Unica Deliver has gone through an epic transformation over the past couple of years. Learn more about its capabilities in the new release.

email marketing automation: 7 tips for increasing email open rates

With the HCL Unica Deliver product introduction in version 12.1, we can say that HCL Unica Suite is a complete martech solution. It is a reliable, scalable, and seamless digital messaging solution that easily integrates with other Unica Suite products. Now, marketers can actually send out emails and SMS to the targeted audience using the Unica Deliver product. In this article, let’s check how to configure Unica Deliver and its basic components. What do you need as a Pre-requisite? Campaign Installation: You would just need to install HCL Unica Campaign, and all required file systems, system database tables, and utilities for Unica Deliver will also get installed by default. There is no separate installer for Unica Deliver. In other words, you do not have to install Unica Deliver, but you would just need to enable it. Account Details: When you opt to use Unica Deliver, the Deliver onboarding team will provide you account details like Deliver Account name and its password. How to configure: 1. Go to Unica Configuration Settings “Affinium|Campaign|partitions|partition1|server|internal” and set the value as “Yes” for the “deliverInstalled” property. 2. Go to Unica Configuration Settings “Affinium|Deliver|serverComponentsAndLocations|hostedServices” and set values below. Note: The Deliver Hostnames will be provided by the Deliver On-boarding team. It may vary in case the account you are using belongs to another Deliver Data Centre. You would just need to use the provided Host name correctly in this configuration. 3. Go to Settings|Users on Unica UI. Click on the user – asm_admin. Click on Edit data sources. Click on Add new button to create a new data source. Provide the below details. Data source UNICA_HOSTED_SERVICES Data source login <Enter the account name received from onboarding team> Data source password <Password of your account> Confirm password <Password of your account>   4. The Unica UI users...

In our experience supporting Unica in a variety of Martech configurations, we can see that there are a number of common questions around robustness, customization, automation, and most importantly, security customers frequently come to support with various problems with their existing delivery mechanism, which includes: ● Multiple configurations needed for integration ● Instability caused by unplanned system changes and downtime ● Performance challenges ● Application glitches - duplicate email delivery because of network connectivity. ● Security & GDPR ● Product defect and enhancements managed over multiple vendors ● Incomplete documentation and support skill sets needed to implement a full solution. This article will help you to understand the challenges our customers face with many martech stacks today. The article will also introduce some of the benefits and features of the Unica Deliver V12.1 Existing delivery mechanism: Issues & challenges today. Introducing HCL Unica Deliver To overcome these challenges, HCL introduced HCL Unica Deliver in V12.1 to provide seamlessly integrated, automated, and ad hoc engagement of customers across digital channels with timely, personalized digital messages. Unica Deliver operates with Unica Campaign, Unica Journey, and Unica Interact. When you install Campaign, several Deliver components and tables are automatically installed as part of the Campaign installation. You don't need to bother about the separate installation as Deliver works with SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, MariaDB, HCL OneDB as system databases. Our customers can choose any database they wanted to use with Campaign. Benefits of Unica Deliver Unica Deliver helps to resolve all the above issues, and in addition to that, it provides various benefits to the marketer. Digital Channel Coverage: Seamlessly integrate with an ever-expanding ecosystem of digital messaging touchpoints, including email, SMS, and more. Unified Omni Channel Experience: Leverage the powerful context and continuity offered by the Unica Platform’s system of record, ensuring that...

Which email design works best, or where should the offer banner be added to gauge more interest from the target users? Comparing and analyzing the success and acceptance of different versions of Marketing Offers or Mailing or different Segments is the essence of today’s Marketing. A popular saying goes, “comparison is the thief of joy,” does not hold good for comparing the results by different Marketing strategies. In this case, the comparison isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When you compare different variables in Marketing Offers, Marketing Mails, or your website, or your social media posts, you can uncover which one performs the best. This type of comparison and analysis can be best achieved by A/B testing, also called Split Testing. HCL's Unica suite has the capability to carry out the Comparative analysis from its different Inbound and outbound products for: Mailing comparison using A/B testing To find out the most effective email design/message contents / Mailing subject in Unica Deliver. Campaign effectiveness using Target VS Control group To check the success and effectiveness of Campaigning in Unica Campaign by comparing the Target group vs. Control group responses. Offer version comparison using A/B testing. To find out the most effective Offers or Offer versions in Interact. This article will see each of the above mentioned 3 methods in detail and how it is used for Comparative analysis. Mailing comparison using A/B testing Introduction In Unica Deliver, the User can configure and conduct A/B testing and automatically send the most effective version (winner) of an HTML email message to the audience. By sending the mailing as an A/B test, responses from the recipient are used to determine the most effective email design and message content. When a user sends a mailing as an A/B test, the system sends different email messages, or...

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...