In my fourteen plus years with Unica, I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with some incredible projects that delivered outstanding achievements using our software. My personal favorite example was when one of our customers consolidated over two hundred newsletter campaigns for individual newspaper publications into a single lights-out campaign. Let me repeat that- from two hundred individual campaigns to one. That is a serious amount of time and money saved every week, week-on-week. Another favorite example of mine is when a major UK retailer invested a couple of million dollars in building a completely new data warehouse and implementing Unica. The uplift attributed to coupon redemption in the very first campaign paid for the entire project. When these tools are implemented right, the rewards aren’t just observable and tangible; they’re staggering. And my experience in the vast number of cases is overwhelmingly positive. But what I want to talk about in this article are some of the obstacles to achieving these results. There was one occasion where I encountered a situation where, despite doing our best, adoption of the suite was only partially successful, and some modules were ultimately replaced. Why? Because in being aware of these situations, we can watch out for the markers in the future and hopefully intervene in time. Those that don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. Failure is only absolute when we learn nothing from it. So what was different in this particular case? The Unica delivery team was the same. The software was the same. The customer’s senior management team's appetite to make the implementation success was there, and they were active and present. The appetite from the users to make the project a success was there too. The main representative from the user team was skilled, intelligent, and inventive. The...

Email marketing is evolving and still remains one of the most effective channels for running campaigns. Today’s customers want their email communications to be unique, tailored to their needs and behavior. There should be a mechanism for a marketer to be able to decide which email variant they want to send, at what time, and to whom without having to lose precious time and energy in repeating the same task time and again. That, In a nutshell, is Marketing Automation. Why is Email Marketing crucial in any digital communications strategy? There are countless statistics out there that underline the importance of digital marketing in modern business, good old email has a particularly rich vein of statistics to mine. For instance, globally, there are about 5.6 billion active email accounts (Statista, 2019), of which 3.9 are used daily (Statista, 2020). Marketers that use segmentation and targeting note as much as a 760% increase in revenue. (Campaign Monitor, 2019), making email not only cost-effective but also highly profitable.  Whilst email has largely stayed the same from a technology perspective, the devices we use to open and read emails have shifted dramatically. Mobile opens account for 46% of opens (Litmus.com 2018). This means that for a significant percentage of us, we are still checking and reading emails on the go and on a scale that beggars belief. Understandably, the most opened emails relate to hobbies (MailChimp, 2018), this indicates that we are still happy to take time to look into areas that interest or engage us. What’s more, relevant communication is welcomed by recipients. GDPR in Europe has forced senders to raise their games and make sure that what they are sending to their customers is engaging, relevant, and most importantly of all, explicitly wanted by their customers. What is Email Marketing? Email...