Unica 12.1.3 Marketing Platform 2022 Spring Release

HCL Unica, the marketing automation platform that helps customers achieve personalization at scale, is excited to announce the release and general availability of our latest Spring 2022 update to the Unica 12.1 cloud native integrated marketing platform – Unica 12.1.3.

As businesses continue to evolve to changing customer needs and demands, the need for delivering personalized engagements across channels with precision and performance has become increasingly important. The latest update to the cloud native integrated marketing platform helps marketers deliver meaningful, personalized engagements that are easy to build & optimize and faster to execute while being compliant with customer preferences.

Featuring key updates such as real-time personalization playback, out of the box preference centre, streamlined privacy and compliance, and expanded industry journey templates, Unica continues to strengthen its Integrated Goal Based Marketing, Messaging without Limits, and Enhanced Cloud Native Foundation pillars, providing marketing teams with a nimble and agile platform to get the job done.

Apart from offering cloud native and on-premise deployment options, Unica 12.1.3 is also available as a dedicated SaaS offering – HCL Unica on HCL Now and powered by the HCL SoFy, the Solutions Factory for HCLSoftware.

Integrated Goal Based Marketing

Audience consents and preferences have a positive impact on customer retention and are key to continuous customer engagement. They not only build customer trust but also help you to narrow your focus on the preferred channel. 52% of consumers polled like it when customer service is personalized to them, and their interests (Opinium Research LLP, Ovum) and 85% of marketers believe respecting customer consent is a competitive advantage (American Marketing Association).

In this release, customer preference takes centre stage with the addition of consent management in the Contact Central feature of the platform. Channel specific customer preference can be either captured either through the out of the box preference centre or from an external source through the integration APIs. This, along with existing contact management features like channel capacity constraints and regional contact preferences based on enterprise and local governmental regulations, ensure channel outreach is privacy compliant.

With a rich set of industry-specific journey templates, Marketers can launch customer journeys with ease and agility. In addition to our existing templates for Retail, Telco, Banking, Pharma, Hospitality/Entertainment industries, this release features four new additional journey templates: Wellness Program Participation Journey (Healthcare), Therapy Launch (Pharma, courtesy of our partner Ereteam), Loyalty Club Points Mobile App (Various) and Cross Channel Welcome Campaign (Various) journeys. These templates are packaged with common engagement scenarios and best practices to deliver a highly engaging and impactful customer experience. With the added support for previewing mailings, marketers can also validate their touchpoint communications before launching a journey.

While journeys drive more engagement, they also bring in challenges with the management of data around privacy, flexibility, error handling, and scale. In this release, journeys have introduced configurable masking of PI data such as credit card numbers, phone numbers, and email addresses. New features like configurable validation of email addresses and phone numbers make the processing of data more flexible. With enhancements to logging and display of error status and details in journeys, identifying and troubleshooting issues in journeys is a breeze. Journey performance also gets a boost with the seamless archival of journey data and clustering of journey engines.

Personalization continues to be at the heart of any engagement. This release features key updates that elevate crafting, analyzing, and executing personalization strategies up a few notches. With the new interactive playback of audience engagement on channels, marketers can filter the audience, drill down activity (sessions) on a channel across multiple time horizons (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.), inspect the call to action (offers presented/suppressed, etc.), the context, event patterns and profile that drove it as well the sequence of interaction. Real-time introspection of personalization gives marketers the insights to tune and tweak their strategies. Triggering personalized actions is also now even more powerful with the enforcement of channel capacity constraints and dynamic scaling of outbound and inbound channel gateways.

An enhanced UI/UX makes building personalization strategies easier and faster. Key enhancements include linkage from the associated campaign, searching across strategies, the listing of recently worked strategies, sorting on individual columns of treatment rules, display of deployment data (date, server group), and on-demand cache refresh. With features such as the display of interaction points in a zone, members of a static offer list, criteria for a dynamic offer list and offer attributes when they are parameterized, treatment rules provide marketers a sneak peek into their personalization strategies.

Talking about offers, the revamped tile-based layout renders thumbnails of associated content, giving marketers a visual feel for the offers. Key info such as name, description, etc., is summarized in the visual tiles, making it easier to explore and utilize offers.

Managing segments also has never been easier with the addition of two new key features. First, whenever a session flowchart containing a segment creation flow is altered, the user is immediately alerted about the impact on downstream campaigns that utilize it. Second, the segment summary screen now also displays the list of campaign flowcharts where a segment is used, making it easier to understand the impact of any changes.

Contact strategy optimization is now more efficient with enhancements to Min/Max # offers and Max # duplicate optimization rules that now can handle every value of offer attribute. This reduces the overhead of creating multiple rules or adding multiple conditions.

Campaign planning also gets a new look with a refreshed planning calendar that allows you to filter tasks and view across timeframes (daily, weekly, etc..). Collaboration on campaign planning is more efficient with the ability to directly launch associated Slack channels from message boards on the platform.

Marketing insights form the basis of understanding your engagements, improve marketing efficiency and effectiveness and ultimately drive increased revenue and profitability. The platform’s Unica OpenInsights, the open reporting framework that lets you leverage the power of leading rich analytical tools like Google Looker to visualize and analyze marketing data, is now available on Maria DB and runs on the cloud version of Google Looker and supports custom offer attributes.

Messaging without Limits:

In this release, the platform’s digital messaging function powered by Unica Deliver comes with new features that make managing, crafting, and sending digital messages more efficient and privacy compliant.

With a configurable out of the box preference centre, customer consent can easily be captured and incorporated into your digital campaigns. Both ad-hoc and scheduled mailings, triggered via Campaign, have been enhanced to adhere to region and capacity preferences defined in Contact Central.

Looking up personalization fields when building landing page forms in QuickBuilder message editor, searching for communications, and the availability of response date time from landing page data in attribution campaigns all make crafting and analyzing digital messaging more powerful.

Want to prioritize the sending of a confirmation email over a weekly newsletter? You got it with the new feature that allows you to prioritize mailings based on volumes and type (batch vs transactional) and ensure their timely delivery.

Enhanced Cloud Native Foundation: 

The release features key enhancements that continue to strengthen the platform’s cloud native foundation. Security is beefed up with support for AWS Secret Manager Integration for Password Encryption. On the performance front, the Interact Tomcat process tracker and scaling configuration address concurrency related changes, and Journey engine clustering is now supported on Kubernetes. Deployment is also more efficient with optimized containers, Helm level Multicast IP configurations out of the box for all products, Container OS upgrade and Vulnerability fixes, and support for custom JDBC URLs using Helm Charts.

Overall, Unica 12.1.3 platform release provides marketers with capabilities that make it easy to build, optimize and execute personalized customer engagements while maintaining adherence to privacy and compliance standards.