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“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.
Marketing automation applications help companies communicate the
right message at the right time to the right client, across all
touch points. Marketing analytics enable marketers to understand
and predict customer behavior, to create intelligent customer
dialogue, and to implement consistent personalization for
increased revenue and profit. It’s time for marketing to enter
the world of enterprise applications and the bottom line will be
demonstrable ROI.
"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. END
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