Unica and Email Service Provider (ESP) Integration – Best Practices
Let’s Geek out on Unica! Best Practices Blog post: Unica and Email Service Provider (ESP) integration. I think 2020 will be shaping up to be the year where everyone starts to realize they have too much tooling to manage in their martech stacks. I have been getting many requests lately around best practices for getting tools to work together or to provide clarity about what function should be performed in which tool in the stack. Recently, one of our banking customers reached out for some advice. They have outgrown their current email service provider, replacing them with a larger enterprise-grade email engine. They hit me with two questions: What are the best practices around integrating our new ESP and Unica? How do we architect the integration to get the most out of both platforms? The first question is pretty straightforward, as Unica was designed to integrate with any ESP. With the release of Unica - version 12 later this year, it will be even easier with Unica Link (more information in a future post) to achieve seamless integration. The second question is endemic of my opening prediction – confusion on the part of marketers about “what gets done where” because of the proliferation of tooling. Just because we can do segmentation or A/B testing in a given solution doesn’t mean we should. The answer also requires an understanding of the functionality in the context- how a customer is set up operationally. There’s no one right solution. So on to the answers: Diagram 1 below shows what we call the Unica to ESP “return trip” integration. Step one is to generate the email records to be sent to the ESP as a result of a flowchart run in an output list. This is specified in the mail list process box in...