Unica Deliver 12.1.3 Release

In 2022, HCLSoftware is continuing to meet its commitment to refine and hone the core capabilities of Unica Deliver. In this blog, I will explore the features of the Spring release. 

The Unica Deliver 12.1.3 release was largely focused on two main areas:

1. Managing recipient preferences with Unica Deliver and Contact Central (a more detailed overview of Contact Central can be found in the Contact Central in Unica blog).
2. Refinements to existing features to improve marketers’ user experience, such as making it easier to find communication documents to assign to your message.

1) Managing Recipient Preferences

In my capacity as product manager for Unica Deliver, my key focus is to make the daily lives of marketers easier. When prioritising any new enhancement functionality, we must consider the impact it will have on our user base as-a-whole. 

One such problem that all of our customers are trying to solve is: how do we make it easy to capture recipient requests to subscribe or unsubscribe from a particular channel and then include or exclude them in subsequent campaigns?

The answer is more complicated than it might first sound. Many customers handle this particular problem in their own unique way. Some have implemented preference centres that are shared across multiple platforms, whereas others use Unica Deliver landing pages to capture unsubscribe events. The Unica platform supports both ways of working.

For those customers that want to use Unica Deliver, we have created two built-in landing pages. One to capture communication preferences and another to confirm the communication preferences have been submitted. 

The built-in landing page can be configured to the marketer’s branding preferences. We have a standard page that can be configured with a logo or banner of your choice. You get to choose which channels are included, so if you only use Unica Deliver to send an email, your customers won’t see options for SMS, Push, and WhatsApp.

When a recipient interacts and updates their preferences, Unica Deliver automatically processes all responses from the new built-in preference landing page and then automatically makes them available to Contact Central on the Customer Consent page if Contact Central is set up with Campaign. Campaign can then process these opt-outs in the Deliver process box and exclude recipients that have opted out so that they are not contacted later by Deliver.

2) Assign Default Values and Personalization Fields to Landing Page Form Fields

Building a great-looking landing page has never been easier in Unica. The 12.1.2 enhancement went a long way to giving our customers what they were looking for. However, one gap that had to be filled was being able to assign default values to form fields. This has been neatly addressed in the 12.1.3 release, and users can now use the hash key/pound sign (‘#’) to bring up the personalization field menu and then type to filter the list of personalization fields as normal.

So what does this mean in real-world terms for our users? There are two use cases that spring immediately to mind; firstly, when you need a landing page to register your customers’ interest in a product or promotion, you can have a hidden field with the default value of ‘registered’ to capture their explicit opt-in.

The next example is where you need to build a customized unsubscribe landing page. You can create a simple page with a single submit button that contains another hidden field called unsubscribe and have that field set to ‘true.’ What this means for the recipient is that they achieve the same thing with fewer clicks, and the streamlined interaction should provide a better customer experience.

3. Communication search

In the original release of Unica Deliver, communication could only be used once in a mailing, message, or journey, which meant that when you created a mailing, message, or journey, we were able to present a nice neat list of communications for users to choose from. Any used communications would be removed from the list and no longer be available for selection.

After some helpful feedback from our users, we quickly came to the conclusion that making our users create copies for recurring messages wasn’t the best user experience, so we decided to make communications reusable across mailings, messages, and journeys. Whilst helpful, this meant that every communication was always available to select in a mailing, message, or journey, meaning that the communication list could grow very large. To improve the experience, in 12.1.3, we have introduced a communication search function to save users time and effort in scrolling through their list to find the right communications.

Unica Deliver has come a long way in its first two years on the market, largely thanks to HCL’s belief in providing investment in their products and also thanks to the tireless efforts of our engineering and DevOps teams. Having said that, nothing is gained when we rest on our laurels, so we will continue to listen to our customers and build the most impactful and beneficial enhancements as quickly as we can bring them to market. 

If you are a Unica Deliver user and want to submit an enhancement request, please visit our ideas portal. Every idea is reviewed extensively, and a good percentage of ideas are converted into functionality. If you would like to read more about HCL’s ideas portal, this helpful blog will guide you through: Unica Ideas Portal.