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User Guide
Unica Optimize provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
Optimization rules
Unica Optimize uses the rules and scores you define in your Unica Optimize session to mathematically determine the best combination of final contacts you use across your marketing campaigns.
Rule types
Optimization rules fall into one of three categories: Capacity, Exclude/Include, and For Each Customer (FEC).
The Max # Packages rule
Use the Max # Packages rule to prevent contact fatigue. Define the maximum number of packages or interruptions that any customer receives over a particular time period.

User Guide
Unica Optimize provides documentation and help for users, administrators, and developers.
- About Unica Optimize
  Unica Optimize is a web-based extension of Unica Campaign that allows you to determine the optimal contact strategy for each customer. You can optimize over time, looking across the proposed offers and channels across multiple marketing campaigns.
- Getting started with Unica Optimize
  Unica Optimize can optimize your marketing campaign and improve response from customers, but only if you know what you want to optimize. You need a plan, the data to support the plan, and an implementation method.
- Unica Optimize sessions
  A Unica Optimize session is a combination of rules and scores that apply to a set of proposed contacts.
- Optimization rules
  Unica Optimize uses the rules and scores you define in your Unica Optimize session to mathematically determine the best combination of final contacts you use across your marketing campaigns.
  - Rules and constraints
    In Unica Optimize, you define how optimization behaves by defining different combinations of rules and constraints in a Unica Optimize session.
  - Rule types
    Optimization rules fall into one of three categories: Capacity, Exclude/Include, and For Each Customer (FEC).
    - The B Only With A rule
      Use the B Only With A rule to ensure that you do not send a follow-up offer unless you send the original offer.
    - The Custom Capacity rule
      The Custom Capacity rule allows you to build your own constraints that are based on the sum or average of a column in your PCT.
    - The Customers In rule
      This rule allows you to include or exclude contacts that are based on strategic segments that are defined in Unica Campaign.
    - The Interactions Where rule
      The Interactions Where rule allows you to include or exclude contacts that are based on any criteria available in the PCT data.
    - The Max # Duplicate Offers rule
      Use the Max # Duplicate Offers rule to limit the number of times a customer receives the same offer in a time period from a channel.
    - The Max # Packages rule
      Use the Max # Packages rule to prevent contact fatigue. Define the maximum number of packages or interruptions that any customer receives over a particular time period.
      - Definitions for the Max # Packages rule
        Detailed description of the values to enter when configuring the Max # Packages rule, including examples.
    - The Min/Max # Offers Capacity rule
      Use the Min/Max # Offers Capacity rule to set capacity constraints. Define the maximum and minimum number of offers that are sent across customers, or for a particular offer, channel, or rolling time period.
    - The Min/Max # Offers For Each Customer rule
      The Min/Max # Offers For Each Customer rule allows you to limit the number of offers that any one customer receives.
    - The Never A Followed By B rule
      Use the Never A Followed by B rule to prevent a customer who just received one offer from receiving another offer for a certain time period. It does not prevent the customer who received the second offer from receiving the first offer.
    - The Never A with B rule
      Use the Never A with B rule to prevent a customer from receiving a pair of offers together within a certain time period.
  - Rule definitions
    Rule definitions allow you to create the scope of a rule or to determine the action performed on that scope.
  - Offer versions in optimization rules
    Certain optimization rules allow you to specify offer versions as part of your rule definition. This feature allows you to write a query that determines the exact set of offer versions to which a particular rule applies.
  - Details for working with rules
    This section explains how to add, edit, and delete rules in your Unica Optimize session.
  - Optimization rule example
    You need to understand how to apply these rules to actual optimization problems. Many business problems require several rules that work together to achieve the wanted behavior.
- Setting up scores
  You use scores in Unica Optimize to rank possible offers for each customer using a patent-pending optimization algorithm. The higher the score you assign to a contact, the more desirable you are making that contact. Unica Optimize maximizes the sum of scores in the OCT.
- Generate a list of proposed contacts
  The optimization process involves generating a list of proposed contacts in Unica Campaign and sending these contacts to Unica Optimize to produce optimized contacts.
- Use optimized contacts in marketing campaigns
  After you optimize the proposed contacts, you must retrieve the optimized contacts from Unica Optimize to send marketing communications to these contacts.
- Viewing Reports
  For each production run or test run, Unica Optimize generates a number of reports. These reports help you understand what happened during the optimization process by providing analyses pre- and post-optimization.
- Administering Unica Optimize
  There are many aspects of Unica Optimize you can configure to improve performance.
- Unica Optimize configuration properties
  This section describes the Unica Optimize configuration properties that are found on the Configuration page.

Max # Packages rule

Use the Max # Packages rule to prevent contact fatigue. Define the maximum number of packages or interruptions that any customer receives over a particular time period.

By managing contact fatigue, you can avoid possible opt-outs or customer backlash. Multiple instances of this rule can be used to construct a contact strategy that ensures spacing of communications, without over inundating your customers or prospects with too many messages. In Unica Campaign, packages are all contacts that are made to the same audience entity in the same contact process in the same flowchart run. Packages represent interruptions. Configure contact processes in Unica Campaign to adhere to this definition if you use contact fatigue rules in Unica Optimize.

You can define the Max # Packages rule for a particular channel. You might also limit the scope of your rule to a segment.

Use this rule to help manage a contact strategy to prevent contact fatigue by controlling the number of "interruptions" or packages that are sent to each customer. It is an important rule that can prevent over-communicating with your customers. For example, you can define a rule to limit the maximum number of packages that are sent to high-value customers to 3 over any 30-day period.

Note: Packages are defined in Unica Campaign. All offers sent to the same customer through the same contact process are considered a single "package" delivered on the same channel at the same time. For example, a package represents multiple coupons in a coupon book or multiple offers within the same email. Flowcharts that are created in Unica Campaign must adhere to this practice. That is, separate contact processes must be used for communications on different channels or for offers given to the same individual at different points in time. Conversely, if multiple offers are delivered in a single "package" to a recipient, those offers must all be assigned within the same contact process.

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