning are crucial to their success.

As your audience demands more personalization, you need to get the most out of your contact database efficiently and accurately. If you aren't, you run the risk of getting beaten to it by your competition.

So which will you choose? Motiva's artificial intelligence platform, or Eloqua's Advanced Intelligence? There are some critical differences between them, and it's more than just the name — although that's an excellent place to start.

Artificial Intelligence vs. Advanced Intelligence

Advanced intelligence is not the same as artificial intelligence. Yes, Eloqua's advanced intelligence does provide some additional reporting, but stops short of actually learning anything from your audience's behaviors – a significant component of artificial intelligence.

Think of it this way: Advanced intelligence can tell you whether the light is on or off; artificial intelligence will look for the pattern of on-off-on and make predictions about its future states.

Send Time Optimization

Let's apply this difference to send time optimization. Eloqua's send time optimization looks at your prospect's last open time and assumes that it will remain constant in the future. If that open/send time changes, Eloqua will then use that new time as the assumption going forward.

Eloqua also assumes that the send time will be the open time, which isn't necessarily true. Consider your own behavior surrounding email. Do you open your email at the same time every day? Do you engage at the same time every day? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Most likely, these times vary from day to day, depending on what other business or personal demands you're juggling.

Motiva's patented per-contact Send Time AI starts with your prospect's engagement history (either through past Motiva steps or Eloqua steps) and experiments until the ideal send time for your prospect is pinpointed. If your prospect suddenly changes their behavior, our Send Time AI will take this new information into account. It will then update its predictions for the time at which your prospect is most likely to engage with your messaging. It's constantly learning and refining its predictions.

Our Send Time AI goes beyond just open signals, and also looks at other patterns of behavior associated with that individual contact. It looks at clicks, website visits, form completions, and any other activity available and uses that in its send time optimization.

The big difference here is that Motiva's artificial intelligence will learn over time based on your prospect's (likely) shifting behavior. Eloqua's advanced intelligence doesn't learn. Instead, it simply looks at the last send/open time and schedules future sends to match.

Why is this a big deal? Look no further than Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, which rolled out in 2021. If your prospect is part of the estimated 57% of the population that uses Apple Mail on iOS or MacOS devices, then every email they receive gets scanned as it arrives, which sends back a false open signal. 

Eloqua updated their reporting so if an email auto-scanner is detected, it will not be included in your results. But if a significant portion of your audience uses Apple Mail, then there's just a big question mark for all those contacts. Eloqua's Advanced Intelligence has no idea when the optimal send time is for those prospects.

And while Apple is the most prominent example, they are by no means the only email service provider scanning incoming messages. Exchange, Barracuda, and Proofpoint can be (and generally are) similarly configured and have been doing this for years. Google is also doing it under specific circumstances. And each of these ESPs are chipping away at the reliability of Eloqua's send time assumptions.

Expect other ESPs to follow suit.

Fatigue Analysis

Eloqua's approach is to score by response rate, but it is subject to false positives and negatives, again, because of the way different email providers behave and how Eloqua handles those signals. If Eloqua is ignoring all the open signals from auto-scanners, it means you have a huge blind spot in that risk assessment.

With Motiva's Dark Pool database cleanup, a contact's "risk" is scored by looking across their history and their ESP's domain behaviors. That gives us a sense of which contacts are likely fatigued versus just getting filtered out, which are hard bounces that Oracle misses, and which are ESP-generated auto-opens and clicks. In addition, Motiva allows you to set a score and throttle sends dynamically.

Subject Line Analysis

Oracle's subject line analysis simply tries to predict above or below average performance given your past emails. It looks at keywords in your subject lines and makes a straight 1:1 assumption about those keywords and open performance. Again, Eloqua makes assumptions about the future by just looking at the past and ignoring any larger context or performing any real analysis.

Motiva uses deep language analysis to suggest improvements to every subject line in real time, checking across seven language dimensions and calling out grammar, spelling, length, tone, and how likely it is to be considered spam (and filtered away from your prospect's inbox).

Motiva takes this artificial intelligence functionality much further by providing customers with automated multivariate message testing, frequency management and optimization, segmentation finder, and related reporting. As a result, Motiva enhances productivity allowing marketing teams to do more with less while supercharging bottom-line results.

If you want true artificial intelligence, then Motiva is the only choice. 

Ready to see what Motiva can do for you? Schedule a demo.