Reduce Contact Fatigue with HCL Unica Suite

Are your customers being confronted with too many marketing messages across all available channels? In general, the answer is yes. The certain tactics a marketer uses of bombarding their customers with too many marketing communication no matter how relevant it is will result in lower CTRs, more Unsubscribes, apparently landing up in Marketing Fatigue. When marketing crosses a certain threshold, it is no more marketing, and It becomes a headache to customers. That’s marketing fatigue. 

Customer contact fatigue is a major problem for marketers and salespeople the world over – not to mention the customers who are receiving it. Contact fatigue becomes a disparate part of marketing fatigue. No one wants to be bombarded with disparate messages too frequently. By managing contact fatigue, you can avoid possible opt-outs or customer backlash. Carrying on bombarding your customers and they won’t remain customers for long.

HCL’s Unica suite, which helps in outbound as well as Inbound marketing via different channels, has the capability to avoid or to reduce the Contact Fatigue. In this article, we will describe how to reduce contact fatigue using Unica’s Outbound and Inbound Communication.

Reducing contact fatigue with Inbound communications- using Unica Interact.

Rather than relying on broad and mass communication, target more narrowly. This can be achieved by using the Unica Interact product, which helps in personalized marketing. Personalize offers that are based on the visitor profile information in real-time to enrich the experience of customers interacting with different channels like web, call center, ATMs, and other inbound marketing channels.

Suppressing the Offers based on customer contacts.

Not sending offers to the same customers after presenting the offer N number of times through specific channels like mail, web for a particular period, etc. This can be restricted considering the channels through which the offers are sent. In Interact, a user can specify a rule as shown in image <> in which offers can be suppressed if it is presented n number of times from channel for some duration.

Understand the Customer Responses / Listen to Customers

Offer Rejection- If a customer rejected the offer for N number of times within a particular duration, then it is not wise to continue sending the same offer multiple times through the same channel for some duration. Thus, in Interact, the user can specify a rule as shown in image <> in which offers can be suppressed if it is rejected for a particular channel for some duration.

Offer Acceptance- If the customer has accepted the offer for N number of times within a particular duration, then marketers should decide to continue sending the same offer multiple times through the same channel for some duration. In Interact, the user can specify a rule as shown in image <> in which offers can be suppressed if it is accepted by a customer for a particular channel for some duration.

Event Pattern In Unica Interact

In Unica Interact, Predefined events are available when event patterns are added. The predefined events are offerAccepted, offerContacted, offerRejected, offerAcceptedInCategory, offerContactedInCategory, and offerRejectedInCategory. Users can add an event pattern on the Interactive Channel and can choose from predefined events when you define the events that must occur to fulfill your event pattern.

• Event pattern consists of one or more events initiated by the customer.
• Events can come from any combination of channels.
• Interact, listens for, and tracks relevant events at the AudienceID level until pattern criteria is met.
• Patterns can trigger one or more actions when the criterion is met.

For Example, as shown in the below image:

• For customers interested in the “Free Overnight Shipping Tablet” offer is presented if all the three events like “iPadPageViewed,” “kindlePageVoiewed,” and “galaxyTabPageViewed” are met
• Offer “Mortgage Consultant Outreach” will be presented to the customer only if the event “mortgagePageVisited” has happened more than 3 times.

Keeping the channel limitations

User can set the constraints like as below in Interact as displayed in below image:

• From when to start presenting the offers and till what time offers to be presented?
• After presenting the Offer # of time, stop serving the same offers.
• Within the stipulated time, give maximum # number of offers.

How to reduce contact fatigue with outbound communications by Unica Campaign and Unica Contact Optimization?

Unica Contact Optimize

Contact Optimize determine the optimal contact strategy for each customer. Users can optimize over time, looking across the proposed offers and channels across multiple marketing campaigns.

Using Contact Optimization helps user: 

• Limit contact fatigue by preventing sending conflicting offers to the customers.
•  Meet channel or inventory capacity limitations. 
• Maximize marketing returns on investment (ROI) or profitability.

“For each customer: Max # duplicate offers” Rule in Unica Contact Optimization:

Use this rule to limit the number of times a customer receives the same offer in a given time from a channel. Thus, this rule is used to limit the number of duplicate offers that might be given to the same individual, potentially over different channels. Set a max of 0, then each customer can get only one of any offer. There are zero duplicates, and an individual can get many different offers.

“For each customer: Max # Packages” Rule in Unica Contact Optimization

This rule prevents contact fatigue by defining the maximum number of packages or interruptions that any customer receives over a particular time period. Note: Packages are defined in the Campaign. All offers sent to the same customer through the same contact process are considered as a single “package” delivered on the same channel at the same time.

For example, a package represents multiple coupons in a coupon book or multiple offers within the same email. You can define the Max # Packages rule for a particular channel. You might also limit the scope of your rule to a segment. You can define a rule to limit the maximum number of packages that are sent to high-value customers to 3 over any 30-day period.

“For each customer: Min/Max # Offers” Rule in Unica Contact Optimization

This rule allows you to limit the number of offers that a customer receives. You can manage the number of different messages you are sending to an individual. In particular, use this rule to control your customer offer strategy on a per-customer basis. Specifically, this rule controls the minimum/maximum number of offers, or a particular offer, to be given to an individual over a particular period.

Exclude the OptOuts audience

“Opt-in / Opt-out” group are highly susceptible to fatigue (‘Opt-in’ can suddenly become ‘Opt-out’). Thus, if someone opts-in, the customer should also be able to vary the number of messages he receives. Many web channels let customers limit the messages by period – daily, weekly, monthly. Optimize product provides the rule where the following can be achieved-

• Customers belonging to specific Segment can be excluded or Included for a specific channel as seen in below image:

• Exclude or Include all the Customers who were contacted with some specific ContactID and other similar rules in combination, as seen in image <>.

• In Campaign, global suppression can be applied to all the customers who have opted out for a specific audience by assigning the OptOut segment to that audience level.

Analyze continuously (Target cells Control cells, Analysis by reporting i.e., ROI)

• In Unica Campaign, users can use the approach of comparison of Target Cell vs. Control cell to find out the effectiveness of the Marketing Campaign.
• Users can continuously analyze the reporting data and can take the input into Campaign Flowchart from history tables to develop the logic so that contact can be made to only deserving customers with correct Offer and through an effective channel at the right time.

Overall, A cross-channel Contact fatigue hampers the marketing negatively. Unica Interact as Inbound marketing and Unica Campaign / Contact Optimization as an outbound marketing channel can be used to reduce the contact fatigue. With Unica Interact- Personalized Marketing, Offer suppression for Offer Rejection, Offer Acceptance, Offer Presentation and Patterns can be used effectively. Utilize the different rules on the offers you extend and utilize them to reduce contact fatigue by delivering great customer experience.

You can read more about it from our Unica Product Guide. For more any further help or queries reach out to us.