There’s a new attitude in the air in marketing departments—the emergence of the performance marketer, growth marketer, and increasingly, the goal-based marketer. As a goal-based marketer, you are trying to achieve specific revenue targets weekly. You are monitoring key milestones knowing that missing a target at any one milestone will keep you from hitting your overall target. You are checking goal achievement throughout the day. If you reach Wednesday at noon and are at less than 50% of your weekly target, it’s time to do something about it. Now. The milestone events come from many actions in many systems – and you are connected to all of them in real-time. Sound familiar? Goal-Based Marketing with Unica Journey Unica Journey was designed to meet the specific needs of goal-based marketers. Here’s how. To do goal-based marketing well, you need to get the moving parts right. The first is setting the goals for each milestone. Then, the sequencing of communications around key dates, milestones, or triggers. The sequencing is important enough that you want to see it laid out. Once you’ve built your customer journey, you monitor it in real-time at each stage. You’ve got event triggers coming in across multiple entry points, and if anyone of them underperforms, your weekly target is at risk. Once you spot a conversion issue, you’re going to want to pause the journey and make adjustments to improve performance. Here’s how we do goal-based marketing in Unica Journey in three easy steps. Step 1 - Plan the goals. Start planning your goals by identifying what we call the golden milestones in your journey. A golden milestone is an event that must happen for your customer to get value from your offering. If it’s a wedding registry journey, then the bride to be will get no value...

Everyone is trying to do more with less – quickly. I have clients who ask me all the time “How do I makes things faster?” or “How do I streamline campaign execution while doing more campaigns?” Both valid questions. Folks want to execute at scale, do more personalization, and run more campaigns in more channels simultaneously. This is where the magic that is Unica can come to the rescue. 

Offers are all around us, you probably just don’t notice them.It’s like when you go to buy a new car. You never noticed how many people drive a Mini Cooper until you’re thinking about getting one. Then you see them everywhere.Unless you work in retail, you probably never noticed these offer strategies:

I had a client reach out and ask me about campaign measurement and reporting. As in, they couldn’t do it. They said, “we have a campaign measurement problem.” On closer inspection, they had a very good handle on tracking their digital media spend and performance. Still, they couldn’t align their paid media performance to the campaigns they were running in other channels like email and the call center, mobile, etc. Turns out, they had a very good unified tag management construct for paid media, but that’s it. They were using Unica Campaign for other channels but couldn’t put all of the pieces together. Also, they were rolling up campaign results between paid media and other channels manually in another external system to support marketing dashboards and reporting. Discovering this, I decided to be bold and tell them that they didn’t have a campaign measurement problem; they had a campaign execution framework problem. They needed a set of campaign identifiers that run across all channels, including paid media. Lucky for us, Unica has a campaign execution framework. It’s called Unica Plan. Diagram 1 below shows the campaign execution framework in Unica Plan. [caption id="attachment_4742" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Diagram 1: Unica Plan’s campaign execution framework[/caption] Marketing Plans sit at the top of the campaign execution framework in Unica Plan. Plans represent the annual marketing plan for a budget holding organization in marketing. That is typically a line of business, brand, or product group. For example, the credit card portfolio at a bank, the loyalty program at a hotel group, or the plus-size brands at a fashion retailer. Each Plan owner sets up Programs to fit their marketing organization’s structure. Programs represent a large marketing initiative with multiple marketing activities under it. Programs generally align with a specific product or audience. In our examples...

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...