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White Papers
Unica’s advanced set of enterprise and on-demand interactive marketing solutions empower organizations and individuals to turn their passion for marketing into valuable customer relationships and more profitable, timely, and measurable business outcomes. The white papers below offer valuable insights and information on EMM, market trends, the latest technologies and processes, how Unica customers are succeeding, and how your company can achieve business success. Registration is required.
Align Social Media Metrics with Your (True) Business Goals
Social media are challenging and humbling because they turn the traditional approach to marketing (i.e. push marketing) on its head. While discussions about how to use social media effectively are often clouded by confusion and buzz words, what's needed is a top-down approach for defining and pursuing clear business goals with social media. In this whitepaper, Unica identifies the social media metrics you can use to pursue and achieve your business goals.
The Power of the Unica Marketing Platform
The Unica Marketing Platform is a set of administration tools, user interface elements and integration services shared by all Unica products. First installed as part of an initial Unica implementation, the Unica Marketing Platform makes it easy to add other Unica products later, all of which then leverage the Platform components in a modular approach.
Optimize Your Marketing Silos: How to Bring Together Online and Offline Marketing
Despite marketers best efforts to centralize their marketing organizations, silos emerge and exist for good reason. To achieve success, marketers must integrate relevant customer data and insights to drive a coordinated marketing strategy across all channels. This whitepaper, written by multi-channel marketing expert Kevin Hillstrom, describes how to achieve a more effective marketing dialog with customers by establishing new a process, facilitated by new organizational roles. When people, process and technology combine, the framework for marketing success is created.
Web analytics is evolving rapidly as companies recognize that online behavioral data is a mission-critical asset that businesses can leverage to increase revenue, improve results, and deliver differentiated customer experiences. As such, web behavioral data must be managed much like any other critical business data. A deep understanding of this natural market progression and the experience of being the leader in helping clients deliver marketing results with data-driven marketing technology solutions defines Unica’s approach to web analytics and sets Unica apart from the competition.
Winning Budget Battles: Planning, Defending, and Adapting your Marketing Budget
Justifying and managing the marketing budget has long been a battle for marketers. Many organizations are still employing spreadsheets to maintain budgets, which is not only a tedious process, but one fraught with potential for error and limited ability to track performance and results over time. This paper covers the radical changes impacting the budgeting process and the many challenges created. Learn how advanced budgeting practices can help marketers become more accountable and productive while increasing their visibility and value at an executive level.
Marketing Career Brief: How to Grow Your Career as a Marketer
Marketing organizations have reached unprecedented size, throughput, and global reach—which means more projects, increasingly complex projects, and even projects executed around the world. That’s why marketing management positions require more advanced business management skills than ever before: planning, budgeting, resource allocation, and process capabilities. This paper highlights insights taken from interviews with Unica Marketing Operations OnDemand users- revealing some surprising trends. One unexpected discovery the interviews revealed is that many of the marketing directors and managers we spoke to had little or no background in marketing prior to their current job. They were hired for their expertise in project management, process optimization, planning, and even Six Sigma. Learn how you can successfully add these skills to your resume and continue your growth and upward trajectory in the marketing organization.
Published in the Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, this paper explains how marketers must redefine their approach to reflect radical shifts in channels and customer behavior — including an accelerating shift toward addressability, growing convergence between online and direct channels, and increasing customer power to shape marketing dialogues and buying experiences. This paper addresses how marketers must engage customers and prospects in a personal, cross-channel conversation that builds upon that individual’s past and current behavior. It also explains how marketers must listen to all information provided, analyze it and respond — sometimes in real-time — in ways that are compelling, timely and relevant. Finally, the author discusses the fundamentally new marketing tools, stronger integration and revamped organizational structure that will be required to achieve these goals.
From Web Analytics to Customer Analytics: Making Web Data Personal
If you're like most marketers, you're facing an enormous headwind: you need to increase marketing returns, but conventional marketing techniques are rapidly becoming ineffective. What's more, you're seeing unmistakable signs that even some online tactics are beginning to suffer from many of the same problems as traditional marketing tactics. To improve returns, many marketers are focused on making their communications more timely and relevant to recipients. To do that, they need to build communications around the interests and preferences of each individual customer or prospect. Web analytics, if made personal, can fuel this process, by providing specific behavioral insights about each individual. This white paper uncovers the gold mine that is personal-level web analytics. We'll help you identify the specific nuggets to mine for, and apply them to increase marketing returns at every stage of the customer life cycle, both online and offline.
The Evolving Marketing Platform: How Unica Makes Marketing Interactive
Marketers recognize that they are facing unprecedented change. Many, however, are responding by simply doing more of what they've been doing: shouting out their messages as broadly and loudly as possible. As marketers turn up the volume, buyers are tuning out: marketing costs are rising, and returns are declining. However, today's environment also offers opportunities for marketers who understand that the changes taking place provide new ways to reach and engage customers and prospects. In this paper, we briefly review the dramatic changes in channels, customer behavior, and technology that are driving the need to reinvent marketing. You will also learn how the Unica Interactive Marketing solution helps you respond coherently, leveraging the extraordinary power of both addressability and interactivity.
The Business Case for Marketing Resource Management (MRM)
Marketers immediately “get” the benefits of an MRM solution -- they know it will allow for easier production of output, increase job satisfaction, and reduce the burden of managing a growing workload. But these critical qualitative benefits aren’t sufficient to close the deal with senior management. This white paper presents a framework for demonstrating a measurable ROI for MRM and provides benchmark numbers to fill in that framework.
Modernize Your Marketing for the Age of the Empowered Customer: Adopt the New Four Ps
The discipline of marketing is currently undergoing the most radical changes it has ever faced: changes that are rapidly rendering conventional strategies and techniques ineffective. In this white paper, we assess these changes and their implications. Then, we present a coherent new framework for reinventing marketing: one that makes marketing so relevant to the customer, it feels like a service.
Building Equity through the Customer Experience
The customer experience can’t be seen, heard, smelled, or touched. Invisible to the eye, silent to the ear, odorless to the nose, incorporeal to the skin, it is by definition intangible. Yet shaping customer experiences into measurable equity may be the single most valuable contribution the marketing department ever makes to a business. Some of the value of the customer experience is tangible and has a direct impact on either revenue or profitability. The tangible benefits of a positive customer experience include: Increased up-selling and cross selling, operational efficiencies, reduced customer churn, customer acquisition via viral marketing, and more.
This white paper will examine why some organizations have been more (or less) successful than others in shaping the customer experience and will provide guidance to marketers who seek to improve their company’s financial performance through a better customer experience.
Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) software is mission-critical enterprise software that enables more effective, efficient and accountable marketing. It is the engine behind powerful, high performance marketing. EMM improves an organization's ability to acquire, retain and grow customer value, establish the corporate value proposition and brand, as well as efficiently manage the strategic planning process and marketing resources including people, time, inventory, and content. EMM enables the unification of all forms of marketing to include brand, product, direct, event, Web, mobile, social and whatever comes next. As analyst firm Gartner has written, "As the role of marketing shifts toward enabling the customer-centric enterprise, enterprise marketing management (EMM) will become increasingly important for firms that want to become marketing leaders."
Helping Insurers Drive More Value from Every Step of the Lead Management Process
More and more insurers are leveraging enterprise marketing management (EMM)solutions to efficiently deliver a superior, seamless customer experience that extends across all touch points and all lines of business. To establish the strongest possible foundation for their EMM initiatives, many leading insurers are working with Unica to maximize customer retention, share-of-wallet, and profitability, as well as to significantly reduce overall marketing costs. EMM consists of several components, ranging from campaign management and marketing resource management to customer analytics and more. In this white paper, we focus on one component of EMM that offers insurers exceptional opportunities for profit: lead management.
The Customer Decision Engine- The Next Evolution of Campaign Management
The Customer Decision Engine (CDE) is a framework that integrates both front and back office systems in order to coordinate targeted customer communications across sales, service, marketing, field service, logistics and other customer-facing departments within an organization. Using common business rules, information from other systems such as billing and fulfillment, and cross-channel customer intelligence, the CDE enables an organization to provide the most relevant message, service, or information to a customer as part of every interaction. As organizations strive to deliver an optimal experience to customers across channels they need a way to centrally coordinate both front and back office activities. In this paper, we detail how the CDE enables this capability by coordinating customer communications and fulfillment, ultimately allowing an organization to deliver on its brand promise, while recognizing customer individuality and profitability.
Customer-Centric Marketing: You Can Get There From Here
Customer-centric marketing is marketing designed around each individual customer. It relies heavily on highly granular, personal targeting and customer segmentation. Most traditional marketing organizations have been organized in fundamentally differentways: around mass markets, in which all customers are treated essentially alike; around specific products and families, reflecting the internal structure of the business and its managers; or around channels, such as stores, catalogs, Internet sites, and direct marketing via sales forces. It is now both possible and essential for customer-centric marketers to transcend these distinctions. Unica clients include legendary innovators like Best Buy who have successfully made the journey to customer-centricity and are reaping the benefits. Our clients also include companies at all stages of the journey: companies who have learned hard lessons and are making slow progress, but nonetheless continue in the right direction. In this white paper, we share what we’ve learned in working with all of these organizations, starting with our two most important insights: Customer-centricity can be achieved. And when it is achieved, it can deliver the results it promises.
The Evolution of Internet Marketing
As multi-channel commerce becomes increasingly ubiquitous, technology has become the means to instant gratification. However, the web as a standalone channel presents as much of a liability as it does an opportunity because best business practices for cohesively exploiting the internet and systematically thriving in cyberspace have lagged. Not least of all in the marketing arena. This white paper explores ways brand, relationship and internet marketers must break through (often artificial) boundaries to coalesce around the customer as the design point. Organizations must plan to be customer-proactive as commerce paradigms shift from push to pull.
What is Marketing Resource Management (MRM), and Why Are Marketers Investing in This Technology?
Worldwide, marketers spend $1+ trillion each year. Yet most still manage their projects via a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, word processing documents, email, and other disconnected applications which result in unnecessary cost and delay, and restrict collaboration. Now, with Marketing Resource Management (MRM), a flexible, integrated application that supports best-practice processes is available to marketers. MRM is software that systematically addresses marketers' requirements for better planning, budgeting, process management, and tracking. Using MRM as a foundation, marketers can optimize virtually all their processes, refocusing scarce resources on understanding their customers, defining strategies, and delivering more creative solutions.
Building a Performance Measurement Culture in Marketing
Today, many marketing organizations are implementing formal Marketing Performance Measurement (MPM) solutions to quantitatively analyze performance against strategic goals, objectives, and commitments as well as to better allocate marketing resources - including people, budget, and materials. This paper focuses on the business drivers, considerations, and tips for successfully building a performance measurement culture in an organization.
Expanding the Power of Data: Event-Based Marketing in Telecommunications
As the global economy rapidly embraces mobile telephony, one-to-one customer service, broadband information access, and always-on communications, increasingly large amounts of information are being generated and transmitted. Computing costs continue to drop as computing power increases, allowing telecommunication providers to capture and retain an unprecedented amount of information about their subscribers. This large-scale increase in data assembly provides the foundation for a giant leap forward in managing subscriber relationships. Thus, an acute need has developed for products that can empower corporations to make more immediate and accurate use of the data assets they are rapidly accruing. This white paper reviews how event-based marketing technology can empower telecommunications services providers to turn the vast amounts of information they have captured in the form of subscriber transactions into profitable customer behavior insights.
Expanding the Power of Data: Event-Based Marketing in Financial Services
As financial services rapidly embrace mobile computing, one-to-one customer service, broadband information access, and always-on communications, increasingly large amounts of information are being generated and transmitted, allowing financial services providers to capture and retain an unprecedented amount of information about their customers. This large-scale increase in data assembly has created an acute need for robust, intelligently designed, and cost-effective solutions that can be implemented quickly and used without significant IT overhead cost. This white paper reviews how event-based marketing technology can empower financial services enterprises to turn the vast amounts of information they have captured in the form of customer transactions into profitable customer behavior insights.
The Internet is changing in profound ways. These diverse changes - often labeled as "Web 2.0" - make the Internet an even more compelling platform both for its users and for marketers. But Web 2.0 also challenges marketers as never before. This white paper introduces a complete framework for measuring Web 2.0 initiatives - especially the Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that are increasingly used to deliver them. Marketers can learn ways to better measure web applications and link measurement to action.
Optimization is the process of allocating resources within a system to maximize an objective, such as profitability, while working within business rules and constraints. For years, businesses have used optimization to help manage their processes and maximize profits. For example, retail organizations use optimization to determine how many employees are needed to staff a store on any given day based on budget, anticipated traffic, and available resources. This leads to maximized sales and minimized costs. Optimization is now becoming a critical technology within marketing organizations to increase revenue, customer loyalty, market penetration, and the probability of response, while at the same time satisfying corporate goals and objectives.
The Case for Centralized Customer Decisioning
Effective acquisition, retention, and development of customers have never been more important. Companies must regard every interaction with a customer – regardless of channel – as an opportunity to establish a dialogue and build or extend a relationship. Successful dialogues depend on effective decisions about customer treatment. These decisions must be made quickly, accurately, and consistently. This requires Centralized Customer Decisioning. Effective Centralized Customer Decisioning is a marketing-led business discipline with several key components: business rules, trade-offs and constraints, and complete customer information. Centralized Customer Decisioning delivers consistency, maximizes the value of customer information and ensures business control. Centralized Customer Decisioning is at the heart of effective marketing, and without Centralized Customer Decisioning, marketers cannot engage customers in interactive, cross-channel dialogues.
