Blog: Unica

Showing blogs: 1–12 of 12

My New Year's Resolution - Improve Our Marketing Operations

Dec 10 2009

Although 2009 is drawing to a close and most people are thinking about winding down for the holidays, I'm already well-ensconced in 2010 marketing plans, programs and campaign execution. During the past few weeks, I've spent a lot of time addressing the "marketing operations" side of the business; and while I've never considered myself an ops expert, my role has always included a significant amount of work in this area.

Interestingly, marketing operations is one of those amorphous areas, quite different in every organization. Here at CSG's Quaero, the goal of marketing operations is to improve the efficiency of the marketing function through people (resources), process and infrastructure/tools. Most recently we've:

Best Practices with Unica Campaign V75 – Should I develop in my production environment?

Nov 16 2009

If you were disciplined as a child you are probably familiar with the following retort, "Yes, you can but you may not". What this expression relayed to the one being chastised is that just because you have the power to do something does not justify doing it. So how about we discuss something that I am sure weighs on the minds of you and your campaign developers. Should you let your campaign developers develop new campaigns in the Unica production environment? We can come back to that question in a minute. How about we first take a poll and see how many clients currently allow their campaign developers to develop brand new campaigns in the production environment, without first having them develop in a non-production environment. As the results come in I will share with you some of the arguments I hear regarding why clients develop in the production environment.

4.0 Tricks of the Trade, Unica V75 – Solving Problems Loading Variable Length Records from Flat Files

Oct 22 2009

Have you ever seen the error displayed in Figure 1 in Unica Campaign V75? For this blog on Unica tips and tricks we are going to evaluate an issue encountered when loading flat files with variable columns widths into Unica. I will provide a solution so that you do not have to encounter this issue when loading flat files in the future.

Figure 1. Error caused by incorrect parsing of variable length fields in a flat file

For larger flat files, Unica's parsing capabilities are limited. So when you are connecting a select process box to a flat file, Unica may parse only a subset of the records in a flat file. For instance, if there is a longer field in a record within your flat file, Unica may not automatically create the appropriate field width for that record.

Exploring Affinium Campaign Interact 7.5 Concepts - Part 1

Oct 13 2009

Part1: Goodbye multiple copies of flowcharts!

For my next few entries, I plan to take a high level approach to discussing and comparing the new features of Affinium Campaign Interact 7.5 and how they improve upon some of the pain points of previous releases. Along the way, I intend to bring some insight into the migration process highlighting any "gotchas" for anyone familiar with the 6.x platform and thinking about making the leap to the next major release.

3.0 Tricks of the Trade in Unica V75 – Printing a Mail List File Even When There are No Records

Oct 7 2009

Have you ever tried to get a Unica V75 mail list file to print out even when there is no data to print out (i.e. no records selected for the mail list)? If you said "Yes" to this question, what did you see in the output on the Unica Campaign server folder? We will come back to this question in a minute.

A favorite client of mine asked if I knew how to print out a "Dummy" row of data in a Unica Campaign mail list file when there were no actual records selected for the mail list. My response was based upon my understanding of Unica Campaign's functionality regarding empty mail list files. I told my client that you would have to use a shell script to perform this feat because I thought Unica Campaign didn't generate a mail list file if there are no records selected by the mail list process box. Boy, was I wrong! For this edition of tricks of the trade we are going to find out how to trick Unica Campaign into creating a dummy list pull file even when there are no records selected by the Unica mail list process!

2.0 Tricks of the Trade in Unica V75 – Copying and Pasting in Unica Campaign

Oct 5 2009

So you are probably feeling pretty good about this topic regarding Unica Campaign V75. Everyone knows how to copy and paste in Unica Campaign, right? Maybe this is a not-so-tricky trick but let's talk about it anyway. Copying and pasting in Unica Campaign is simple enough. You can use the right-hand mouse to copy something that has previously been selected. So let's say for instance that you are working on a flowchart and you want to copy a select process box to another location in that same flowchart. In the flowchart you can highlight the select box by dragging your mouse over the entire process box (it will have a yellow outline when it is selected) and then use the right-hand mouse key to copy the process box. Once you have copied the box you can use the right-hand mouse to paste it. Sound reasonable? But that is not-so-tricky at all. Now comes the trickier part.

1.0 Tricks of the Trade in Unica V75 – How do I dynamically add a date stamp to my list files?

Sep 28 2009

Today's discussion will yield something that you can put to use right away with respect to your Unica V75 Campaign implementation. Have you wondered how to add a dynamic date stamp to your list file name using Unica Campaign? Let's say you want to create a list pull file with the date and time in the file name. Generating a daily file with the date stamp in the file name enables you to differentiate yesterday's file from today's file. Often your mail vendor will want to be able to differentiate today's file from yesterday's file as well. So it may be a requirement when working with 3^rdparty vendors to include the date and time stamp in your file name. Using the date stamp in the file name enables both you and the vendor to differentiate files across multiple dates when this file is dropped off into a folder.

Thoughts: Adobe's acquistion of Omniture

Sep 18 2009

In the past few years, we've seen marketing technologies market grow and shift to comprise these four major application areas:

Web content management
Online Analytics/Digital Marketing
Enterprise Marketing Management
Customer Relationship Management

The recent acquisition of Omniture by Adobe looks to be the first step toward industry consolidation of Web content management and online analytics.

4.0 Reusability in Unica 7.5 – Deploying Re-usable Email Document Components

Sep 15 2009

Is it worth the effort?

Do you think that building re-usability into your eMessage deployment is worth the additional effort? While working at a client site, we debated this same question. The question is whether or not one should implement re-usable eMessage document components in Unica's V75 eMessage application.

Unica's eMessage application enables the design of unique personalized email messages for each recipient in a campaign. The design of eMessage email messages may be done quite rapidly as the application allows for the direct pasting of HTML-rendered creative content into the application. Unica's eMessage application also supports the use of previously created eMessage components in a document. Thus, the concept of re-usability applies to Unica's eMessage application.

3.0 Reusability in Unica 7.5 – How to leverage Contact History

May 4 2009

When many of our clients think of contact history, they think of reporting. Contact history is a table often joined to when creating marketing reports. Contact history provides the mailed-base for historical campaigns, and as such, it feeds reports that measure lift, response rates and other metrics. In this issue, I will talk about the reusability of contact history in Unica version 7.5. Below, we will explore how contact history may be deployed in order to actually extend your investment in Unica's Affinium Campaign.

"How do you marry Unica's campaign metadata with other customer information once you have implemented Unica's Affinium Campaign?"

2.0 Reusability in Unica 7.5 – Really Reusable Offers

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?"

Reusability in Unica 7.5

Mar 30 2009

As a consultant for a leading marketing firm offering our clients real-time multichannel customer interaction, I am continually asked to build things in Unica that are reusable. One of the ground floor tenants of automation is the ability not only to automate a process, but to ensure that what is automated does not require high maintenance. Reusability is the buzz-word for low maintenance and should apply as well to the automation of your Unica applications. This article is the first in a series of articles about how to take full advantage of your Unica 7.5 environment - that is, how to make things reusable.

At the highest level, reusability for Unica 7.5 would pertain to your ability to take the entire environment - for instance a production environment - and recreate that environment elsewhere. That is exactly an exercise which we recently performed for one of our clients. Below are the steps to moving your Unica application from one environment (ENV#1) to another environment (ENV#2).