With the increasing number of touchpoints for the customers to engage with a brand or their product, mapping out a customer’s journey has become increasingly complex. Despite that, customer journey mapping is important as it helps in unraveling customer's expectations, gain insight into their mental model, and helps in creating a personalized omnichannel experience. HCL Unica Journey is a product developed for marketers, helping them design the entire customer journey using different capabilities of Unica Journey like Touchpoints, Engagement split, Decision splits, etc. Unica Journey helps marketers communicate with their customers using different touchpoints like Email and SMS. Marketers can integrate the Journey touchpoint with different Email and SMS connectors and quickly deliver their contents/offers to the targeted audiences. Supported Email Delivery Connectors – Unica Deliver, Mailchimp, and Mandrill using HCL Link. Supported SMS Delivery Connectors – Unica Deliver, Twilio using HCL Link. Use Case: As a marketer,  I would prefer to send desired content/offers to the customers based on their hobbies along with personalization with a single click. If the customer has a hobby of ‘Reading’ then as a marketer, I want to send content/offer related to books/magazines to this customers and those who love ‘Music’ I must send content/offer related to some musical instruments, etc. Unica Journey can send dynamic offers/contents to the customers using the preferred delivery channel. The decision split of Unica Journey has a strong capability to do segmentation based on desired conditions. Journey can send desired contents/offers to the set of people who belong to that segment. Let's have a look at how we can achieve it with Unica Journey. Steps 1. Entry Source creation: The marketer needs to create an Entry source where he can upload the customer data in any supported data import formats, as shown below. E.g., CSV file in this...

A country’s tourism website is planning an email campaign featuring special travel packages to entice 2021 tourism. The company would like to deploy strategic emails offering real-time offer personalization for its customers. Let's understand with the help of this article the goals of the company, the challenges they face, and how Unica Interact can help them in strategizing the entire offer strategy. GOAL Make business user aware of how Interact message connector works. To deploy the Interact message connector in the WebSphere application server. To test the message connector tag to verify personalized offers are getting displayed. CHALLENGE Unfortunately, the company is limited in its backend digital capabilities (no Java or SOAP) and anticipates problems with customers who open emails where only HTML content is possible. The company is looking for a solution to provide real-time offer management in situations where you only have control over the web content that is loaded on the client’s side. SOLUTION Unica Interact is a sophisticated real-time interaction solution to personalize the customer experience and determine the next best action for customer engagement across various channels such as websites, call centers, point-of-sale, ATM’s, kiosks, and more. KEY FEATURE Unica Interact Message Connector allows email messages and other electronic media to make calls to Unica Interact to allow personalized offers to be presented at open-time and when the customer clicks-through the message to the specified site. This is accomplished by using two key tags: The image tag (IMG), which loads the personalized offers at open-time, and the link tag (A), which captures click-through information and redirects the customer to a specific landing page. STEP-BY-STEP SOLUTION 1. MessageConnector gets installed with the Interact installation itself.  The path of msgconnector folder in our windows environment is as follows Path :- C:\HCL\Unica\Interact\msgconnector 2. Deploy the ‘MessageConnector.war’ in the WAS profile....

Cloud-native is the biggest enabler of the generation and helps you to deliver business value by providing you the flexibility to quickly incorporate user feedback for continuous improvement. With the latest feature release, Unica Discover has become cloud-native. Why go Cloud-Native? Cloud-Native applications have several advantages over typical on-premises deployments. Unlike traditional applications, Cloud-Native application resources are automatically provisioned and released with an on-demand allocation of infrastructure. With auto-scaling, complex up-down process needs are addressed, and resources are paid for on a need-only basis. Container-based platforms decrease the time taken to deliver new products and services to market.  HCL understands the customer's needs to have a stable infrastructure that is also primed to scale up or down based on the times of the year. Reduced cost through containerization and the ease of managing the infrastructure will translate to a better customer experience. Unica Discover Is Dockerized! Along with the traditional on-premises solution, Unica Discover is now cloud-ready for any infrastructure options with Docker containerization. With this, Unica Discover has become more flexible, scalable, and manageable, leveraging the Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CICD) model. Dockerized CICD upgrades will allow upgrades, features, enhancements, and fixes to be delivered to customers more frequently and reduced time for testing and deployment! A traditional Unica Discover deployment has Linux components (DNCA and Packet Forwarder) and Windows components (Routing, Processing server, Reports, Replay server, and DB server). All of the Windows components can be deployed in one server or distributed across servers for larger-scale implementations, and the servers themselves can be physical or virtual. In the cloud-native deployment, we have containerized these components and provided Docker images for each. The ports required for communication within the different components, capturing data from Packet Forwarder to DNCA, and forwarding that data to Routing are all automatically managed...

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...

With numerous marketing software out there, how are you supposed to choose the right marketing software to meet all your marketing needs? An integrated martech stack is an answer to the changing industry trends. From HCL Unica V12.1, Unica Suite launched a new product named Unica Link, which has the capability to connect to delivery channels for sending the communication. Unica Link provides both design-time and runtime services. It is invoked at design-time when an administrator configures a Link connection or when you configure a process box in the Unica Campaign application or a touchpoint in the Unica Journey application. Unica Link has the capabilities to create connectors, which include the configuration and provisioning to connect to any delivery channel. Unica Link supports the following connectors: Mailchimp connector: The Mailchimp connector uploads contact information to an audience in Mailchimp, populating the merge field defined for the Audience. Then runs (or optionally schedule) Mailchimp campaigns for delivering communications as eMail. This connector also has the capability to report back whether emails were delivered, bounced, opened, or links clicked within the emails. Mandrill connector: The Mandrill connector sends email using a defined template on a Mandrill account. This connector then polls Mandrill to report whether emails were bounced, opened, or links clicked within the email. Salesforce connector: Salesforce (CRM) saves and updates details about users. It supports two operations, i.e., 'Create' and 'Update,' on two objects, 'Lead' and 'Contact.' Twilio connector: The Twilio connector sends SMS to a destination device and fetches the sent SMS status. Campaign Link Integration Overview Unica Link can create Connectors. Connectors consist of configuration and provisioning to connect to any delivery channel. The out-of-the-box connectors in the Unica link are as follows: Mailchimp Mandrill Twilio Salesforce A new process box named LINK has been introduced in Unica...

Marketing has changed its course from cold calling to establishing meaningful relationships with the customers. When a marketer communicates with their customers, they represent their brand; in short, they are the brand's voice. So the communications need to be clear, consistent, and most importantly, in real-time; that's how you build valuable relationships. Unica Interact can now seamlessly leverage Unica Journey’s capability to establish a continuous dialog with customers. It helps marketers to establish a meaningful relationship with their customers by triggering special offers based on abandoned shopping carts, repeated page visits, etc. This, in turn, will result in churn prevention and increased ROI. Using Unica Interact’s Triggered Message functionality, a marketer can acquire, engage, and retain customers throughout the buyer journey by presenting them with offers that suit their needs at the right moment through the right channel. Using out-of-the-box integration, Unica Interact can send specific audience information as well as personalized real-time Marketing messages and Offers to Unica Journey. Unica Journey then can send a special offer to the customer on various outbound channels. The article explains the detailed steps involved in setting up integration between Unica Interact and Unica Journey. Let’s consider a simple use case here. The customer visits the online shopping website. The customer adds a mobile phone into the cart. Due to some reason, the customer abandons the shopping cart. The marketer wants to give a 10% discount to the customer to facilitate the purchase. Problem Statement and Solution. Traditional Interact marketer will now have to wait for the customer to return to the website/any other inbound channel to give him the discount offer. During this waiting period, the customer may go to some other site, and thus the marketer could lose him. Using the Triggered Message capability, the marketer can decide to give a...