Many moons ago, when I first started in Marketing (at the tender age of about 5, I might add), optimization was all about which Product Silo gets the most high-value customers for their Campaign targets. In those days, Campaign targets were all about the number of people being contacted, rather than responding.   The concept of contact fatigue was unclear and was mainly managed by Campaign prioritization. Let’s say, the mortgages have key sales targets this month, and they get all the best customers. However, Credit Cards are also behind on their sales, so they need them. The arguments about who gets the best customers could go on during the planning phase. But someone had to step in and manage the overall customer to stop them from opting out of Marketing altogether. As marketing evolved into targeted communications, the optimization issue got more complicated. With a much smaller number of people to contact, how do you choose who should get your offers, where, and when?  You still have the key sales targets for each product silo, but now you better understand the customers that are likely to respond.  So you start to analyse the results of offers. This gives insights into who is more likely to respond to a particular offer and when. We can then start to choose the best set of customers to receive each offer at the best time. However, as Marketing teams gained experience and became more savvy, other constraints came into the mix. Which channel do the customers want to be contacted on? How do I improve my ROI? My team only has a budget of $50,000. What email should I send to my customer who has just purchased from the website? My customer received 3 emails last week, and they are likely to ask me...

Whats the state of Martech in 2020? HCL Unica and Econsultancy collaborated and surveyed marketers across the globle to find answers.

​The new HCL TechConnect week is here. For those who are new to our events, here is a quick look at what you may have missed out... ​ What we captured in last TechConnect and what can you learn in the upcoming sessions? ​​ Back in February, on the first Monday of IBM Think 2019, a group of 35 Marketing Software users gathered for the 1st  HCL TechConnect kick-starting the engagement with our product experts and marketing peers, for what we envision, will become the platform of choice for partners and customers. This first session was a huge success with industry leaders from Banking, Insurance, Telecom, Retail and other verticals sharing their feedback on our marketing suite (Campaign, Interact, Marketing Operation, Contact Optimization and all the add-ons). With this feedback, we formally started the ideation process with a new design thinking approach. We decided this would be the baseline for our road-map and the next release of the Marketing software suite. “It is beginning to feel like Unica again but much better and more transparent”. We wanted to establish that our vision at HCL is to engage Marketing Software users early on in our road-map design cycle to ensure the products and features we deliver have more relevance to their marketing needs. This aspect of our hyper care strategy is already producing great results. Our support team has reached a satisfaction score of 9/10 in addressing your requests. Moreover, the last V.11.1 release covered more than 50 of your requests for enhancements; making it the largest release since Unica was acquired by IBM. ​ ​Therefore, it was heartening to see that so many of you appreciate that transparency has been restored and you can openly raise requests in our community. We want to hear and respond to the conversations our users are having on...