Overview of the Unica Campaign and Engage integration

What does the integration provide?

The integration provides digital marketers with the ability to communicate over multiple channels, personalize and track customer interactions, and protect sensitive personal data. Marketers can target specific audiences to reach customers through email, SMS text messaging, and mobile push campaigns.

Integration components

The integration involves the following components:

• Unica Campaign, an on-premise marketing application that is typically installed behind a corporate firewall
• IBM Engage, a cloud-based service that provides digital marketing and lead management
• IBM UBX, a cloud-based service that exchanges data between applications
• IBM UBX Toolkit, which provides a way for on-premise applications (like Unica Campaign) to interact with UBX.

The following diagram shows how the components interoperate.

What is Unica Campaign?

Unica Campaign is an on-premise solution for organizations who prefer to keep their marketing data behind a firewall. Marketers use Unica Campaign flowcharts to create target segments for marketing campaigns. A flowchart provides a visual way to create, combine, and manipulate data from multiple databases and flat files. For example, a single flowchart can pull names and addresses from a DB2 database, buying history from a SQL database, and customer preferences from big data sources such as Hive or Amazon Redshift. After a campaign runs, response data is brought back into Campaign for subsequent retargeting.

What is IBM Marketing Cloud?

IBM Marketing Cloud provides digital marketing and lead management solutions incorporating email, SMS, and mobile push, along with embedded analytics. It is a cloud-based digital marketing platform that consists of Engage, UBX, and Journey Designer.

What is IBM UBX?

IBM Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX) is a cloud-based service that provides a way to exchange data that identifies individuals and their behavior in commercial interactions between HCL Commerce and IBM Business Partner applications.

UBX recognizes various events that occur in different channels. For example, for email communications, an event is generated when the recipient clicks a link in the email message. Each type of event is registered with UBX so that subscribing applications can readily interpret the event data.

What is the Unica Campaign built-in ability to connect to UBX?

Unica Campaign has the built-in ability to connect to IBM Universal Behavior exchange (IBM UBX) which improves the flow of data into Unica Campaign. You can register an Unica Campaign endpoint in the UBX user interface.

The Unica Campaign installer also installs the UBX endpoint registration utility in the UBXTools folder at <campaign_home> / tools. The installed UBXTools folder has all of the files necessary to register the Unica Campaign endpoint in UBX.

What is the UBX Toolkit?

The UBX Toolkit is a component that must be installed and configured to support the Unica Campaign and Engage integration. The UBX Toolkit provides a way for Unica Campaign to interact with UBX. In the context of this integration, Unica Campaign is an event destination (an "event consumer endpoint"). As such, Unica Campaign connects to UBX with the help of the UBX Toolkit.

The integration makes use of the UBX Toolkit to track responders to email, SMS, and push at the Unica Campaign level. The UBX Toolkit routes response data such as opens, clicks, and bounces, from Engage to UBX back into Unica Campaign.

What is IBM Journey Designer?

IBM Journey Designer is part of IBM Marketing Cloud. Although it is not part of the integration itself, it can be used in conjunction with Unica Campaign and Engage. Marketing teams use Journey Designer to create visually compelling, easy-to-use storyboards of their programs or customer journeys. Teams can collaborate on online interactions (such as emails and mobile pushes) and offline interactions (such as direct mail and in-store events) that together make up the overall customer journey. Journey Designer documentation is provided separately and is not covered as part of the Unica Campaign and Engage integration.

How do marketers use the integration?

Marketers use Unica Campaign to create a flowchart that selects the desired audience segment and configure a process box for the desired channel (email, SMS, or Push). When the flowchart runs, segmentation and contact data are uploaded from Unica Campaign to IBM Engage databases and contact lists. Engage then sends out the message to the specified market segment. After the marketing campaign runs, response data is tracked by Engage and routed back to Unica Campaign through UBX and UBX Toolkit.

Marketing professionals use the integrated products in the following ways:

• Use Engage to create the email, SMS text, or mobile push message template.
• Use Unica Campaign to select and segment individuals for the marketing campaign by pulling data from on-premise databases and flat files. For example, find all individuals aged 30-34 who own their own homes.
• Use Unica Campaign to upload the selected data to Engage for use in email, SMS text messaging, or mobile push channels.
• Use Unica Campaign to personalize the email, SMS, or mobile push message. For example, change an email Subject line or replace a variable in the message body with specific text.
• Use Unica Campaign or Engage to initiate the "Send."
• For "lights out" messaging, you can automate the process so messages are sent as soon as Unica Campaign uploads the selected audience data to Engage (when the flowchart runs).
• After the Unica Campaign runs, use Unica Campaign to retarget responders and non-responders based on the response data that you download to Unica Campaign with the UBX Toolkit.