Latest Winter update to the Unica 12.1 cloud native integrated marketing platform – Unica 12.1.2. It provides marketers powerful features to engage customers.

5 things to learn from Doom and how to slay it in Marketing like the OG of video games.

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

HCL Software is excited to announce that Unica has been shortlisted for Constellation ShortList report along with Salesforce, Adobe & others.

The most efficient, flexible, and future-proofed marketing systems are cloud native. This architecture provides significant economic and operational advantages over on-premise or conventional SaaS solutions. However, many early adopters of marketing solutions deployed on-premise and SaaS solutions because they were considered best of breed at the time, and cloud-native solutions and IT organizations hadn't matured to the point of mission-critical readiness. Companies that adopted on-premise or SaaS solutions now find themselves lagging in their ability to quickly upgrade and enhance their systems and adapt to the new demands of a highly personalized, digital-first, omnichannel world. Today, your MarTech infrastructure is your brand, and if you compete against companies with systems that provide greater resiliency, adaptability, and efficiency, you are at an increasingly significant disadvantage.  When cloud first emerged, it was a difficult proposition to "lift and shift" conventional applications environments. It could take years of planning, testing, and parallel operations to make the change. However, legacy applications that have been "lifted and shifted" lack the agility, performance, and ease of use marketers need, while hosted SaaS applications lack customizability and control. For example, when Netflix first moved to the cloud it took approximately eight years. Today, that time has been reduced to a matter of days and weeks due to the evolution of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), the migration processes and tooling, and the skills needed to operate in the cloud. Taking this a step further, HCL Unica has accelerated this cycle with its cloud-native foundation that is all about fast and flexible deployments. With HCL's Solution Factory (SoFy), new cloud-native deployments of HCL solutions, including Unica, can be provisioned in a matter of minutes and deployed on premises, or via public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud. If the full set of skilled resources is lacking, HCL...

The most important person in 21st-century business is the customer. Companies recognize that putting the customer at the center of their thinking delivers better engagement, higher retention, and greater customer lifetime value, resulting in improved sales and better ROI. The number of channels and touchpoints like Email, Social Messengers, Digital App, Websites, etc., is ever-increasing that enterprise marketers can leverage to reach the customers.  But leveraging the full potential of multi-channel touchpoints can be challenging. Brands must meet their customer in the channels the customers choose. The need for an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy has become existential for enterprise marketers to engage with their customers seamlessly across touchpoints. Twenty-first-century marketing is omnichannel, with companies being required out of necessity to be hyper-personalized in real-time. So what are those 5 things that you can do to create a successful marketing strategy? Let’s find out. 1.  Building a Strong Omnichannel Strategy 43% of the automobile companies advanced their conversion rates over 2x just by attaining omnichannel marketing maturity. Only 6% of Financial services can deliver fully integrated real-time Omnichannel experiences. 50% in the Energy Manufacturing sector have started to work on integrated experience for their customers. Retailers with strong omnichannel customer engagement see a 9.5% rise in annual revenue. Tech Companies that adopt omnichannel engagement have achieved 89% customer retention. Today’s marketing landscape is an omnichannel one. Businesses and clients interact across a myriad of touchpoints, whether they are buying a product for the first time, seeking to resolve a problem, or renewing a service. Having strong omnichannel capabilities enables the customers or clients to easily navigate between the website, social media, and physical store, providing the experience of keeping them hooked to your product or service. Strong omnichannel customer engagement sees a 9.5% rise in annual revenue for the retail industry. 2. Refocusing...

email marketing automation: 7 tips for increasing email open rates

We're excited to announce the release and general availability of latest Summer update to Unica 12.1 cloud native integrated-Unica 12.1.1.

Unica on HCL Now continues Unica’s Cloud Native Journey, using the software you know and love! You can deploy it on your own private cloud.

As a marketer, I am going to assume you will often put yourself in the shoes of the person you are marketing towards. When you go there, do you feel like you are receiving the information you need or want to receive and how you want to receive it? “I think so” or “I hope so” are responses I have heard when this question has been asked. This is not a huge surprise to me. Most marketing communications are directional messages geared to a target audience that have general similarities. Organizations conducting their marketing efforts using the “think so/hope so” approach are probably seeing some results and have come to dismiss these results as the baseline… and this becomes the norm. It is at this point that complacency kicks in, and it continues for years with the customer experience being just “ok.” The key to this story is don’t be complacent. Put effort into getting your data quality right, focus on advanced analytics and modeling to help draw out trends and correlations that help you create tighter target audiences, use A/B testing to find the right mix of personas and content to drive your message or call to action, build a holistic consumer engagement platform to support message delivery through the various channels required and back it up with reporting to support message attribution and performance reporting. I know it may seem like a lot to grasp, but if you want to change the impact your marketing is making on your consumer, you will need to push the envelope and strive for 1:1 engagement with highly personalized content that can be delivered seamlessly across all the channels. Your customers are expecting it, your competition is either doing or planning to do it, and you can’t afford to see customer shift...

Grids are the spreadsheet-like tools available in HCL Unica Plan for data collection and display. Plan provided a user interface to display Grids data as a table or a list. HCL Unica Plan supports the below-given Grids. 1. Line Truncate View 2. Line Wrap View 3. Two Line Staggered View 4. Editable Grid View Out of these, Line Truncate View, Line Wrap View, and Two-Line Staggered View are called Read-only Grids where Editable Grid View can be used to Edit and save the business data/details. An editable grid is for users to enter information, while a read-only grid displays information entered previously. This article will help you configure and display an Editable grid's contents as a report in a Read-only grid. You can configure the Read-only grid in the same OR different HCL Unica Plan Form Definition Page as per your business requirement. In the below-given scenario, we will use the single Form Definition Page with Editable and Read-Only grid. Below given steps will help you to walk through the scenario. 1. Create a new form with an editable grid view in HCL Unica Plan. Refer given Fig.1 [caption id="attachment_14298" align="aligncenter" width="920"] Fig.1[/caption] 2. Post form creation, add an editable grid view component in this form, and save the changes. Refer given Fig.2. [caption id="attachment_14299" align="aligncenter" width="920"] Fig.2[/caption] You need to note down the value for the “Database Table” column. This is the table from where the Read-only grid will pick up the data for display. 3. Create editable grid type attributes per your business requirement; in this scenario, we used the Integer and Text Multi-Line attribute. See below given Fig. 3 a, b and c [caption id="attachment_14300" align="aligncenter" width="920"] Fig.3a[/caption] [caption id="attachment_14301" align="aligncenter" width="920"] Fig.3b[/caption] [caption id="attachment_14302" align="aligncenter" width="920"] Fig.3c[/caption] 4. Add editable grid view component to form canvas. Similarly,...

An Event Pattern consists of series of events that occur in a particular way. Marketers can use event patterns to track and record the pattern of customers' activities in real-time and act accordingly. The pattern's state is updated by posting events to Interact at selected stages of customers' activities. Event Pattern is an important component of Interact, and a marketer uses it to track changes in customers' behavior in real-time and act accordingly. From the 12.1.0.3 release, many capabilities have been added to Event and Event Pattern, and they are as follows:  A marketer can define Time Span to Event Pattern. Events in Event Pattern can be Qualifying or Suspending Events. Tracking of Event Pattern Inactivity. Delay the action triggering for Event and Event Pattern. New Event and Event Pattern actions, Suppress Offer and Qualify Segment. Define Condition for Events in Event Pattern. UI refresh for Event and Event Pattern List tab. Let’s see the details of each feature: 1. In the earlier releases, the integration between Interact and Interact Advanced Patterns provides advanced pattern recognition capabilities for Interact implementation. An integrated environment provides enhanced time windows for the three basic Interact patterns. From the 12.1.0.3 release, now a marketer can configure all three standard event patterns with more sophisticated time spans during which the pattern compares incoming events with its criteria. The following additional options are available for each basic event pattern.  Time bound  Rolling time This effectively adds six pattern options to Interact by adding two new time span options to each of the three standard patterns: Match all (time bound) Counter (time bound)  Weighted counter (time bound) Match all (rolling time) Counter (rolling time) Weighted counter (rolling time) Time Bound Pattern: A time bound pattern can be a "Match all," "Counter," or "Weighted counter" pattern, but all...

In this digital age, customers are more educated, web-savvy, and are technology-driven. It provides marketers with more interaction opportunities, ramped up messaging, and laying out offer strategies on all possible channels. It is empowering, but it gets overwhelming for the customers, resulting in losing customers' interests and ultimately pulling away from the brands. To solve this challenge for the marketers, Unica Interact uses the marketing score to help determine which offer displays if multiple offers are available for a single request. For example, if a request for offers must choose between offer A with the marketing score of 30 and offer B with the marketing score of 80, Unica Interact presents offer B. The main purpose of this blog is to understand the score assignment in HCL Unica Interact and how to bypass learning’s final score from the Score Override table. Benefits of Score assignment model Offer eligibility in Interact is decided by the Marketer’s score/Final Score assigned to the user. There are multiple criteria for score assignment. If learning is enabled, then the Learning score will take the highest precedence. If learning is disabled, then the score assignment depends on where the expression is to determine the marketing score is defined. The below model clearly defines the order of precedence for score calculation. A marketer can even influence learning scores with Score Override table score with the help of parameters ADJEXPLORESCORE and FINALSCORE. Score Assignment Model Scenario 1 (When both learning and Score Override is not enabled) 1. Create an Interactive channel and Session flowchart associated with the Interactive Channel. Add three segments, e.g., PUNE, MUMBAI, ALL_CITY. The Score Assignment should be as shown in the below screenshot. 2. After the changes have been deployed, hit the Interact Admin URL and do startSession and getOffer call for CustomerID=102. (Note:- CustomerID 102...

In the world of marketing, the customer is a real asset. And to deliver great customer experiences, the marketing team needs to dive right into the customer insights - what they like, when and where to reach out, what people are interested in, and how best to connect. Unica Discover is the offering of Unica Suite that helps you by providing behavioral insight into the online user journey, allowing you to deliver the kind of optimized experience that improves conversion and makes users want to visit again. In this blog today, we will highlight the Health-based Routing) Transport Service Pipeline Agent of Unica Discover and how you can easily configure it. Transport service is a 32-bit process. Multiple pipeline agents are running under transport service. HBR is one of the pipeline agents. HBR can run the main process (parent pipeline) and also child pipelines. Original HBR agent has a limitation: parent and child pipelines are sharing the same memory allocation. 32 bits process can utilize up to 2 GB. Often, memory utilization exceeds the 2GB limit, and transport service is restarting or just stays down. The goal is to - Optimize and improve the performance of HBR agent. Fully Utilize all hardware (RAM) resources of the machine. SOLUTION MODULE AND KEY FEATURES Health-Based Routing enables the routing of hit data to multiple canisters for processing based on the health and load on each canister. Use HBREx agent instead of the original HBR. The Extended HBR session agent (HBREx) implements multiple child pipelines for an individual pipeline in the canister to better utilize memory. This improves the hits processing performance of the pipeline. The difference between original HBR and Extended HBR (HBREx) is that child pipelines are running separate processes in HBREx and are no longer part of the parent pipeline process....

It’s a marketer’s world. Customers can be reached by virtually any medium (email, SMS, social media) a marketer puts their mind to. But with so many channels, meeting customer expectations, understanding their needs, and formulating strategies to provide a great customer experience, the list of marketing "to do's" is much longer than it used to be. Hence Marketing Resource Management has become an essential part of new marketing approaches. What is MRM? Forrester1 defines marketing resource management as enterprise marketing technology that helps marketers with financial planning, performance measurement, collaboration and calendaring, project management, content production, asset management, brand compliance, and marketing fulfillment. MRM is not a new space, but marketers need to take a fresh look at available solutions. As the MarTech landscape has exploded over the past decade, marketing operations has become the backbone that keeps all of the tools and processes working together to achieve the organization's goals - encompassing everything from planning, processes, execution to technology and resource allocation. MRM includes the resources available to internal teams and the relationships with external stakeholders and approval processes. MRM lets you organize, automate and optimize marketing tasks. The Purpose MRM fulfills MRM exists to save time and marketing resources. Think of just one single marketing task – for example, preparing an email marketing campaign. The list of activities includes the coordination between your marketers, graphic designers, copywriters, and others involved – it is time-consuming and, therefore, costly. This was just an email campaign; consider the cost of running hundreds like these together. For every hour spent on this, you lose focus on other marketing collateral or company growth. With MRM in the picture to manage the assets, tools, and operations, it is easier and more cost-efficient. Creative Approvals - Easily float creatives to brand, legal and other teams for...

If you haven’t, you really should meet SoFy, which is HCL Software’s Solution Factory! It is another major step in Unica’s Cloud Native Journey. So, you may be thinking: what, how, why? Glad you asked: WHAT: SoFy provides access to dozens of HCL Software products and services! Products, including: Application Security, Databases, Integration, Testing, Workload Automation, Configuration Management, and now – Unica! Services, including: Data Stores, Scheduler, Code Security Scanning, Data Mapper, Test Engine, and Data Synthesis. HOW: SoFy provides enterprise-grade technologies that are exposed through: Dynamic deployable microservices. Accessed through well-designed REST APIs. Leveraging modern container and orchestration technologies. Integrated with smart common Services. WHY: SoFy provides bespoke solutions at your finger-tips that: It can be rapidly deployed to any cloud environment. Easily secured, monitored, and managed. Provide simple, consumption-based licensing. Once logged into SoFy, the fun can begin! With SoFy, you can: 1) Explore: A catalog of Products and REST APIs that are enabled for Kubernetes as Docker images and Helm charts, 2) Create: A set of microservice SoFy tools to help users discover and combine those APIs and products into SoFy solutions, including: a) A list APIs & products, generate solution Helm chart, deploy into test cluster and b) A simple GUI over these services, including Swagger UI for REST API documentation and 3) Release: A set of common SoFy services that run inside a SoFy solution, providing consistent setup & management of the solution. Accessing SoFy Getting started with SoFy is easy! SoFy presents as a web application available via any Web Browser.  As with any web application, users – customers, partners, and HCL staff – need to “sign up” for SoFy. You can go directly to the Register for SoFy page using the following link: https://www.hcltechsw.com/sofy/request-access. The screenshot below displays the sign-up page. Also, you can...

We are excited to announce the release and general availability of our latest Spring update to the Unica 12.1 cloud-native integrated marketing platform - Unica 12.1.0.4. The Unica Spring Release strengthens the platform’s cloud-native foundation with more flexible deployments and a diverse stack. It deepens the integrated platform’s core capabilities with coverage for more social channels, better planning, rich Insights, and enhanced personalization. Finally, it broadens digital marketing with the addition of mobile PUSH messaging. Your omnichannel customer engagement gets more impactful with updates to Unica Journey in this release. As marketers, not only can you define multiple goals and key milestones for your journeys but now track those goals with a wave and funnel stats, export the reports providing you powerful insights to proactively recalibrate your journeys. Exporting journey audiences to an external database is also now possible with the new Unica Link JDBC connector. Your audience outreach also gets wider with integrated WhatsApp messaging in Journeys, and AdTech targeting through our new Google AdManager audience syndication capability (in addition to Facebook and LinkedIn) built on Unica Link.  In Unica Deliver, we have added key capabilities that can give your digital marketing a major PUSH. Now you can engage audiences on the go with world-class integrated PUSH messaging through Unica Deliver and Kumulos. Bring agility to your message build experience with search, offer integration and PUSH support in the QuickBuilder mail editor and Optimize your SMS messaging strategy with out-of-the-box insights on SMS link clicks. With these key enhancements and our already existing Email/SMS/WhatsApp channel coverage, Unica Deliver can provide you the breadth and depth of digital messaging, all from a single integrated platform. In Unica Campaign, we have added support for new customer databases (Actian Vector and Oracle 12c/19c with ODBC). We have also introduced Improvements in the...

This past year has been one of the most stressful, challenging and exhausting years our world has faced in quite some time. Brands have struggled to stay engaged with their customer base and to grow their bottom lines. Some businesses have flourished because they were prepared, while others have been forced to downsize or, even worse, close their doors. Looking deeper into 2021 and beyond, there is still so much that is unknown, but successful brands will deepen their relationships with their customers and will experience growth leveraging their loyalty programs and offers to their existing customer base. Consumers expect brands to have a finger on the pulse of their struggles and are resistant to being sold to by a brand that operates its marketing strategies in a vacuum, without considering the current circumstances. Successful brands will focus on non-purchase member engagement activities such as redemptions, digital interactions, and virtual experiences. They will benefit in the long run with the ultimate reward of conversion. As we expect some pre-pandemic trends to continue, this pervasive virus has forced us to accelerate change and has brought about unexpected challenges to the loyalty and business environment. In response to the many new obstacles we face as a society, we at HCL foresee the emergence of several key themes in customer loyalty. They are Personalization, Social Journey Integration, & Friction Detection. Personalization Research has proven that customer satisfaction levels are higher when brands personalize the customer experience, and loyalty is no different. 91% of consumers said they would be more likely to shop with brands who recognize and provide relevant offers and recommendations, and 83% are willing to share their data to make this work (Accenture). Consumers share that they are actively engaged in programs that are highly personalized and that make them feel...

It is amazing to be part of how Unica is evolving. Expanding on the June 2020 HCL Commerce and Google Cloud partnership, HCL has announced that it has expanded the Google Cloud relationship to HCL’s Unica and DX solutions. This relationship is more than merely a cool-sounding announcement between our companies. Unica’s Cloud Native platform capabilities can now be deployed to Google within minutes, with more exciting Google capabilities coming in our next Unica V12.1 update.   HCL Unica is now offered on Google Cloud and clients will have access to the wide-ranging solutions that are included in the Google Cloud Platform, whether running on-premise or cloud deployment supporting private, public or hybrid cloud with no change in application functionality. For HCL Unica customers, this means they can maintain the investments they have made in the robust and proven Unica solutions while also taking advantage of the global reach, security, and elasticity of Google Cloud. Unica customers will gain insights into how customers are engaging and continue to encounter agile campaign and marketing execution combined with Google Cloud’s market-leading tools out of the box.   Insight Behind the Login  Together, Google Cloud and HCL provide robust, enterprise-grade solutions to global clients that are the heart of HCL customer experience solutions that include HCL Unica, HCL Commerce, and HCL Digital Experience. The power of these solutions comes together at the intersection of data, process, and applications behind the login – that is where the magic happens.  This joint program with HCL Software and Google Cloud brings a wealth of capabilities that HCL Unica customers can take advantage of for prescriptive solutions powered by Google cloud innovation, starting with our support to run a Kubernetes deployment in GCP for clients that seek cloud deployments. With the release of Unica 12.1, an Integrated Cloud-Native Marketing Platform, combined with Google Cloud Platform, provides cloud-native enhancements and expanded open stack support. Through simple but important solutions like these, this combination makes a real difference, and the business benefits increase significantly.   Beyond the obvious benefits that Google...

You've spent time and resources attracting and generating new leads, but now what? Are they getting passed on to your sales team, and if so, do your reps know which opportunities are the hottest? Time is of the essence when you're small and growing fast. Make the most of your marketing tools — email, social, marketing automation just like HCL Unica — by connecting them to a Salesforce CRM platform. Both sales and marketing will have a complete view of leads and prospects to create and target engaging communications to turn prospects into customers and reach key decision-makers faster. Unica Journey and Salesforce integration will lead to the following benefits: Unica Journey will pass the hot and evaluated leads to a Sales representative, which result in a reduced cost of sales. A 1-to-1 relationship can be maintained with your leads, and you will be able to provide a personalized experience to your customers. The sales cycle would be shortened as Leads (or Contact) would be transferred to a Sales representative at the right time. With Unica V12.1, HCL added Unica Journey as one of the prominent products in the Unica suite family.  Unica Journey is a goal-based orchestration solution that can craft, execute, and visualize context-driven, personalized, multi-step omnichannel customer experiences.  With HCL Unica Journey, Markets can: Define goals for customer experience  Easily adjust journeys in real-time to achieve them.  Craft and visualize the entire customer journey across channels/touchpoints and events with a sleek and intuitive Journey Canvas Unica Journey supports integration with HCL Unica Deliver for email and SMS delivery. It also supports integration with Unica Link for integration with various email and SMS delivery channel and is also used to integrate with Salesforce ® CRM. With the integration of Unica Journey with Salesforce, the following objects in Salesforce...

Segmentation in marketing allows brands to tailor their efforts in the right direction to the right audience. It lets you divide your customer base into segments based on their characteristics, demographics, age, gender, salary, and many such factors. Those efforts can relate to both communications and product development. Unica Interact allows marketers to perform real-time segmentation based on their behavior and their actions while exploring your product and website. One such great feature of Unica Interact is Auto Binning that lets marketers analyze the data collected after segmentation or categorization; the following article talks about the same. Auto Binning - What is it?​ Interact's built-in learning algorithm works partly by saving and analyzing the values of learning attributes when the offers were contacted and responded to. Some attributes may have a virtually unlimited number of unique values. However, due to limited resources and/or practical categorization requirements in an Interact system, we can save only a small number of them.  How will it help? It’s often observed that it's more reasonable to do the analysis based on the ranges of the values rather than its actual n number of values. Auto binning allows customers to create bins(Segments/Ranges) in Interact, and the learning sub-system will automatically do the mapping. How to define Bins in Interact DT? The bin definitions can be created from Interact -> Global Learning -> All Bin Definitions page, using the mapped learning attributes. The bin could be either Range Type or List type. For example, A Salary attribute can have n number of distinct values, and when this attribute is used in learning, analysis on these distinct values could be quite difficult. Hence we can divide different value ranges of Salary attributes into separate bins. We have created 3 bins on the Salary attribute  Low Income >=35000 Medium Income...

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...

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...

The fabric of marketing technology is no longer a giant software monolith. As we saw a proliferation in customer touchpoints and channels, we expected an enterprise had to deal with to have a certain amount of complexity with their marketing tech landscape - To the extent that the average enterprise uses about 91 marketing cloud services in its portfolio! It is expected of Marketing Campaigns to evolve from being piecemeal marketing initiatives to truly integrated marketing campaigns. However, according to Gartner, Inc., Marketing leaders struggle to make progress in the utilization of their marketing technology (Martech) stack capabilities. This is because marketers have struggled to put the best of breed martech technologies together in an integrated manner to power a comprehensive and integrated campaign. A well-planned integrated campaign demands synergies across a wide range of areas including but not limited to: Marketing automation platform, Email Delivery Engines, Digital Messaging Platforms, CRM platform, Ad Tech Platforms, Inbound channels like website, call centers, social media handles…This means collaboration between teams, data handoffs, schedule adherence – in a nutshell, a tremendous amount of agility and responsiveness between teams that handle various functions/technologies across the marketing landscape. The complexity exponentially increases when multiple such integrated campaigns need to be handled simultaneously, which calls for more simplified yet sophisticated design and integration tools at the marketers’ disposal. Unica Journey is a good example of a Customer Experience Design and orchestration Tool. While Unica Journey solves the problem of designing the integrated customer experience journey end to end, helps visualize it and to an extent enable automation between various capabilities of Unica, but how about integration with the other 3rd party systems? What is Unica Link? Unica Link is an Out of box, low code, fast, and flexible integration framework to create quick and seamless App Integrations with Unica...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Having an offer management system in place enables you to manage offers, their priorities, the number of times a customer sees a specific offer, to which customers the Offer should be shown to. With offer management, you can easily personalize your offers and tailor an efficient user experience for the audience. %

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....

The thought of upgrading any type of computer software can be off-putting and make you ponder several irritating questions… How long will the upgrade process take? Will it negatively impact my ability to meet current work demands? How long will it take to get accustomed to the updated platform? Is this upgrade really going to be worth it? 

Today’s typical enterprise has between 91 and 189 Marketing & CRM SaaS Tools (instruments) to manage day-to-day messaging, promotions and advertising campaigns across channels. Depending on who you ask, these numbers may vary by a few, but the most commonly referenced research cited by those of us in the industry is from Netskope. Their survey research details that there are 69 CRM related and 120 marketing-related SaaS tools in use on average at the enterprise.  

Everyone is trying to do more with less – quickly. I have clients who ask me all the time “How do I makes things faster?” or “How do I streamline campaign execution while doing more campaigns?” Both valid questions. Folks want to execute at scale, do more personalization, and run more campaigns in more channels simultaneously. This is where the magic that is Unica can come to the rescue.