IBM Unica Optimize

As the complexity of marketing increases – more customer touch points, finer audience segmentation, more product lines or business units – the number of occasions and motivations for marketers to contact their customers grows dramatically.  How can marketers ensure customers receive the most relevant and profitable offers while satisfying the needs of individual business areas and minimising customer contact fatigue?

The answer is Unica Optimize, a companion product to Unica Campaign, which offers a rich set of contact optimisation capabilities:

• Sophisticated contact optimisation algorithm: mathematically determines the best communications for each customer based on the customer’s interaction history, offer details, channel preferences, time frame, business constraints and rules, and marketing objectives.
• Configurable capacity constraints: limits that impact contact strategy, such as size of the marketing budget limits, the allowable number of contacts per customer per period, how many offers of each type are available, number of telemarketing calls that can be made per period, or direct mail pieces that can be sent, etc.
• Customer preferences: recorded preferences for each customer, such as preferred channel to receive communications, maximum number of contacts each customer wishes to receive each month, and primary product or service interests
• Business rules: determine based on business considerations, such as limits on what offers can be combined, allowable sequences and timing of offers (“if A, then not B within 30 days”), minimum credit scores for certain offers, exclusions of specific customers, offer-specific opt-outs, etc.
• Business goals: what gets maximized as part of the optimization process; virtually any marketing goal can be specified, such as maximizing customer value, revenue, profit, or probability of response.
• Flexible scoring options: can use simple ratings and ranks, not just scores from predictive models, to execute the optimisation process, making it usable by marketing organisations that have not yet adopted predictive analytics.
• Reports and analysis: automated pre- and post-optimisation reporting to allow scenario and sensitivity analyses to fine-tune parameters.

With Unica Optimize, marketers can determine the optimal contact strategy over time for each customer or prospect.

Unica Optimize’s market-leading contact optimisation capabilities enable marketers to:

• Become more customer-centric and less product-centric: marketers can find the best communication for each customer, not the best customer for each marketing campaign
• Improve results from existing campaigns: better results come from better choices about which customers should be included in which campaigns, and which individual offers and message each customer should receive
• Decrease customer fatigue and improve customer relationships: limiting how many messages each customer receives and ensuring each customer gets the optimal message to advance the relationship means fewer opt-outs and tune-outs
• Lower costs: the optimisation process eliminates wasted and counterproductive communications, while achieving the same results

For an example of a Unica customer enjoying these benefits, read how Advance Info Service Public Company Limited (AIS) in Thailand reduced high-value customer churn by 50% and increased overall response rates by 10%.

Unica Optimize's contact optimisation process works in the following way:

1. Marketers create campaigns and indicate the proposed contacts they wish to include in each campaign.
2. Constraints, preferences and business rules that may impact the contact strategy of any given campaign, such as the marketing budget, limits on what offers can be combined together, etc., are centrally defined.
3. Each optimisation process is given a specific business goal or objective, such as maximizing profit or response.
4. Unica Optimize’s patented algorithm factors in the constraints and goals and also makes use of scores, contact history and other data to determine the optimal message or offer for each contact.
5. An optimized contact list is outputted for each campaign and made ready for final execution of the campaigns.

Unica Optimize is a companion product to Unica Campaign. Use of Unica Optimize requires Unica Campaign, and leverages and complements Unica Campaign's core campaign management capabilities.

 

Unica Optimize provides complete control over and visibility into this optimization process, including contact drop-out analyses such as the one seen below.

 

Product Sheet

Download a Unica Optimize product sheet.

Read The Evolving Marketing Platform: How Unica Makes Marketing Interactive, about Unica Optimize's role in enabling Interactive Marketing.

Read The Case for Centralized Customer Decisioning, about how the capabilities in a product like Unica Optimize can be used as part of a centralized customer decisioning approach.

Analyst Report

See what the analysts say about Unica Optimize: read Gartner Research Magic Quadrant for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management.