Unica Campaign concepts

There are several basic concepts that can help you understand how to use Unica Campaign to create and manage marketing campaigns.

Campaigns

Each marketing campaign is defined by a business objective, a corporate-defined initiative specific to your marketing plan, and a date range during which the campaign is effective. For example, you could create a retention campaign to deliver an offer to customers who otherwise might be lost through attrition.

Flowcharts

Every marketing campaign consists of one or more flowcharts. For example, a marketing campaign might consist of a flowchart that provides offers to selected customers and another flowchart to track responses to the offers, for reporting and analysis.

Each flowchart makes use of one or more data sources. A data source contains information about your customers, prospects, or products, for use in marketing campaigns. For example, a flowchart can pull contact names and addresses from one database and pull opt-out information from another source.

A flowchart performs a sequence of actions on your marketing data. To define the actions, you use building blocks called processes, which you connect and configure. These processes make up the flowchart.

To implement your campaign, you run the flowcharts. You can run each flowchart manually, by a scheduler, or in response to some defined trigger.

Licensed users of Unica Interact can use Unica Campaign to run real-time interactive flowcharts that depend on the occurrence of an event. For more information on interactive flowcharts, see the Unica Interact User’s Guide.

Processes

Each flowchart is made up of processes, or process boxes, that are configured and connected to perform specific tasks in a campaign or session. For example, a Select process can select customers who you want to target, and a Merge process can combine two distinct audience groups.

You configure and connect processes in each flowchart to achieve specific marketing goals. For example, a flowchart can consist of processes that select qualified recipients for a direct mail campaign, assign various offers to recipients, then generate a mailing list. Another flowchart can track respondents to your campaign, so you can calculate your return on investment.

Sessions

Sessions provide a way to create persistent, global data artifacts for use in all campaigns. Each session contains at least one flowchart. Running a session flowchart makes the outcome of the session (the data artifacts) available globally to all campaigns.

A typical use for a session flowchart is to create strategic segments, which are segments that can be used in multiple campaigns. For example, you can create strategic segments for opt-ins or opt-outs, then use those segments in various marketing campaigns.

Offers

An offer represents a single marketing message, which can be delivered in a variety of ways. Offers are re-usable:

  • in different campaigns
  • at different points in time
  • for different groups of people (cells) in a flowchart
  • as different "versions" (by varying the offer's parameterized attributes)

You can assign offers to target cells in flowcharts using one of the contact processes, such as Mail list or Call list. You can track the campaign results by capturing data about customers who received the offer and those who responded.

Cells

A cell is a list of identifiers, such as customer or prospect IDs, from your database. You create cells by configuring and running data manipulation processes in flowcharts. For example, a Select process can generate an output cell consisting of males between the ages of 25 and 34.

An output cell can be used as input for other processes in the same flowchart. For example, two Select processes can select customers from different data sources. A downstream Merge process can then combine the results.

A cells that has an offer assigned to it is called a target cell. A target cell is a group of homogeneous individuals, as defined by the audience level, such as individual customers or household accounts.

For example, cells can be created for high-value customers, customers who prefer to shop on the web, accounts with on-time payments, customers who opted to receive email communications, or loyal repeat buyers. Each cell that you create can be treated differently, receiving different offers or communications through different channels.

Cells that contain IDs who are qualified to receive an offer but who are excluded from receiving the offer for analysis purposes are called control cells. In Unica Campaign, controls are always hold-out controls.