Unica V12.1 has been released to power the next generation goal-based marketing, and Unica v12.1 is the first release to enable an HCL Licensing portal called FlexNet. Once the user deploys the HCL Unica products, they will need to configure required licenses with HCL Unica products to start using them. Without applying for a valid license, the user would not be able to login into Unica environments. Licensing in Unica is to validate products' entitlement and measure the product consumptions based on various units. HCL Unica products support the below license models. Term based licenses Perpetual licenses If you are upgrading from earlier versions of Unica products to version 12.1, you can have the option to take a Perpetual type license for the existing products you are entitled to use. And for new product licenses, you can take the option of Term based licenses. This is flexible as per your entitlement plan. In the upgrade scenario, you could have Term and Perpetual licenses in your entitlements. While you upgrade to 12.1, you should have default entitlements with Perpetual type licenses in your FlexNet account. HCL supports the below type of counting mechanism for products in the HCL Unica suite. Configuring Unica 12.1 – Licenses Once you perform a clean install or upgrade install and tries to login to the Unica application, you would be prompted to enter the license details. Below are the high-level steps to configure the licenses for Unica 12.1. Pre-requisites: Before you start with license configuration you will need to fulfill the below perquisites: Make sure you have FlexNet (HCL Licensing Portal) login details. Login to FlexNet portal. Check if you can see entitlements for the products they are entitled to. Please raise a support ticket if you do see the products in entitlements. You will need...

HCL Software is excited to announce that Unica, a leading enterprise marketing solution, has been recognized as a November 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Multichannel Marketing Hub (MMH). Our team at Unica takes great pride in this distinction, as customer feedback continues to shape our products and services. In its announcement, Gartner explains, “The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice is a recognition of vendors in this market by verified end-user professionals, taking into account both the number of reviews and the overall user ratings.” To ensure fair evaluation, Gartner maintains rigorous criteria for recognizing vendors with a high customer satisfaction rate. Here are some excerpts from customers that contributed to the distinction: “A solid product with deep user community and good integrator expertise in region.”- Head Of Marketing Data & Analytics in the Finance Industry “HCL Unica is a great Campaign Management tool which generate good revenue for organisation.”- Senior Manager in the Services Industry "HCL Unica is a great ROI Marketing Automation tool.”- Associate Director in the Manufacturing Industry Read more reviews for Unica here. Everyone at Unica is deeply proud to be honored as a November 2020 Customers’ Choice for Multichannel Marketing Hub. To learn more about this distinction, or to read the reviews written about our products by the IT professionals who use them, please visit the Customers’ Choice announcement. To all of our customers who submitted reviews, thank you! These reviews mold our products and our customer journey, and we look forward to building on the experience that earned us this distinction! If you have a Unica story to share, we encourage you to join the Gartner Peer Insights crowd and weigh in. The GARTNER PEER INSIGHTS CUSTOMERS’ CHOICE badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates, and is used...

Marketers are always looking for tools and processes to manage their marketing operations, streamline workflows, optimize the budget spend, resources, and manage other marketing assets. MRM is a single solution that can take care of all your needs, from strategic planning to executing a certain marketing activity and ensuring that consistency binds the team together. Unica Plan is the solution that Unica Suite offers to manage all your marketing needs and activities. HCL Unica Plan (Formerly known as Marketing Operations) supports the feature called Tabular View Control (TVC) Grid, where the marketer can choose and arrange the different attributes like Text, Numeric, Date, etc. which they want to use for tracking their business activities. Grids are mainly used for collecting data, in the user interface, it appears like a table or a list. You can enter data into the cells of the grid according to the selected attributes and their data type. Apart from this, the product supports the customization of grid attribute(s) with validation; for example, the attribute should start with a specific character/word OR attribute should not allow entering beyond a certain limit OR attribute should only allow data between a certain range, etc. “com.unicacorp.uap.grid.validation.plugin.GridValidatorPluginImpl” validator is delivered with HCL Unica Plan which can help you to define the validations on-grid attribute(s). This validation plug-in supports two types of rules. ROW: row-level rules are executed first. GRID: grid-level rules are executed after row-level rules. HCL Unica Plan ships with the following sample rules. BeginsWithRule DateCheckRule RangeCheckRule UniqueCheckRule This article will help you to understand the grid validation, data validation rules, and how to implement the ROW level validation using the "BeginsWithRule" rule with the Text Single Line Type attribute. Let’s follow the step by step approach to learning the validation. Create the new grid frame using the Form...

We’ve all experienced struggle in our day-to-day life as consumers. The struggle can be any number of things, such as adding something to your cart to find it out of stock or receiving product suggestions that have no relevance to you. As I write this, one of the UK’s largest retail bank’s online and mobile systems are unavailable, keeping me from viewing my account and making transfers – very frustrating for such a critical service.  All of these examples create friction in the user experience, reducing the perception of a brand and leading to sharing negative experiences with friends, family, or voicing it on social media. What is Customer Experience? Customer experience (CX) covers every aspect of a customer’s journey with your brand (first contact to becoming a happy and loyal customer.) It is a holistic perception a customer has for your brand or service irrespective of the engagement channel. It is what drives a customer to keep coming back to your product and ultimately become a brand advocate. Delivering a remarkable customer experience depends on how you, as a brand, interact at every touchpoint, like sending an email after a customer has made a purchase from your store or even the amount of customer rep's attention while solving a problem; everything matters. Why does Customer Experience Matter? With the rise of on-demand and quick delivery/shipping services, customers have come to expect and demand more. They want things faster, such as having items delivered within 24-48 hours. This raises customer expectations everywhere and ultimately increases the chances of frustration when it doesn’t happen. This is reflected in market research. 79% of digital experience professionals rate the customer experience they provide as very or extremely high priority. Great that these see the importance, but also leaving 21% who don’t! 90% of those...

Marketers these days are more involved and skilled with using data than ever. The customer information is gathered, stored, and retrieved from a central database, and it is increasing exponentially. It helps facilitates the marketers to make more specific and targeted marketing communications and create more personalized experiences for the users. But database management and handling is no easy job, and Cloud databases and Database as a Service (DaaS) platforms are becoming more popular in enterprises. Amazon Redshift is a known name among them. What is Amazon Redshift? Amazon Redshift is a fully managed petabyte-scale cloud-based data warehouse product designed for large scale data set storage and analysis. The current trend in the market is to use cloud-based database service, and the HCL Unica Campaign is well-versed to have integration with such services. In this article, we are going to find how easy it is to configure the HCL Unica Campaign to make use of Amazon Redshift as a user database using Amazon ODBC Driver. What do you need as a Pre-requisite? You would need below pre-requisites to start configuring Unica with the Amazon Redshift database: HCL Unica Campaign application, which needs to be integrated with Amazon Redshift Database. Amazon Redshift Details: Cluster Name, Database Name, User Id, Password (You will get all these details when you purchase a contract for Amazon Redshift.) In Unica UI, under Settings->Configuration, under node "Affinium|Campaign|partitions|partition1|dataSources", make sure that a datasource template for "(PostgreSQLTemplate)" is already added and you should be able to create a datasource using this template. If HCL Unica suite is installed on Unix based OS, install unixODBC 2.3.x on the server on which Unica Campaign listener is installed. Supported ODBC Drivers To integrate Unica Campaign with Amazon Redshift Database, you can either use PostGreSQL ODBC Driver or Amazon ODBC Driver. To...

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...