IBM Unica Campaign Management

What is IBM Unica Campaign Management?

IBM Campaign (formerly Unica Campaign) is a software designed for the purpose of campaign management. Unica provides a unique GUI’s to design, execute, and measure customer-driven communication across all marketing channels. This software also stores contact and response history that enable the user to know which customers have responded to which offers over the time.

Campaign management tools should be chosen with care to truly make a difference to marketing programs.

IBM Campaign enables you to:

• Construct a targeted, ongoing dialogue using data available from local and third-party repositories dealing with past interactions, as well as current behaviors and events, etc.

• Govern campaign logic and delivery, which includes segmentation, field creation, exclusions, the ability to execute email, and mobile SMS campaigns.

• Reuse building blocks of campaign management incorporating audiences, offers and other exclusion rules.

• Perfectly measure and report marketing activities to improve insights, decision making and accountability.

• Choose either an on-premise or cloud deployment model, whichever preferred.

IBM Unica products

IBM Unica products deliver outstanding customer experiences over multiple channels. This extraordinary customer treatment enhances loyalty and drive revenue growth. Below are the major Unica products discussed:

·         IBM Campaign

Automates marketing programs through advanced campaign management.

·         IBM Interact

Delivers personalized reports across different marketing channels.

·         IBM Contact Optimization

This platform regulates the optimal contact policy for personalized customers.

·         IBM Marketing Operations

This tool is used to deal with marketing campaigns quickly and rapidly by taking into account the processes, budgets and expenses.

·         IBM Opportunity Detect

Deals with customer behavior by applying event and pattern detection.

·         IBM Distributed Marketing

Enable field marketing teams to customize corporate marketing campaigns for local use.

IBM marketing tools

·         Omni-channel marketing

Enhances customer engagement, increases user satisfaction and thereby increase in sales by enabling seamless individual experiences.

·         Real-time personalization

Interacts with relevant and personalized marketing for promoting interactions. Here, there is an opportunity to engage customers with your brand.

How does Unica Work?

When working on IBM Campaign, it pays to understand what the software is doing behind the scenes. Nearly every time you add a box in a Unica flow chart, it creates a temporary database table with just a list of ids. A simple select statement will run and save a table like the one shown in the image below. When you then link that select box to another one it uses the first temporary table as its starting point. This makes the queries more efficient by starting with a smaller base at each new level.

Joining a temporary Table

If we use any of the Unica process boxes (as in below image). We need to connect the source input to the previous Unica process box, provided both are at the same level.

Figure: Unica Process Box Options

In the figure below is a section from a Unica flow chart containing 2 select boxes. The first box has 6 members, the second box starts with those 6 members when applying the next level of criteria. You will see that the preceding process box limits the volume of the subsequent process box.

What this means in terms of behind the scenes process is shown in the figure below:

The figure above shows that we have joined a temporary table of 6 customer id’s to another schema table and then applied some additional criteria (in this case age <=72). Unica will treat this as a 2 table join. The first table only has 6 customer ids in it; the second is a full table of all customers. The query will be very quick because it uses the indexes in the 2nd table and effectively only has to query against 6 records. The result of this will be a new Unica temporary table of only 3 records. Nearly every time you run a select query it will only store the results of that query as a list of ids. This is demonstrated in the flow chart image below… each step in the flow chart will be referencing or creating a new temporary table.

Instances where Unica will store more fields in the temporary table are:

1. An extract box, which keeps all fields from the extract TAB.

2. A persistent Derived field will be stored as long as the audience level doesn’t change.

IBM Campaign Use Cases

IBM Unica Campaign is hosted on behalf of clients, to provide access to the customer data for the purpose of marketing and service campaigns. This tool is used by both analytics teams and marketers.

IBM Campaign can be utilized for both simple as well as complex data selections whose requirements include splitting 'contacts' by channel based on data that is available.

• Marketing automation, set and forget - only remember when there is an issue and are alerted when there are failure triggers

• Resource management - allows resources to focus on items within Unica or outside.

• Can handle complex data sets - and large amounts of data

Benefits of Unica Campaign

• Reduce campaign cycle time and time-to-market and increase campaign volume

• Reduce costs of marketing campaigns

• Improve response rates and business results by increasing the precision of campaign targeting

• Deepen customer relationships, loyalty and lifetime value

• Enable cross-channel marketing by using centralized decision

·         User friendly interface;

·         Makes querying data much easier;

·         Provides visibility and transparency from starting universe through segmentation;

·         Stores templates, catalogs, triggers and also easily integrates with email and IBM Cognos;

·         Syncs well with the database;

·         Allows personalized multiple ways to arrive at the desired results.

Features of Unica:

·         Segmentation, offer and channel assignment: a powerful, flexible, flowchart-based interface to manage campaigns, including audience segmentation, exclusions, and assignment of offers and channels.

·         Interaction history: a complete history, for each customer or prospect, of contacts made, offers presented and response or no response – critical to building an effective on-going dialogue.

·         Highly reusable: Nearly any element you create can be used in subsequent campaigns.

·         Scheduling, list generation and output formatting: achieves campaign execution capabilities, including the ability to schedule multiple campaign waves and access data from multiple sources in ‘n’ number of formats.

·         Response attribution: compacts the loop by attributing responses of different direct, indirect, or inferred campaigns.

·         Reporting and analysis: standard campaign reports and other key analyses are included, a flexible and open datamart allows custom data to be incorporated into reports and any 3rd-party tools to be used.

·         Social Media Integration: output from Unica Campaign directly to Facebook user walls or Twitter Direct Messages.

The key system functionalities

• Create and used multiple data source inputs from multiple data types

• Merge, manipulate & segment customer data into groups

• Create selection criteria of campaign target list and response

• Create and manage offers and communications

• Create a control group for campaign performance tracking

• Generate a target list in predefined format to integrate with execution channels

• Create strategic segments for frequently used criteria

• Store contact history and response history data.

• Automate life cycle and event driven communications

Conclusion

IBM Unica includes many modules from opportunity detection to campaign execution. It allows complex list building and also allows for better management of contact points, and automation using scripts.

The more data you have, the more likely IBM Campaign is recommended over the other tools in the market. It is an absolute EMM (Enterprise Marketing Management) solution. It helps one gain all the marketing requirements right from traditional channels to the evolving digital channels.

This advanced omnichannel campaign management application enables marketers to execute deep segmentation over various data sources to convey tailored messages to vast volumes of contacts.