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...

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...

The course of marketing has changed from cold-calling to real communications and engaging with your customers in real-time, irrespective of the channel or mode of communication. Unica Interact facilitates this by integrating with the customer-facing systems such as call centers and sending personalized offers in real-time to provide an interactive and enhanced customer experience. FlexOffers is one such component in Interact, which allows mapping company offers, customer profiles, and the customer's real-time activity data into a Windows spreadsheet, which resembles a mapping table. What is it?​ Marketers design their segmentation logic using only a few conditions on profile attributes. Many such rules allow marketers to leverage the rich set of functionality provided in spreadsheet software, like sorting, search, filters, etc. Some rules require frequent but simple updates and can be achieved using FlexOffers. How will it help? FlexOffers helps the marketers to provide easy mapping of offers to the best-targeted customers. Marketers can use the CSV file input, with the basic mapping data, and import it into the system and integrate it with system data such as offers, zones, cells, which will create a FlexOffer mapping table. As in the past, to deploy an Interactive Channel, we do not need Interactive Flowchart and Interaction strategy. Just map a profile table create FlexOffers mapping, and deploy the IC. How Does FlexOffers Work? The basic steps required to work with FlexOffers are as below: Creating a Mapping (existing table , .csv, new table) Add /Edit /Update Rules Customize the rules Create Filters Copy the mapping table to profileServerGroup Deploy the IC 1. Creating a FlexOffers Mapping FlexOffers mapping can be created using three different ways. Create a mapping using the existing table. Select a .csv Create a brand new table and then add rules to it. The source column on the list...

Why Unica Cloud-Native? We are in the midst of an information technology revolution driven by the cloud. The emergence of containers, with their fast startup, standardized application packaging, and isolation model, is further contributing to efficiency and agility. Along with the benefits of Docker like reducing hardware resource costs, ease-of-use, portability, scalability, and modularity of deployments, Kubernetes provides container-orchestration capabilities for automating application deployment (rollout and rollbacks), workload scaling, and high availability. Helm charts leverage Kubernetes packages to streamline the installation and management of applications deployed on Kubernetes. 1. Faster release pace  Unica Docker Images will be rolled out for each release and/or fix pack. Time to market has become the key differentiator between the most innovative organizations and their lagging competition. With this deployment approach, Unica can build and ship more value to its customers. With this deployment approach, it is very easy for customers to consume new releases. 2. Better CX HCL Unica will ship Docker Images with new features faster and keep iterating continuously. An extensive set of APIs in the Unica Products would enable integrations with enterprise data stores. Overall, Cloud-native applications allow you to improve your customer experiences. 3. Ease of Application management Cloud-native also has many options to make infrastructure management effortless. With helm charts, application management, monitoring, deployments will be easy, automated, and configuration driven. 4. Reduced cost through containerization Containers make it easy to manage and secure applications independently of the infrastructure that supports them. The industry is now consolidating around Kubernetes for the management of these containers at scale. Alongside Kubernetes, there’s a host of powerful cloud-native tools and standardization of infrastructure and tooling. This, along with open-source technologies, drives down costs. Pricing flexibility models are all enabled with a cloud-native deployment approach. 5. Building Reliable systems With modern cloud-native approaches...

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...

Just three months after releasing Unica V12.0, our amazing engineering and product management teams have released Unica V12.1!  All of us on the Unica Professional Services team are extremely excited about the new capabilities. We can’t wait to show Unica end-users everything they will now be enabled to do... but since we can’t cover everything in one article, here’s the rundown! Today, we’re going to illustrate how Unica V12.1 harnesses the power of the number 4. This means we’re going to show you 4 key features of our new integrated cloud-native platform and 4 functions that make each of the 4 features work! Key Features: Goal-Based Marketing orchestrated by Unica Journey. Digital Execution at Scale powered by Unica Deliver. Integration Made Easy with Unica Link. Of course, let’s not forget – there is more with Unica 12.1 A/B Testing and FlexOffers with Interact. Workflow simplified & more powerful, plus REST API Swagger with Plan. Goal-Based Marketing 1. Introductory Use-Case Of course, all marketing campaigns have a goal; increase revenue, sell x units of y product, have an ROI of n%, but what about marketing campaigns that have much more focused goals? As an example, let’s take a look at campaigns with milestones based on the completion of specific customer activities. In the credit card industry, the target goal may be to attain a certain number of transactions within the first month of a customer opening their account. To achieve that, after being approved, the customer must: 1) receive the credit card in the mail, 2) active their new card, and 3) start making purchases. There could also be many more customer activities along the way that leads to them completing the number of transactions within their first month of receiving their card. That is what we call Goal-Based Marketing! 2....