Unica: A Perfect Model for Marketing Automation

By Anju Marempudi, IntelliBusiness.com

October 23, 2001

“During the next 3 years more organizations will implement full marketing automation solutions, extending beyond the customer management into brand management and resource optimization,” predicts Yuchun Lee, co-founder and CEO of Unica Corporation, in an interview with IntelliBusiness.

"We founded Unica in 1992 with a vision to provide the best-of-breed infrastructure for marketing automation for the global 2000 companies. We are committed to delivering a complete marketing automation solution in the area of analytical customer relationship management," said Yuchun Lee.

Marketing automation solution strategy

According to Lee, an effective marketing automation solution includes: 1) Effective data integration of customer data from various enterprise applications like ERP and CRM, 2) Reporting and customer analytics, 3) Campaign management for planning, managing and evaluating customer communications, 4) Modeling platform to develop predictive models to understand customer behaviors and proactively manage the customer interactions.

Unica's Affinium Suite gives businesses the ability to create deep customer insight and to plan, design and execute interaction strategies that leverage that insight. In real time, a company’s interactions can be intelligent, effective and permission-based. Data mining and predictive modeling is the core technology behind Unica's Affinium Suite for marketing automation. Predictive technology is the key to better understanding  customers across all touch points and optimize customer relationships.

Underlying Affinium is Unica’s Universal Dynamic Interconnect™ (UDI), a powerful architecture and application layer that enables concurrent access to multiple databases, including flat files, as well as data sharing with all customer touch point systems. It has been designed to handle complexity of data infrastructure. "This unique architecture enables quick and easy configuration of Affinium in a complex enterprise environment, and gives the customer  the ability to have a system up and running without writing a single line of code," said Yuchun Lee.

Typical Unica implementations involve 10 - 20 million customers with one of the largest implementations handling about 7 Terabytes of data and 240 million customers..."that is almost everybody in the U.S. with a wallet," Yuchun Lee said. GE, , American Express, MetLife and AT&T are some of Unica’s largest customers. 

Unica has become the top choice in catalog and retail market, with the top 3 direct marketers using Affinium, while in Financial and Banking, 3 of the top 4 large banks in Canada using the product. "Unica excels where there is lot of complexity of data infrastructure and a need to handle large volumes of data," says Yuchun Lee.

Success in marketing automation!  

A recent Gartner study says that more than 50% of CRM implementations were considered failures from customer's point of view.  

So how do you ensure your CRM Marketing Automation project's success? How do you choose the right solution?  

There is lot of hype in the industry and expectations are very high. There is a huge disconnect between what the marketing needs of customers are, and what vendors are offering. SFA and Call Center applications are very mature, but marketing automation is very different and still evolving.  

"Buyer beware - do not just buy a product by looking at a demo. Do your due diligence. Take a deep dive into the technical architecture and functionality of products. Involve the top ranking marketing team in the evaluation process because they understand the marketing needs. Users need to become more knowledgeable about the marketing automation tools and technologies," said Yuchun Lee.  

Buyers need to understand the risk in not doing due diligence, evaluating the products thoroughly, and asking tough questions.  

As Yuchun Lee, Unica's CEO says, "You can hurt your business by selling to people who can't be successful with your product."   Instead Unica focuses on the companies that they know will have the right background approach to analyzing and targeting customers across multiple channels; companies like Lands End, JC Penney, Marriott, Cintas, Scotiabank and others. "Our goal is faster time to production and customer satisfaction.  We pick the customers carefully and are even ready to walk out of deals at times. Every single enterprise customer of Unica’s is reference-able, which is unheard of in the industry," said Yuchun Lee.  

Recently, Unica launched its Affinium Success Acceleration Program (ASAP). The program enables partners to show ROI on analytical CRM solution implementations in one-third the time of competitive offerings. Unica also received a U.S. patent for data mining technology it developed that provides a unique, graphical presentation of complex modeling results.  

Are you ready for the next wave in marketing automation?  

Though a lot of high-end organizations have some sort of marketing automation in place, most organizations have not yet automated the marketing functions deep into the organization and across all channels. Marketing automation, as it’s defined today, addresses only a fraction of the activities that an average marketing professional deals with on a daily basis. "During the next 3 years more organizations will implement full marketing automation solutions, extending beyond  customer management into brand management and resource optimization like HR, IT and financial," predicts Yuchun Lee.   

Unica is committed to the marketing automation space, providing additional deep functionality around planning and optimization in coming versions of Affinium. Unica is gaining a lot of momentum in the market with more than 100% annual growth rate during the last 4 years, and winning industry-wide recognition.  

It is very important that this industry gets good information on tools and technology as customers become more knowledgeable when it comes to choosing the most appropriate marketing automation solution and implementation strategy. <>

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