Releasing the new feature pack - Unica 12.1.1 Summer 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 Summer update to the Unica 12.1 cloud native integrated marketing platform – Unica 12.1.1. Apart from offering traditional deployment options, Unica 12.1.1 is now available as a cloud native-as-a-service offering – HCL Unica on HCL Now and powered by the HCL SoFy, the Solutions Factory for HCLSoftware.

Featuring updates to its Integrated Goal Based Marketing, Messaging without Limits, and Enhanced Cloud Native Foundation release pillars, Unica Summer Release strengthens the platform’s cloud native foundation with Unica on HCL Now Offering, deepens the integrated platform’s core capabilities with journeys that now have integrated next best action, better execution, enhanced personalization, analytics and finally elevates the messaging experience from build to send to deliver.

Integrated Goal-Based Marketing

Journey design and build experience get a boost with key updates. Marketers can now save their journey designs as templates and migrate between environments through export and import functionality. Customers looking for a quick start on their journey design can also leverage any of the four industry-specific Journey templates: Credit Card Activation, Retail Customer Subscription Service, Contactless Hotel Experience, and Telco Handset Upgrade that Unica is making available on demand.

Journey execution is greatly enhanced with updates to journey controls and deep platform integration. Are your customers getting stagnated in their Journeys? Fast forward them with Unica Journey’s powerful next best action that leverages their journey context. Marketers now have a choice either to assign offers based on their personalization strategy or leverage the power of Unica Interact’s real-time personalization to determine the next best action. Time-driven controls in decision splits (apart from engagement splits) and delay factors in data definition fields now make it easier to leverage individual context in journeys and drive them on the relevant engagement path.

On the Journey delivery front, with the new REST API endpoint integration support, you can now get 3rd party touchpoints involved in your omnichannel orchestration. Integrated email opt-outs through Unica Deliver are now available for Journeys ensuring customer outreach is privacy compliant.

Talking about the call to action, the platform’s centralized offer management module (Unica COM) features key enhancements that make managing and analyzing offers very powerful; with the new static variants, creating and controlling attribute-driven offer variations becomes very easy. Internal class of attributes also provides an additional degree of control in persisting and managing key business data in your offer definition.

Content integration powered by HCL Digital Experience (DX) gets further enriched with automated offer attribute mapping for additional content objects such as blogs and articles. Take the hassle out of maintaining offers with Webhook support for create, update and delete offer operations. Automated synchronization of content attribute changes with offer attributes between Unica COM and HCL DX or any 3rd party CMS is also now available in this release.

Bring the power of AI to offer analytics with Unica COM’s support for cognitive tagging of content-based attributes. 3rd party AI tools for content like Azure, Snapcast, Google vision, and language insights can be tapped for generating insights and persisted as tags into the offer attributes, making downstream offer-content ROI analysis very powerful.

Unica Plan, the marketing resource management module of the platform, features usability and compliance updates in this release. Project workflows now have a consistent look and feel when it comes to saving workflow templates. Marketers also have a choice to configure the default report selection for marketing objects. Offer history audit can also be migrated to the centralized offer management (COM) module of the platform, making audit logging more centralized.

The platform’s precision targeting powered by the Unica Campaign module has key updates in this release that takes productivity up a notch. Accessing your campaigns is faster with an enhanced search capability that supports searching by campaign code. Have multiple users working on the same campaign flowchart? We have you covered with our concurrent usage depiction feature, which depicts the current user accessing it and provides options to gracefully take over control.

Looking for a reliable way to publish your contact lists to a third-party system? The snapshot process in campaign flowcharts now provides you the ability to push data to the Kafka queue. With our expanded segment and flowchart APIs, you can now access process box counts and segment members along with a choice of profile attributes.

In continuation with our direction to streamline campaign execution and optimization, running contact strategy optimization powered by Unica Optimize for your campaigns is now easier than ever. Have campaigns with different cycles participating in your optimization session? No problem. Marketers can now on-demand turn on or off a participating campaign from an optimization session.

The release also features key updates to the Unica Interact module of the platform, providing more efficiency, control, and coverage for your real-time personalization. Struggling to do the next best action with multiple offers? Unica Interact’s latest enhancement includes support for static and smart or dynamic offer lists in interaction strategies, making offer assignment and personalization a breeze.

You also get more control over personalization based on 3rd party external callouts with our new timeout feature. This feature allows graceful exit from such calls in case of heavy traffic or outage of 3rd party systems and prevents your personalization from getting impacted. Managing your personalization environment is also better with the new purge deployment history feature. Omnichannel engagement also gets a further push with support now for triggering action on the Push channel based on inbound channel activity. Gain insights on your personalization strategies with reporting that are now flexible, allowing you to run reports on strategies with or without associated campaigns.

Marketing insights also get a fresh look with key updates to the Platform’s reporting capability. Marketers now have the choice and flexibility to run reporting on the platform’s marketing data on the platform of their choice with our new open reporting framework – Unica OpenInsights. With Unica OpenInsights, you can leverage the power of leading rich analytical tools like Google Looker and visualize and analyze marketing data to drive the strategy for your business. As of this release, the Unica OpenInsights is only available for Deliver, and future updates will be expanded to other platform modules.

While Unica OpenInsights addresses the need for a more open reporting model, we continue to enrich our own native Unica Insights solution. This release includes a refreshed UI/UX for around 10 reports on performance, operations, and financial insights, making them more appealing and easy to analyze and drive your marketing strategy.

Messaging without Limits:

In this release, Unica has elevated the whole messaging experience from build to send to delivery. Crafting and managing SMS messages is faster with an enhanced QuickBuilder editor with emoji support and features that make it easy to search, filter, and sort your messages. Reusable communications across messages provide further efficiency and standardization to your build process. With additional support for SFTP protocol, messaging upload between on-prem and on-demand is more secure.

Email marketers can also get access to powerful mailing send-time analytics through the Unica OpenInsights solution and optimize their delivery window. Customer outreach is privacy compliant with opt-outs integrated between customer journeys and delivery opt-outs. Delivery of on-demand Push notifications can now also be triggered through Unica Interact’s Deliver gateway.

Enhanced Cloud Native Foundation:

Building on HCLSoftware’s cloud native strategy, Unica continues to march ahead with its cloud native foundation with the availability of Unica 12.1.1 as a cloud native-as-a-service offering – HCL Unica on HCL Now powered by HCL Solution Factory (SoFy).

HCL SoFy is the foundational Cloud Native experience platform that allows clients to deploy HCL Unica on their cloud of choice, without vendor lock-in, and scale to enterprise needs. Customers can experience Unica (and other products from HCLSoftware) by browsing through the catalog of products, and demo packs, and accelerators, deploy them in a matter of minutes on the SoFy sandbox or on a local environment, try new features & functions, and could even easily complete a proof of concept to help them to decide faster on the adoption of newer releases and features.

HCL Now is a cloud native-as-a-service offering that unlocks the full potential of Unica’s cloud native marketing platform on a Cloud of client’s choice. This offering is designed for companies that need the convenience of SaaS but want to avoid cloud vendor lock-in, prevent data-sharing with competitors, and gain more control of their security and compliance.

Additional features such as fully Dockerized deployment capabilities and open-source stack support with the Tomcat app server help you implement Unica faster and lower your TCO. Managing deployments is also more efficient with search and visualization tools built on an ELK stack and integrated CI/CD capabilities with its open platform philosophy; Unica also expands its 750-plus value-driven REST APIs with a more curated audience and transactional mailing APIs.

Overall, Unica 12.1.1 platform release provides marketers powerful features to plan, build, execute and deliver a more engaging customer experience and achieve their marketing goals. At the same time, IT teams can leverage the immense benefits of an enhanced cloud native foundation and flexible deployment options.

To learn more, sign-up for one of our upcoming Unica 12.1.1 Summer Release webinars:

• August 3 – Are Your Customers Getting Stagnated in Their Journeys? Fast Forward Them with the Unica 12.1 Marketing Platform 
• August 5 – Need for Speed? Accelerate Your Outbound Campaigns with the Unica 12.1 Marketing Platform
• August 10 – Take a Fresh Look at Digital Marketing Insights with Google Looker and Unica 12.1 Marketing Platform’s OpenInsights Solution
• August 12 – It’s Time to Revisit Your Offers! Make Your Offers Do More with the Unica 12.1 Marketing Platform
• August 17 – Make Every Moment Count! Get Your Real Time Personalization Going with the Unica 12.1 Marketing Platform
• August 19 – Get Your Digital Channels Firing! Boost Your Digital Marketing with the Unica 12.1 Marketing Platform