Introducing Goal-Based Marketing with Unica Journey

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 from your registry unless they add at least one gift to their registry. In the case of mortgages, prospective home buyers need to pre-qualify for a mortgage before they can look for a house.

In the example below for a SAAS database product, we have identified the milestones for a 30-day free trial. First, a user must register for the trial. Next, the user needs to upload some data. The user will get no value from a database trial unless they load some data. Next is to provision an index. It’s a technical requirement. The user can’t run a query unless they have provisioned at least one index against the data. The last is to run a query. The user in the trial can’t see a database’s performance without running at least one query.

Diagram 1: Plan your goals

Step 2 – Build the journey in Unica Journey.

To get started in Unica Journey, you first create a New Journey.

Once you give your journey a name, you add Milestones and give them names. You can see we have one milestone for the trial registration, uploading data, provisioning an index, running a query, and lastly, purchasing a subscription.

Next, you specify the entry/event sources for the milestones.

Last, you set up the conditions under which Journey takes action for that milestone. In some cases, it will be a positive live, “Upload_data is equal to true.” It could also be that you want to trigger an action if the user hasn’t yet uploaded data. You can see that Journey supports integration with the most common real-time event triggers like JSON, Kafka, web forms, and REST APIs. It can also use Unica Campaign, Interact, and Discover as entry sources.

Next, you right-click on each Milestone on the journey canvas and add a Goal.

Once you have named a Goal, you can further define it. In the case of our database trial, we would select the count of registrations daily. The entry source would be an API call for registration confirmation, and our Weekly Goal is 1000.

Once you have set up your goals, it’s time to build the Journey Activities and Controls to encourage the user to complete each Milestone.

For our database trial, you can see that we start with the “registered for trial” Milestone. When Journey detects a trial registration, it sends confirmation of the trial registration email with a login link – prompting the user to get started by logging in.

On login Journey displays an in-app message to do the first Milestone “Upload a dataset” with a link to a popup tutorial and video. If you complete a data upload, Journey detects the Milestone and displays the next in-app message to provision an index. Journey continues serving messages in the app until you complete all 4 Milestones or log out.
On log out, Journey checks to see the last completed Milestone. If none, Journey sends an email “How to upload data,” with a link to a video. If data was uploaded, the Journey sends an email “How to create an index,” with a link to a video. If an index was created, then Journey sends an email ”How to run your first query,” with a link to a video. Lastly, if all the prior Milestones were completed, Journey sends an email “Save money on a monthly subscription,” link to subscription plans.

 On the next login, Journey presents an in-app message confirming the successful subscription purchase.

Now that we have created our Journey, it’s time to monitor it and adjust it on the fly. Journey is always on and runs in near real-time. So if you are in a Journey, you can mouse over any Milestone or Touchpoint to see its performance to Goal.

It will also show you the % completion to each Goal by Event or Touchpoint. This way, you can check your Journey throughout the day and identify underperforming Event Conversions or Touchpoint Responses and make adjustments.

If you click on the Milestones tab, you can see the progress to goal for each Milestone in near real-time.

To improve conversion performance, you might decide to add an Engagement Split to your Journey. We pause the Journey to make the change.

In this case, we are segmenting the audience by Country to see if a message presented in the local language will improve conversion.

Journeys can be monitored over time to use historical performance to adjust the upcoming week’s Goals.

You can also view the Milestones in the Journey from a classic funnel view to see the gap between milestone conversions.

That’s what Goal-Based Marketing looks like in Unica Journey. It’s designed to help you easily set the goals, monitor conversions, and adjust the journey based on real-time results.

So if you are a Goal-Based Marketer, see what Unica Journey can do for you. 

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