Offer Creation Using Unica Centralized Offer Management (COM)

‘Offer’ the most common term which we see almost everywhere while interacting with the digital platforms. Whether you are trying to purchase your favorite shirt on an eCommerce site or when booking a movie for a relaxing Saturday, offers are everywhere. They act as a currency for the digital world and need to be carefully utilized, keeping the target audience in your mind to leverage their full potential; this is where Offer Management plays the biggest role.

Having an offer management system in place enables you to manage offers, their priorities, the number of times a customer sees a specific offer, to which customers the Offer should be shown to. With offer management, you can easily personalize your offers and tailor an efficient user experience for the audience. A simple offer from an online retailer could consist of free shipping on all online purchases made in April. A more complex offer could consist of a credit card from a financial institution, with a personalized combination of artwork, introductory rate, and expiration date that varies based on the recipient’s credit rating and region.

Why is Offer Management improved when it is centralized?

To create a personalized marketing strategy, the marketers need to have control over offer distribution on the marketing channels such as email, SMS, direct mail, and many more. Centralizing the offer management lets you optimize offers across any channel. Based on the customer behavior data, you can control which set of contacts should receive a BOGO offer and which should receive a flat 20% off. It enables you to manage a portfolio of your offers and put a cap on the number of offers being sent to a particular customer.

Offer Management with Unica V12.1

In Centralized Offer Management, offers are based on the offer templates that you administer. As many of our customers have told us that in their organization, the folks that build offers are not the folks that build the campaign flowcharts. To accommodate these requests and others, we have established a Centralized Offer Management (COM) from V12.0, for centralizing and integrating offers with other channels, across the Unica Portfolio.

We gathered the feedback from other Unica end-users who want to build the Offer once and then be able to deploy the same Offer both on batch outbound campaigns & on real-time inbound channels. Centralized Offer Management (COM) meets both of those needs. Offers can now be created without an offer template. This means that offers can be assembled using offer attributes and tested out before needing to create a template. Only after you’ve used and determined the correct set of offer attributes, you can then create an offer template for continuous reuse. The process for the creation of an offer has not been changed, but the way it is created has changed. You need to follow the below steps.

Offer attribute creation

To create an offer attribute, you need to navigate Setting Offer settings and then click on ‘Custom attribute definitions.’ On this page, you have a button ‘Add custom attribute’ to add a new attribute. You can fill the necessary details below to create a new custom attribute for the Offer.

Once the required attributes are created, the next step is to create an offer template.

Offer template creation

To create an offer template, navigate to Setting Offer settings, and click on ‘Offer template definitions.’ On this page, you have the ‘Add new template’ button to create a new offer template. On the ‘Metadata’ page, provide the necessary details, and then click on ‘Next.’

The above-highlighted option ‘Allow offers created from this template to be used in real-time interactions’ should be selected only when you plan to use the offers to Interact for real-time marketing. On the ‘Offer attributes’ section, drag-drop the required attributes in the appropriate section, as shown below.

On the ‘Default values’ section, you need to provide the default values for all the attributes selected earlier, as shown below. After that, you can click the ‘Save’ button to complete the creation of the offer template.

Once the offer template is created, the next steps to create an instance of an offer using the offer template create earlier.

Offer creation

For the creation of an offer, navigate to Offer Offers from the top navigation bar. Then from the left navigation pane, select the appropriate folder, and then click on ‘Add Offer’ from the right navigation pane.

This action will open a screen to choose the required offer template. You need to select the desired offer template and then click on ‘Next.’

On the next screen, you have an option to provide the details about the offer attributes and also define the ‘Suppression Rules’ for the same Offer and then click on ‘Save.

This will create an offer. Centralized Offer Management (COM) module also facilitates the user to create an offer without a template. For achieving the same, the user needs to follow the below guidelines.

Creation of Offer without a template

To enable the creation of an offer without a template, you need to navigate to Settings Offer settings and then click on ‘Offer without template setting’ as highlighted in the below screenshot.

This opens a new page that captures few details, as shown below.

Note that this is a one-time activity.

Once these settings are saved, you can create a new offer without any template. For that, click on Offer Offers from to menu option. After selecting the appropriate folder, you can click on the ‘Add Offer’ button. You will be shown the below screen from where you can select the ‘Offer without template’ option.

Then click on the ‘Next’ button. This action opens a popup window from where you can select the appropriate offer attributes like below.

After selecting the required attributes, click on ‘Next.’ This will take you to the next screen where you can provide the values for the offer attributes chosen earlier.

Then click on the ‘Add & Save’ button, which navigates the user where he needs to provide like below.

And then click on ‘Save’ to create an offer.

With the introduction of the Centralized Offer Management (COM) module, users get the facility to create an offer template from an offer already created and used.

Creation of offer template from Offer

This option is available from the Offer (s), which is created without a template. To achieve this, open an offer, which is created without a template. Then click on ‘Actions’ like below. This will give an option ‘Save as template’ which facilitates the user to create an Offer template.

This opens a new screen where the user needs to provide ‘Metadata’ for the offer template like below.

After clicking on ‘Save,’ the user will be navigated to a new screen like below where he can provide the default value for the offer attributes which were selected for that Offer.

Clicking on ‘Save’ will create a new Offer template and will be available for the creation of a new offer going forward.

Adding offer attributes to existing Offer templates

Consider the scenario where the customer wanted to add new Offer attributes to and existing offer template. This is very well possible with the Centralized Offer Management system now. For that, you can perform the below steps.

1. Access Offer template you wanted to update in ‘Edit’ mode.

2. On the below section of the ‘Offer attributes’ section, add new offer attribute(s) you wanted to add.

3. Click on ‘Next’ and the provide default values for newly added attribute(s) and then save template.

After completion of this, users will see the new attribute while creation of Offer using this template.

Difference between traditional Offer Module Vs. Centralized Offer Management

1. Centralized Offer Management module comes with a separate .war file that needs to be deployed in the Web application Server, whereas the traditional Offer module is embedded in Campaign/Marketing Operations.

2. Once the Centralized Offer Management module is enabled, users won’t be able to use the traditional offer module.

3. With the Centralized Offer Management module, the administration of offer templates and offer attributes created is done at Settings Offer Settings menu option.

4. The Centralized Offer Management module can be enabled or disabled using the flag property highlighted in the below screenshot.

 With the Centralized Offer Management module in Unica, you gain the benefits likes.

• The user creating Offer doesn’t require access to Campaign.
• Create Offers without offer template
• Update offer template when required
• Create an offer template from Offer

For more information, you can also have a look at the video on Unica V12- Centralized Offer Management You can learn more about COM from here.