Unica 12.1.2 Marketing Platform Winter 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 Winter update to the Unica 12.1 cloud native integrated marketing platform – Unica 12.1.2. Apart from offering traditional deployment options, Unica 12.1.2 is also 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 key updates such as quick start industry specific journey templates, streamlined privacy and compliance, enhanced messaging experience from build to send to deliver, and resilient deployments, Unica continues to strengthen its Integrated Goal Based Marketing, Messaging without Limits, and Enhanced Cloud Native Foundation pillars, providing marketing teams a robust and easy to use platform that makes marketing a breeze.

Integrated Goal-Based Marketing

With customer journeys becoming more complex than ever, marketers are challenged with figuring out how and where to start their journey planning and execution. With this release, the platform’s Journey capability makes it easier than ever for marketers to quick start their customer journeys. With a wide range of out of box industry-specific journey templates such as Credit Card Activation (Banking), Customer Subscription Service (Retail), Contactless Hotel Experience (Hospitality), Handset Upgrade (Telco), Cart Abandonment (Retail), Dynamic eNewsletter (Various Industries), Event Marketing (Hospitality/Entertainment), Increase Walletshare (Various Industries) and Prescription Home Delivery Acquisition Journey (Pharma), marketers can leverage common engagement scenarios and best practices to deliver highly engaging and impactful customer experience.

Managing templates is also now much easier with enhanced search, categorization into folders, and the ability to save, export, and import templates across environments. With added security permissions around journey export and import, a greater degree of control can be enforced as well.

Integral to journeys is how customer events are consumed and processed. With key enhancements, such as custom KAFKA topics, support for nested JSON data feeds, flexible date formats, and the ability to modify data definitions, data feed processing in journeys becomes more efficient. The ability to download data definitions in JSON or CSV formats makes it now easier to plan and integrate with 3^rd party data feeds. Stuck with a journey process? Looking for help? Access to documentation is also now a click away with embedded documentation links.

Every day, customers more increasingly turning towards a mobile-first brand experience and social channels for brand awareness. A recent study found that push-enabled app users logged 53% more monthly sessions compared with users who had not engaged with a push message, while social channels like Twitter provides access to over 211 million monetizable daily active users.  Are your journeys covered for these powerful channels?

Unica has added support in journeys for social messaging powered by Twitter

With this release, Unica has added support in journeys for PUSH powered by Unica Deliver and social messaging powered by Twitter. With existing support for Email, SMS, Push, WhatsApp, AdTech like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn channels, you get the most diverse and broadest omnichannel coverage for your journeys, ensuring you never miss a moment to engage with your customers on any channel. While channel coverage ticks the box, are you worried about privacy and compliance requirements in your outreach? Breathe easy!! The platform’s new “Contact Central” feature is here.

This centralized platform feature allows marketers and channel managers to define channel and regional preferences and execute outreach that is compliant with enterprise protocols and local governmental regulations. Contact cadence can be defined for each channel by geographical time zones, communication hours, days, and holiday/outage exclusions. With the option to throttle communications, channel capacity constraints can be enforced by weeks and months. All in all, you get customer outreach that is not only the broadest but also privacy compliant.

The platform’s centralized offer management module (Unica COM) features key enhancements that make creating and managing calls to action easy and efficient. Support for offers with attribute values mapped from lookup tables is now available, making offer definitions more flexible. While prior releases added the ability to integrate content powered by HCL Digital Experience (DX) with automated offer attribute mapping for content objects, Marketers now also have a choice to control automated synchronization of changes at the offer template level.

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 Google Vision, Google Translate, Azure Image analysis, Google video insights, Google NLP can be tapped for generating insights and persisted as tags into the offer attributes, making downstream offer-content ROI analysis very powerful.

The platform’s precision targeting powered by the Campaign module has key updates in this release that takes productivity up a notch. With more and more data sources being leveraged for segmentation, it becomes imperative for marketers to identify if a table is being used across flowcharts/campaigns so that maintenance becomes hassle-free. This release includes both UI-based as well as API-based support for flagging table usage across campaigns/flowcharts.

Campaign build experience also gets a boost with two key enhancements. Have multiple users worked on the same campaign flowchart? We have you covered with our enhanced concurrent usage depiction feature, which now notifies all active flowchart users, which user is currently editing the flowchart. Opening and editing maillist process boxes in campaign flowcharts are also now more efficient with underlying performance improvements.

Unica Plan, the marketing resource management module of the platform, features updates that greatly enhance collaboration, compliance, and productivity.

With out-of-the-box integration to Slack, marketers can now seamlessly collaborate on marketing initiatives on dedicated channels. Centralized offers can also be accessed and routed for approval, ensuring compliance. Improved notification along with email alerts for Checklist and To-Dos ensures timely communication on activities to all team members.

Updates to the platform’s real-time personalization and next best action powered by Unica Interact make your engagements more impactful. Understanding discrete customer events and inferring interest patterns for the next best action is now greatly enhanced with support for sequential events.

Triggering follow-up next best action on other channels based on events or event patterns is now easier than ever with a new look triggered action UI/UX. Struggling to do the next best action with multiple offers that keep changing? Unica Interact’s latest enhancement includes support for static and smart or dynamic offer lists in FlexOffers, making bulk offer assignment and personalization a breeze.

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 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 available for Campaign and 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 easier to analyze and drive your marketing strategy.

Messaging without Limits

In this release, the platform’s digital messaging function powered by Unica Deliver has been enhanced to elevate the build to send to deliver experience.

Crafting communications is quick and easy with the QuickBuilder message editor that now ships with Landing Page templates, supports SMS Unicode, and provides thumbnail preview for communications. Looking up personalization fields in your communications is a breeze with the new “type and look” feature. Added support for DLT regulations ensures SMS compliance for Indian markets.

Increase your email open rates and drive your customer engagement with powerful out-of-the-box send time optimization that ensures messages are delivered at the right time to the recipients. Support for rich in-app push notifications takes your mobile engagement to the next level.

Enhanced Cloud Native Foundation

The release features key enhancements that continue to strengthen the platform’s cloud native foundation. Managing your Unica deployments is now more efficient with industry-leading storage distribution and cluster management (ROOKCEPH). Deployments are now more resilient with support for Interact Server Groups and scalable Unica Discover (the module that provides deep behavioral insights) containers.

Overall, Unica 12.1.2 platform release provides marketers powerful features to plan, build, execute and deliver a more engaging customer experience and achieve their marketing goals. Marketers can truly accelerate their time to market and broaden their customer engagement.

To learn more, sign-up for one of our upcoming Unica 12.1.2 Winter Release webinars.