Strategy and treatment rules

An Interactive channel can have multiple marketing strategies. A Strategy, key focal point of Interact application, consists of a set of treatment rules. Treatment rules assign an offer to a smart segment. These assignments are further constrained by the custom-defined zone that you associate with the offer in the treatment rule.

For example, you have one set of offers that you assign to a smart segment in the "login" zone, but a different set of offers for the same segment in the "after purchase" zone. Treatment rules are defined on an interaction strategy tab of an interactive channel or (deprecated) from a campaign.

Each treatment rule also has a marketing score. If a customer is assigned to more than one segment, and therefore more than one offer is applicable, the marketing scores help define the offer Interact suggests. Offer score can either have static number score called Marketer score or dynamic score, which is defined as an expression (also called Predicate in Interact) of profile or offer attributes. Interact Runtime uses this expression to calculate the offer score based on attributes values at runtime. Offer Eligibility is the way to further determine if an offer is eligible or not even it is enabled. An offer is only eligible if it is falling into effective period (between Effective and Expiration date) and/or an expression is evaluated true at run-time. When Interact presents an offer to end users, instead of taking offer attributes’ values from the offer, Interact has the capability to override offer attribute values, even with an expression calculated from profile data at Interact Run-time. Users can define Parametrized Offer Attributes for the offer in a treatment rule. The offers the runtime environment suggests can be influenced by a learning module, an offer suppression list, and global and individual offer assignments.

A limit is set in strategy rules on the maximum number of offers - this is the highest score in the eligible list. This is returned in each getOffers API invocation. The maxScore and suppressionCount parameters in the Unica Interact User Tables > UACI_DefaultOffers table and UACI_ScoreOverride table and in Unica Interact Design Time System Tables > UACI_Rule table are added for this purpose - to stop hackers from getting all the eligible offers.

Under the new "Strategy" tab for an interactive channel, a number of functional enhancements are added in v12.0. For example, predicates can be used for both a rule's eligibility and score, an effective date range can be specified at rule level, users can group the treatment rules into groups for better organization and search. They can add or modify a rule through inline editing. A single rule can be copied or duplicated to multiple segments, zones or offers. Users can view Treatment Rule list in Segment-centric, Zone-centric or Offer centric way either by "Group By" or simply move the column header to the first column in Rule list.

Strategy migration utility tool can be used for migrating the strategies of the interactive channel's from the older model to version 12.0. It can also be used to revert the migration of the strategies of the interactive channel's from Version 12.0 to the older model. For more details, see the Unica Interact Upgrade Guide.