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2.0 Reusability in Unica 7.5 – Really Reusable Offers

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Apr 2 2009

So just when you thought you knew what you were talking about,  someone gives you a requirement for reusable offers in Unica version 7.5. Do you know how to make offers reusable in Unica? I asked some Unica representatives this very question, "What happens to an offer in Unica 7.5 once you assign it to a cell? Can you change the offer description?" Go ahead and take a shot yourself at this question. If your knowledge of Unica is pretty good, go ahead and try and answer the question. Here is the question again,

"What happens to an offer in Unica 7.5 once you assign it to a cell? Can you change the offer description?"

Well? Did you say that you could change the description of the offer once it was assigned to a cell? Don't feel bad if you did because most people were not able to answer that question either. So if you answered the question correctly, you stated that the offer is being used and therefore nothing about that offer may be changed.

No, you cannot even change the description or any other attribute or extended attribute. You cannot change anything about that offer, period. In the graphic below you can clearly see the message you get back from Unica Affinium Campaign when you attempt to change the offer:

Reusable Offers

 

The messages states that the offer is being used, so you cannot change the value for its attributes. So now what? You can't just temporarily un-assign the offer to a cell and then update the attributes. You most certainly could create a new offer with the attributes that you need and then re-assign it to the cell in the flowchart. But when you open up a flowchart that is running in production there is always the chance that you might break something. As well, multiply this by 100 offers in production, each needing their attributes updated occasionally, and you would have created a maintenance nightmare. Unless, of course, you read my blog and understood how to create really, really reusable offers.

We had a requirement from a client to create really reusable offers. In essence the client's requirement was to have the ability to change an offer's attributes without going into the flowchart and updating the offer in the cell. The client was running lights-out campaigns, which is to say the campaigns were running on a daily basis. In order to keep a production environment from breaking the best thing to do is to never touch it if you don't have to. When we change something there is always the possibility that we can change if for the worse. If you are the client and you have many, many campaigns running wouldn't you like to know that they will not break on you due to something that you did to them?

 

Best practice tip: In order to keep a production environment from breaking the best thing to do is to never touch it once it is in production.

 

Simply put the client had offers that went through status changes (like on-hold or off-hold) and they wanted to be able to change the offer status without the need to update the offer in the cell of the flow chart. Make sense? I bet you have experienced this requirement as well. This is what I term a requirement for really reusable offers. Couple that with the fact that in Unica once an offer has been assigned to a cell in a Unica campaign flowchart then the extended attributes for the offer can no longer be modified.

Here is how we took this client's requirement and created a most beneficial solution for really reusable offers. Let's take our example of an offer extended attribute which designates an offer as being 1="on hold" or 0="not on hold".

Step 1.   Define all of the components of the offer that need to change over time as extended attributes.

Step 2.   Deploy offers into the flowcharts and assign to a cell

Step 3.   Use SQL updates to the Unica system tables to manage offer extended attributes.

Here is an example of the very simple SQL statement that is used to make updates to the system table:

UPDATE ua_offerattribute set stringvalue=1 WHERE atributeid=106 AND offerid=

(With the understanding that a value of 1 is on hold and 0 is not on hold)

What does this mean for you? Don't you want to  really extend their Unica 7.5 implementation? Why not provide less maintenance and thus afford them fewer opportunities for breaking something that is already in production. So if you are ready to provide really reusable offers to your clients give it a try. Let me know how it goes and tell me of some of the requirements you encounter and the successes you have meeting those requirements. Respond to my blog or give me a call and we can discuss more in depth.

I would like to offer a special thanks to my friends and associates, Obi Nwoke and Seekar Ghodgaonkar, who turned this requirement into a reality for our now very happy client.

Stay tuned my for my next blog in this series when I look at how to enable varsity-class contact history tracking in Unica V7.5. Also please look at the first blog I posted for this series on reusability entitled, "1.0 Reusability in Unica 7.5 - Yes you can reuse this environment!" in order to learn how to reuse your entire production environment as a development or QA environment.

 

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Leave Your Comment Comments

Sep 3 2009

Bill Bartmann said:

Excellent site, keep up the good work

Jun 3 2010

Gokul Kumar Gopal said:

I think reusability and mistake must be seperated. Filling in offer description wrong or making it reusable are two different things. If you want offer attributes to be resuable it is better to define them parameterized so that you can them as you need and they get recorded in ua_offerhistattrib (if you are writing to contact history in prod mode ofcourse). The parameterized values are still available even if you want to write to a file..

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