Before you begin creating campaigns

Before you begin using Unica Campaign to create marketing campaigns, there are some important initial tasks. Some of these initial tasks, such as creating offer templates, typically are done by administrators.

One of the most important initial tasks is to make information about your customers and products available to Unica Campaign. To access your user data, Unica Campaign needs to know which tables or files in your data source to use. To make your data available for use in Unica Campaign, your company's database tables and files must be mapped into Unica Campaign. An administrator typically performs this step. An administrator also creates offer templates, strategic segments, and other data objects for use in campaigns. For more information, see the Unica Campaign Administrator's Guide.

After the initial objects are created and tables are mapped, you can begin creating marketing campaigns.

Often, the first step is to design the campaign on paper or in Unica Plan so you can determine your workflow. Identify your campaign goals, decide what offers to make, which customers to include or exclude, and whether to use control groups. After this initial design, you can use Unica Campaign to create marketing campaigns to accomplish your objectives.

Each marketing campaign is made up of one or more flowcharts. Each flowchart performs a sequence of actions on your customer data. A flowchart consists of interconnected process boxes, which you configure to perform the actual data selection, manipulation, and response tracking that is required for your campaign. Each process box performs a specific action, such as selecting customers, segmenting them, merging data, or generating a mail list or a call list. By configuring and connecting process boxes in a flowchart, you determine the logic of your campaign.

Offers are created outside of a flowchart, and are assigned when you configure a contact process box, such as a Mail list or Call list, in a flowchart. Offers can also be assigned on the target cell spreadsheet (TCS), which provides a visual matrix of segments and offers.

You use Unica Campaign to define offers. You then create a flowchart where you select customers or prospects to be contacted, assign offers to your selections, and generate a list of contacts. When customers respond, you can use a separate flowchart to track the campaign results.

For an example of two flowcharts that were designed for a retention campaign using multiple channels to deliver an offer, see Example: Contact and response flowcharts.