Unica V12.1 = 4; Are You Ready for More?

Just three months after releasing Unica V12.0, our amazing engineering and product management teams have released Unica V12.1!  All of us on the Unica Professional Services team are extremely excited about the new capabilities. We can’t wait to show Unica end-users everything they will now be enabled to do… but since we can’t cover everything in one article, here’s the rundown!

Today, we’re going to illustrate how Unica V12.1 harnesses the power of the number 4. This means we’re going to show you 4 key features of our new integrated cloud-native platform and 4 functions that make each of the 4 features work!

Key Features:

1. Goal-Based Marketing orchestrated by Unica Journey.
2. Digital Execution at Scale powered by Unica Deliver.
3. Integration Made Easy with Unica Link.
4. Of course, let’s not forget – there is more with Unica 12.1
   1. A/B Testing and FlexOffers with Interact.
   2. Workflow simplified & more powerful, plus REST API Swagger with Plan.

Goal-Based Marketing

1. Introductory Use-Case


Of course, all marketing campaigns have a goal; increase revenue, sell x units of y product, have an ROI of n%, but what about marketing campaigns that have much more focused goals? As an example, let’s take a look at campaigns with milestones based on the completion of specific customer activities. In the credit card industry, the target goal may be to attain a certain number of transactions within the first month of a customer opening their account. To achieve that, after being approved, the customer must: 1) receive the credit card in the mail, 2) active their new card, and 3) start making purchases. There could also be many more customer activities along the way that leads to them completing the number of transactions within their first month of receiving their card. That is what we call Goal-Based Marketing!

2. Guided Tour of the Journey Interface

Journey is new, and so is its interface. Each Journey begins with one or more Entry Sources that provide the customers for the Journey. These could be via KAFKA topics, JSON files, REST APIs, or even flat files. The Journey canvas is completely flexible and allows marketers to design the Journey and execute it as well. Marketers can determine if a customer is engaged or not, decide what is next in their Journey, add a custom wait period as well as join separate parts of a Journey together for a single path forward. Digital execution is available via email or SMS.

3. Let’s Journey Together: Steps to Create an Executable Journey

Now that we’ve explained Goal-Based Marketing, provided an example use-case and talked a bit about the interface for Journey, here are the high-level steps:
– Establish a Goal for the Journey
– Create a Data Definition
– Configure an Entry Source
– Add Journey Controls to the canvas
– Include one or more Touchpoints
– Publish and “Let the Journey begin” For a more in-depth look into creating an impactful Journey, be on the look-out for an upcoming video!

4. Audience Syndication to and from Journey

Every Journey is better if it is shared, and Audience Syndication makes that possible. Journey can receive audiences from Campaign as well as share audiences with Campaign. Interact Triggered Messages can be used to add members of an audience to Journey.

Digital Execution at Scale

1. Powering Your Digital Channels (email, SMS and transactional email)

Unica once again has built-in digital execution capabilities! Today, this can be done via email, SMS, and transactional email – mobile push will be added soon. Landing pages are available today, and we’ll be adding the ability to perform surveys in the future.

2. You Control the Message: Introducing Message Editor

Our built-in message editor allows upload of HTML files, creation of headers, and footers to edit your message easily, and of course, the addition of the all-important personalization fields. Message preview and the ability to test your content according to your personalization rules round out the functionality.

3. Execution That Scales

4. Closing the Loop!

Digital execution means more than just the “send”; it also means closing the loop. Yes, it’s important to know about bounces, opens, click-throughs, etc., but even more important to know on an email by email address basis, and the correct way to do that is to have the information be stored as part of Unica’s omnichannel Contact and Response History.

Integration Made Easy

1. Establishing the Link: What is Unica Link?

Unica Link is a low-code integration module available in Unica V12.1. We’ve taken established technology and embedded it in Unica Link, which makes this possible. A process box in Campaign and Touchpoints in Journey are Link enabled.

2. Out of the Box Connectors Available

There are out of the box connectors today for email, CRM and SMS. We’ll be adding more connectors in the future.

3. Behind-the-Scenes Tour

The end-user interfaces for Unica Link are straight forward and point and click. An administrator interface allows for the entry of REST APIs for the integration point and process maps for how the APIs will be invoked. The administrator configures the data fields that will be transferred and what will be exposed to the end-user interface.

4. We are Just Getting Started

We’ll be adding more connectors in the future. We envision integration with social channels, DMP/DSP, attribution tools, and more!  We welcome collaboration with customers as well, so please let us know what integration needs are, and we can work with you.

But wait, there’s more!- Unica Interact and Unica Plan

1. A/B and N Testing with Unica Interact

Interact V12.1 has built-in A/B testing that can accommodate more than just champion/challenger testing, so you can test more than 2 versions at once. After the test, you can return to the ‘default’ offer of those being tested or review the results and make the winner the new ‘default.’

2. Increase Your Flexibility: FlexOffers with Unica Interact

FlexOffers allows for bulk personation of real-time/inbound offers. It provides the ability to group offers and then add rules and filters to these pooled offers that are then applied in real-time during execution. This provides further end-user efficiency to the end-user configuration of offer usage for Interact.

3. Performance and Efficiency: What’s in Your Workflow?

Unica V12.1 brings an updated workflow to Plan. The workflow automatically opens in edit mode, and changes are instant. You’ve asked for it, and now you have it – the workflow now allows multiple users to make edits to the same workflow at the same time. Reordering tasks is now drag and drop, and updating % complete is more efficient as well.

4. Adding Swagger to Plan APIs

Plan now has Swagger! That’s right; a Swagger interface has been added to Plan to allow access to the REST APIs in Plan.  This includes the new REST APIs for the workflow. Now reviewing and working with the Plan REST APIs is easier than before.

As I detailed above, Unica V12.1 really does equal 4!  Also, we want to show you more!  So, in the coming weeks, we’ll be adding videos to Unica Live that demonstrate each of the items that prove that Unica V12.1 – meaning 1+2+1 equals 4, and Unica V12.1 gives you more!