Advantages of using Unica Optimize

Use Unica Optimize to take a large set of targets and compare them to a complex set of rules to find the best candidates for a particular offer.

Unica Optimize considers not just the local data available within a single campaign, but data across multiple campaigns, taking into account business constraints at a much higher level (for example, outbound call center capacity). In other words, Unica Optimize helps you maximize your marketing across your entire business, not just for a single campaign or offer. Since Unica Optimize works across campaigns, you can prevent customers from being over-contacted. Preventing contact fatigue lowers the probability that those valuable customers opt-out from further communications or dispose of your communication without reading it. Starting with a larger initial selection expands your opportunities to reach previously under-resourced segments of your customer base. At the same time, the larger selection maximizes overall optimality within your business constraints.

You configure Unica Campaign to select targets for your marketing campaign from your customer data. This selection process can be simple, for example:

  • All female customers

Or more complex:

  • All female customers
  • Between the ages of 25 and 45
  • Earn over $45,000 a year,
  • Purchased your product in the last 90 days
  • Have not been contacted for at least 30 days

However, in any marketing organization that is product- or offer-centric, multiple campaign designers are competing for the best targets for their product or offer. Teams competing for the same targets often raises the following challenges:

  • Cross-campaign collision. Cross-campaign collision occurs when multiple campaigns target the same customer. For example, if you have two campaigns:

    • A mortgage refinancing offer for people who recently moved to a new home
    • A free online banking offer for people who recently opened accounts

    It is highly probable that many of your customers might be targeted for both campaigns.

  • Customer fatigue. Repeatedly contacting the same customers, leading to decreasing response rates over time. Many of your best customers are good candidates for virtually any offer. Campaigns commonly overlap in their target selection by selecting from your top-tier or most loyal customers.
  • Missed opportunities. Some customers might be satisfactory candidates for an offer, but are consistently ignored by the current selection process.

Unica Optimize in practice

Consider the following scenario:

One marketing team creates a campaign that identifies high-value customers that are based on recent use of loyalty cards at the stores in the team's region. Customers that meet these criteria are sent tickets to a private invitation-only sales event at a small set of larger stores.

Another marketing team creates a campaign that identifies high-margin customers that are based on significant spending through the website channel. Customers that meet these criteria receive a special online-only coupon the next time they login to the online store.

Yet another marketing team creates a campaign that identifies top-tier customers that are based on the long-time and consistent use of loyalty cards and correspondingly high spending habits. Customers that meet these criteria receive special mailings with in-store coupons.

Many of the customers are targets for at least two, if not all three of these independent marketing campaigns. Excessive contact might drive away some business, or cannibalize success of one marketing campaign at the cost of another. For example, a high-value customer received both a web coupon and an in-store coupon. The customer might spend the same amount of money regardless, resulting in a wasted contact, and a lower response rate for one of the campaigns. Worse yet, sending out a 15% off coupon and a 20% off coupon to the same customer for the same time frame results in a lower-than-expected response rate from the 15% offer. To combat the fatigue issue, you might have different business rules such as:
  • Only four email contacts are allowed in any one-month time period.
  • At least 14 days must elapse between direct mailings.
However, since individual campaigns do not interact with each other, this strategy does not support other guidelines, such as "customers who receive the invitation-only sales event offer cannot receive the in-store coupons."

Companies with customer-centric (for example, segment-based) marketing largely avoid these types of offer conflicts, since a single individual controls the entire stream of communications to the customer segment. This segment-based approach has its benefits, but it is a difficult and time-consuming process for a company to change from a product-centric to a customer-centric marketing organization.

With Unica Optimize, you create a set of constraints or rules that address all three of these situations to determine the best candidates for each across the whole of your customer pool. Using the Max # of Packages rule, you can limit the number of offers a customer receives. Using the Never A with B rule, you can enforce that no one receiving the invitation-only sales event offer receives any coupons. Each marketer determines a score for each offer. Unica Optimize optimizes the contacts, providing the surviving list of contacts that satisfy the specified rules and constraints. The marketers then extract the contacts for their offer and complete their campaigns, each campaign reaching out to the globally optimized set of best customers.