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...

Unica Campaign is an advanced campaign management solution that brings with it the powerful segmentation capabilities of outbound, multi-channel, multi-wave batch campaign execution, and tracking. But how does everything operate in the background, how does the Campaign connect or integrate with the other products in the suite? There is a restful approach of doing it. Yes, we are talking about the REST APIs. So what is REST APIs, and how are they used in creating Campaign objects is a question which has multiple aspects and areas. The HCL Campaign REST API to manipulate campaigns, offers, offer lists, attributes, and target cell objects. What are REST APIs? You are trying to search and book your flights on the internet, and in a few seconds, you have the results. That is the function an API performs, helping two systems talk to each other. REST is an approach that facilitates such communications by assisting in creating APIs keeping a specific set of rules in mind. I work as a Unica Support Engineer and a Client Advocate, and I come across many different Unica use cases and questions. One thing I have observed is that while using REST API calls to create campaign objects, people struggle to do configurations required in the Platform. The challenges can vary, like using the sample JSON body, parameters needed to execute API calls, or updating the configuration values for any version of REST APIs. This article focuses and helps to understand and perform configurations in Platform. To execute REST API calls, we use the Postman tool as it's been used by most of the users and our clients while working with REST API calls. Configurations at Platform Side 1. Increase a token's lifetime, which is used for authentication in API calls. - Navigate to: Affinium|Manager|miscellaneous. - Increase Token Lifetime...

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...

Great things come with Unica V12! We recently published a series on The 12 Things We Love About Unica V12.0, which focuses on the aspects unfolding from being a place for centralized offer management to the capabilities of turning cloud-native for deployments. It has demonstrated how Unica is easier to install, scale on-demand, faster to upgrade, and has received so much interest. #UNICAisDockerized  Docker is currently one of the most popular containerization technologies and an industry buzz. At HCL, we understand our customers’ need for greater usability, flexibility, and a high level of stability. We strive to provide all of this and more with the latest technology.  As Docker becomes more popular along with the availability of tools like Kubernetes and Helm, it has become a boon for IT professionals who have the requisite expertise. This not only includes pre-built Docker images but also leverages the orchestrating capability of Kubernetes and Helm. It is never a repeated day at HCL Software for any of our recently acquired products, including the full Unica Suite. With v12.1 release, Unica has dockerized all of its products, and Docker Images can now be deployed on Kubernetes using Helm charts. Dockerized Unica Products have many advantages ranging from easy installation to cloud readiness. What Problems Does Docker Solve for the CMO, CTO, the Marketing Leadership, and the User? For the Leadership (CMO, CTO, other C levels), the most significant problem is that of software currency and reliability. Software version stagnation is a known problem occurring in the Martech space. This is a situation, where whatever initial version of Martech software is installed, is rarely upgraded. The company faces challenges in experiencing great new features such as the goal-based marketing in Journey or the drag and drop features that come along with the new features and...

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...