Be Bold
Contribute supported Be Bold in building the SMS Connector as an extension of Oracle Eloqua and manages the application on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
- Company
Be Bold - Challenge
To enhance the efficiency of marketing campaigns. Be Bold wanted a tool to send automated and personalized SMS communications. - Solution
A custom-built tool hosted, monitored, and maintained on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Contribute manages Be Bold’s custom application on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Automated and personalized SMS communication supports the marketing campaigns that Be Bold designs for its clients. Contribute assisted Be Bold in developing the SMS Connector as an extension of Oracle Eloqua. Additionally, Contribute handles the hosting, monitoring, and maintenance of the application on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Be Bold specializes in strategic marketing, digital marketing, and marketing automation. Clients of the Antwerp-based marketing company include Eneco, Mazda, CM, and VUB.
“We develop digital marketing strategies for our clients,” says project manager Emily Lippens. “We implement the necessary tools, help our clients develop campaigns using them, provide training, etc.”
One of the tools that Be Bold has gained extensive experience with over the years,
Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation is one of the tools that Be Bold has built extensive experience with over the years. At Be Bold’s request, Contribute developed a custom tool: the Be Bold SMS Connector, which was later further customized by the Be Bold team. Specifically, it’s an application that functions as an extension for Oracle Eloqua. “When a client maps out a marketing flow in Oracle Eloqua, you can easily use SMS as an additional channel,” explains Emily Lippens.
Dynamic communication
Marketing automation aims to automate marketing actions as much as possible. A simple example explains how the SMS Connector works in this context. Imagine you see an interesting item on a webshop, add it to your cart, but don’t check out immediately. At that moment, the automated marketing flow kicks in. After one day, the system sends an email reminding you that there’s a product waiting in your cart. If that email remains unread for another day, the flow can, among other things, trigger engagement through a different channel. But there are 100 ways to do this, not just via another channel. For example, you can also set up a wait step to send another email as a reminder a few days later.
Another popular application of the SMS Connector is for events and seminars. “Through SMS, organizers keep participants informed: ‘The next session starts in 15 minutes,’ or ‘What did you think of the presentation?’ with a link to an evaluation form.”
Through the Be Bold SMS Connector, companies can set up dynamic, personalized communication with their customers. “It’s a very direct way of communicating,” says Emily Lippens, “which leads to higher customer satisfaction and strengthens the brand.” The application allows Be Bold to extend concrete communication via Oracle Eloqua—typically through email and social media—by adding SMS as an additional channel.
Application without worries
Initially, Be Bold hosted the SMS Connector on Oracle Cloud themselves. “But ultimately, managing and maintaining the technical side of the application isn’t our core business,” continues Emily Lippens. “When there were some issues with the availability of the application, it became clear that we were better off bringing in a specialist for this.”
That’s why Be Bold turned to Contribute again, this time requesting that they take over the entire technical management of the SMS Connector.
Contribute migrated the Be Bold SMS Connector to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). To optimize the new cloud infrastructure, Contribute adjusted the application’s architecture. Both the application server and the database are now hosted on OCI. “Outsourcing is the key here,” says Emily Lippens. “Contribute takes care of the entire technical picture. We use the SMS Connector in the form of a managed service.”
Everything that happens behind the scenes— from continuous monitoring to the installation of security patches— is handled by Contribute, leaving Be Bold with peace of mind. The services provided include monitoring the infrastructure, the database, and the availability and response time of the website. Additionally, a backup of the database is taken every night as standard.
Predictable Costs
The managed service model offers Be Bold two key advantages. On one hand, it allows the company to focus fully on its core business: developing the digital marketing strategies for its clients and the accompanying marketing automation. When SMS is needed as a communication channel, the SMS Connector is immediately available for that purpose.
On the other hand, the managed service model allows Be Bold to treat the SMS Connector not as an investment, but as an operational and predictable cost. This makes it easier for the company to maintain a clear overview of the application’s costs, which in turn simplifies pricing for the use of the SMS Connector by clients.
To save costs, Contribute replaced the Weblogic cloud service with an OCI Compute instance and its own Tomcat application server. This is more cost-effective, as the new OCI cloud Weblogic service has become more expensive on OCI.
Result
The SMS Connector has been running smoothly on OCI for about a year now. “The environment has been correctly scaled to serve multiple clients simultaneously,” concludes Emily Lippens. “If needed in the future, we can easily scale up through Contribute. And who knows, we may also integrate the SMS Connector with other marketing automation tools down the line.”
We offer our clients a powerful additional communication channel with the SMS Connector. We confidently leave the technical management behind the scenes to Contribute.
Emily Lippens, Project manager at Be Bold
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