Unica 12.1, mouth-wateringly good?

Unica v12.1, mouth-waterlingly good? This release will be made generally available in July 2020 and for me certainly, the sense of being on the road to something great is palpable. Since my post back in November expounding on our view of the horizon, we’ve been waiting with bated breath anticipating great things; so what made the cut? What’s hot? What’s going to help you succeed? And what other goodies are HCL lining up I hear you ask?

Unica 12.1 is the product of over two years of research and development; encompassing dialogue with over 250 Unica customers and 1000’s of users from cities across the globe; HCL have taken the time to ask, have had the patience to listen, and are delivering the goods.

12.0 served up a cloud native platform with 200+ enhancements, 25 new core features and functions, centralised offer management, 90+ out of the box reports and 500+ APIs across Unica Campaign, Interact, Plan and Optimize. The investment being made by HCL is prodigious; 12.1 has doubled down on this unveiling three new modules which, coupled with the core offering present a comprehensive platform for the execution of complex marketing programs. 

What’s new pussycat?

As marketers you’ve spent over a decade reinventing the practice in the face of relentless change. Marketing technology and automation have encouraged organizations to evolve rapidly, and as you’ve worked to keep pace, your responsibilities, your expectations, and those placed upon you and your endeavour have grown and changed rapidly as well.

Orchestration and Automation have become pillars within the practice, orchestration brings additional data to automation – making it smarter and more effective. We need platforms that, as Forrester puts it, support “an approach to marketing that focuses not on delivering standalone campaigns, but instead on optimizing a set of related cross-channel interactions that, when added together, make up an individualized customer experience” .

Orchestration unifies and coordinates our channels, campaigns, and data, driving value, and v12.1 certainly starts ticking all the right boxes.

Unica Journey

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou

Journey makes me feel good.

With its flexible data definition utility and broad touchpoint integration capability, Journey affords the opportunity to bring together profile, behavioural and contextual data and events from multiple touchpoints to inform and enhance customer journeys and deliver exceptional-individualized experiences.  The plug and play integration framework is powered by Unica Link,  you can leverage out of the box native touchpoints for digital channels, capitalize on native integration for outbound (Unica Campaign, Unica Deliver) and inbound engagement (Unica Interact, Unica Deliver), or craft a custom touchpoint and seamlessly co-ordinate and automate the journey across your eco system.

From its sleek and intuitive orchestration canvas this goal orientated solution allows for the crafting, visualization, analysis, and adjustment of entire customer Journey’s across channels.

Unica Deliver

“Ability is important in our quest for success, but dependability is critical” Zig Ziglar

Functionally deliver has everything you’d expect from an Enterprise level digital messaging solution; powerful personalization capability, lights out automation features capable of automating complex campaigns, support for bulk outbound and transactional  messaging, intuitive A/B testing utilities and insightful reports and analytics.

With pedigree delivering high volume personalized messaging Deliver has been architected from the ground up with performance and reliability at the forefront, it integrates seamlessly with Unica Campaign, operating across Email and SMS channels and promises an expanding portfolio of digital messaging touchpoints.

Unica Link

“Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong.” – Suhail Doshi

Clive Humby is credited as coining the phrase “data is the new oil” back in 2006, whether you feel  it’s like oil, a new nuclear super power or the air we breathe, it’s importance and dominance is undeniable; if you don’t have it, you definitely need it (can’t count on lady luck), and when you get it ? well you need more right?  Link integrates your 3^rd party touchpoints and applications with Unica to deliver a unified customer experience, I guess if data is oil then Link is like the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean Pipeline.

• Seamless integration capability – check
• Flexible, low code development framework – check
• Out of the box connectors coupled with a growing network – check 

Out of the gate 12.1 will provide connectors for leading third-party touchpoints – Salesforce CRM, Mailchimp and Twilio, with additional connectors to FaceBook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Instagram anticipated in future releases.

Precision marketing, at scale

For me, Unica has always been one of the most effective, scalable and connectable marketing solutions on the market; Unica is certainly back and flexing; the new Journey, Deliver and Link ‘power ups’ combined with the rich capability of Campaign, Interact, Optimize and Plan, present a distinctly compelling marketing automation platform.

The pace and cadence of recent improvements in engineering are a testament both to the investment HCL have been making, and the rapidly evolving demands of marketers. Areas we’d anticipate further advancement include the interface design for Deliver, support for Mobile push, improvements in budgeting capabilities and the introduction of AI as a service, particularly around analytics. We can expect future functionality to be brought to market faster and capitalized on more rapidly due to the emergence and adoption of containerization, and continual improvements in the on-premise upgrade process.

Keeping your marketing platform up-to-date and taking advantage of new features and functionality ensures your business maintains its competitive edge, and we can make the process painless; we’re proud of our reputation for delivering a reliable, professional service and have pooled our knowledge and expertise to bring you cost-effective programs for a seamless transition. Contact Purple Square today, and we’ll help your business move forward with confidence.