7 Killer Features in Unica Deliver

Unica Deliver has gone through an epic transformation over the past couple of years. When the product was in its infancy, the goal was to provide the most powerful marketing automation functionality on the market. Back in the day, the Unica product team succeeded in their mission and the product offered truly cutting edge performance and flexibility but at a cost. In honing automation power, the typical marketing user experience was left somewhat neglected. Two years ago, I made it my mission to address the elephant in the room and bring Unica Deliver to the forefront of the market in terms of user experience for marketing automation tools.

In that time, HCLSoftware has completely reinvented what a digital messaging platform should be and has extended Unica Deliver’s digital messaging capabilities further than ever before. The product can now cater to your multichannel messaging needs over email, SMS, Mobile Push and Whatsapp communications with a user interface so intuitive that you already know how to use it.

At the same time, Deliver automatically maintains the advanced feature set that made the original product so powerful, as well as offering fully integrated contact and response tracking to help the marketer set their strategy and then optimise accordingly based on recipient interactions. There have been so many big changes to the product that I wanted to revisit our journey and highlight some of the killer features you may have missed along the way.

1. Powerful Quick Builder WYSIWYG Communication Editor.

Marketers are often tight on deadlines, spending vast amounts of time strategising across multiple communication channels and business lines. Many digital messaging solutions make day-to-day tasks impossibly hard by not providing simple methods to merge data with communications and by not providing flexible WYSIWYG communication editors to build communications quickly.

Over many years, we listened to marketers and worked with them to provide world-class digital messaging services as part of the Unica Suite. We focused on creating a better user experience by introducing the new Quick Builder editor that allows users to manipulate images and text, customise branding and frame the content professionally using drag-and-drop buttons, divider lines, social media icons combined with every other element needed in any email. In the latest release, the Quick Builder can now create an email, simple push, SMS, rich in-app push, and landing pages. Learn more about the WYSIWYG Quick editor in this webinar replay.

The new release allows for rapid communication build and deployment. The data across all channels are seamlessly and simply integrated with your communications and most importantly, all of these features are in the hands of marketers, ultimately leading to less dependence on IT and resulting in quicker time-to-market with a significantly lower cost of ownership.

2. Multidevice Preview

When it comes to email marketing, people receiving targeted, personalised emails still spend more. Marketers saw a 760% increase in revenues thanks to segmentation. In the Unica Platform, you can easily create mutually exclusive segments that allow you to segment individuals based on their channel preference.

For recipients that prefer email, as digital marketers, we need to ensure that every email is tested and renders correctly. What device is the user using? What is the email client? What is the size of the screen? Your emails need to be tested against all these display types to ensure your message pops for every recipient. In doing so, you maintain your brand standards, avoid sloppy mistakes and most importantly, keep your recipients engaged.

Once you have created a nice-looking and engaging email, you need to test the rendering on devices, browsers and different operating systems. Unica Deliver allows you to run nearly 50 Litmus tests with a single click.

3. Two-way SMS

For many companies, email is still their most important communication channel, but SMS is also a powerful engagement tool that allows businesses to send concise, timely messages to their customers. Just like email, SMS also needs to be used at the right time and for the right message. It can readily be used for reminders, alerts, notifications, confirmations, and other marketing communications.

Two-way SMS allows you to send and for customers to respond to text messages with a  keyword. For instance, they are very useful to incentivise customers to sign up for more cost-effective communication channels. For example: “We noticed you’re not getting the best offers from us. Text YES to 75757 to receive our best weekly deals”.

In the latest release of Unica Deliver, SMS messages can be built using the Quick Builder. Indian DLT rules, including SMS templates, are fully supported and Unicode characters are also supported.

4. WhatsApp

You might be surprised to learn that an average WhatsApp message gets an open rate of 98%, which is 60% higher than many typical email open rates, and that’s what makes WhatsApp the most engaging yet under-utilised communication channel today.

Unica Deliver provides an enhanced Whatsapp capability where the marketer can use WhatsApp pre-approved templates to send out messages to the customers. It allows for increased engagement as it’s another rich communication channel that is commonly used by customers on a daily basis.

WhatsApp is one of the most used messaging apps across the globe today, with over 2 billion active users. 58% of WhatsApp users use the app more than once each day. Every day, at least 60 billion messages are sent via this messaging app. Many companies are adopting WhatsApp to implement cost-savings in customer support as it offers rich text messaging as well as supporting attachments. Most importantly, it is secure by design.

5. Stand out from the pack with Personalised Push notifications to increase engagement.

Push notifications represent a great way to communicate with your audience. According to a study by Localytics, 52% of smartphone users have push enabled on their devices. In a new data science report, Leanplum found that push notification marketing that includes personalised content sees four times the open rate of generic messages.

We have made it easier for marketers to trigger on-demand push notifications to Deliver via Unica Interact using triggered messages and actions. You can monitor the event and event patterns on your outbound channels, website and then orchestrate engagement on a push channel via Unica Deliver.

Studies show basic personalisation can improve open rates by 9%, as can emojis (4.94% CTR compared to 3.01%). So you can also add Emojis and use personalisation in your push notifications. Write messages up to 512 characters long, choose images of your choice and add those to the previews of your notification.

From version 12.1.2 of Unica Deliver, we support rich in-app push messages, allowing you to create even more striking communications, including video content. Discover how you can implement it in the “Give your Digital Marketing a Push” webinar.

6. Seamless Integration with the Unica Suite

As marketers, it is essential to have a toolset that enables your workflow rather than hindering it. You need to be able to easily send large batch broadcast messages, real-time interactive messages, and messages to touchpoints from within customer journeys. You need to be able to iteratively test that your data allies with your content to form striking communications. If mistakes are spotted, you need to be able to quickly and easily make a change without having to start from scratch or get into a bun fight with your technology.

How long does it take to make a change with your current provider? Chances are, this is a real source of pain. Many of our competitors claim to seamlessly integrate data with content and communications, but Unica truly achieves it. The integration of Deliver with Unica Interact lets you issue real-time offers across any channel. You can identify the best offer to send on-the-fly and mapping data from Unica Interact to Unica Deliver is as easy as selecting your communication and choosing which fields to send.

Out-of-the-box integration between Journey and Deliver helps you understand where your customer is in their journey with your business. Again, mapping data from Unica Journey to Unica Deliver is as easy as selecting your communication and choosing which fields to send.

Finally, with Unica Campaign, you choose the data you want to send to a Deliver communication, and Deliver will automatically tell you if a data item is missing in your output table or if unnecessary data is being uploaded. If you make a mistake, simply add the missing field and re-run your flowchart. Job done.

7. Monitor your Digital Messaging Performance with advanced Dashboard

For marketers, formulating a new strategy depends on understanding, exploring and dissecting campaign performance. Useful insights are always married to the metrics.

• Which marketing channels are worth scaling and are likewise providing a positive ROI
• Where leads are dropping off within your marketing funnels
• Which messages and campaigns are resonating with leads versus those which are falling flat.

The answers to all of these questions lie in the Messaging Analytics at the heart of Deliver. These pre-built reports give you exactly what you need to allow you to view automatically aggregated information about how individual channels and campaigns are performing.

With the integrated Deliverability Reports in Unica Deliver, you can quickly retrieve detailed reports to see how your email communications are received by the most important ISPs in your region and how they score with many common spam filters.

Finally, you can get access to powerful analytics through Unica OpenInsights, including send-time analytics to help you understand and optimise your mail delivery window. The latest version 12.1.2 release also provides a fully automated out-of-the-box Send-time Optimisation function so you can compare and contrast how your send-time optimisation is performing over time. OpenInsights is shipped out-of-the-box with the Deliver module and provides marketers with the ability to build reports on the platform using the reporting platform of their choice, for example, Google Looker.

We’ve talked through a few of the killer features that you may have missed along the way with Unica Deliver. With the right tool, it’s easier to get the most out of your communication channels in your overall marketing strategy. Without the right tool, it’s too easy for your business processes to become unmanageable and ultimately, time is very often wasted fighting with technology and struggling to marry your data with your communications.

Understanding your users’ likes, dislikes and then channelling them through the appropriate channels, customer journeys and interactions helps you to deliver cohesive, relevant communications. In the end, having the ability to engage over a combination of channels gives you the best chance to reach recipients and encourage long-term retention. 

With this point in mind, HCLSoftware will continue to put the best user experience front and centre of our product strategy and aim to make Unica Deliver the obvious choice for marketers. To learn more about Unica Deliver, watch the replay of our webinar “Get Your Digital Channels Firing. Boost Your Digital Marketing with the Unica 12.1 Marketing Platform.”