HCL has released version 12.1.9 of its Unica marketing automation platform, bringing a host of new features and improvements to help marketers streamline their workflows and drive better results:
- The Seamless integration with HCL CDP for real-time, 360-degree customer insights.
- Multi-brand productivity with RCS channel support, parameterized sending domains, enhanced filters, and modernized performance reports.
- Upgrades in Customer Journey Orchestration and expanded support for databases like HIVE, Google BigQuery, and Databricks.
Let’s dig deeper into some of the key enhancements in this latest release.
Seamless CDP Integration
In Unica 12.1.9, the Customer Data Platform (CDP) integration enhances customer engagement by unifying data from multiple sources to create a 360-degree customer view. This enables marketers to deliver highly personalized and targeted campaigns based on real-time customer insights. With advanced segmentation, AI-powered recommendations, and seamless integration with Unica’s campaign management tools, HCL CDP helps businesses drive better marketing outcomes and higher ROI.
Why it Matters? Removing the barrier between campaign management and customer data means that you can truly deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right team – with ease.
Campaign Instrumentation
Unica Campaign now integrates OpenTelemetry, allowing marketers to continuously monitor and analyze the health status of all components involved in their campaigns. This powerful feature helps identify potential failures or bottlenecks across different parts of the system, ensuring smoother campaign execution and performance.
Why It Matters? Being able to fine tune your campaigns in real-time — like updating opt-out preferences at each stage of a journey — means that you’re providing relevant touchpoints to the right customers.
Rich Communication Services (RCS): The Future of Mobile Messaging
Rich Communication Services (RCS) in Unica Deliver is revolutionizing the way businesses communicate with their customers, offering a more engaging and interactive messaging experience. As an evolution of traditional SMS, RCS brings a host of advanced features that are transforming marketing strategies and customer engagement.
- High resolution images, videos, and audio
- Verified sender information
- Location sharing
- Interactive buttons
- Read receipts
- Enhanced analytics capabilities
Why It Matters? With so many digital channels cluttered by competition, RCS offers a less fresh channel for engaging strategies, essentially allowing you to meet customers where they are.
Text Generation with AION in Email Communication
HCL’s AION (Artificial Intelligence ON) platform has introduced powerful text generation capabilities that can significantly enhance email communication strategies. This AI-driven feature allows marketers to create more personalized and engaging email content at scale.
Why it Matters? Well, why not leverage the power of AI to create better email content by analyzing audience preferences, optimizing subject lines, and crafting clear, compelling messaging that drives higher engagement and conversions.
Apache Superset Integration in Unica Deliver
Unica 12.1.9 introduces support for Apache Superset, an open-source data visualization and exploration tool. This integration empowers marketers to create interactive dashboards and perform advanced data analysis, facilitating data-driven decision-making.
Why it Matters? Timely, relevant insights are the name of the game. The latest iteration of reporting in Unica is easier to work with, making insights easier to surface and take action on.
Enhancements to HCL Journey
The latest updates bring new capabilities that enhance customer journey management, improve transparency, and ensure compliance. Here’s a quick look at what’s new:
- Flexible Reengagement – Allows duplicate contacts to reenter after a defined duration, improving journey success.
- Improved Visibility – Entry Source now links directly to Journey details, enhancing navigation.
- Enhanced Monitoring – Audit trail for journey actions ensures better tracking and transparency.
- Reliable Message Delivery – Retry mechanism added for failed messages, ensuring guaranteed delivery.
- Compliance & Trust – Contact Central now supports Journey Opt-Out, boosting regulatory compliance.
- Kafka Integration – Ability to write journey data to external Kafka instances for better scalability.
- Updated Chart Support – Syncfusion replaced with Apache ECharts for advanced chart creation.
- Expanded Push Communication – PushMX integration enhances push notification touchpoints.
- OAuth2.0 Authorization – Added support for ‘scope’ and ‘grant type’ selection in REST touchpoints.
Why it Matters? Every single customization in for your customer journey — like setting “cool off” periods to later re-enage specific contacts in a nurture journey, or having contacts loop back through certain stages of a journey before they proceed — allows you maximize results.
Customizable Mailing Names in Deliver
The Deliver Process Box now offers greater flexibility by allowing users to specify custom mailing names directly through the configuration. This seemingly small change can significantly improve organization and tracking of email campaigns.
Enhanced BigQuery Support
The latest version improves ODBC connection functionality, enabling users to query tables across multiple datasets within a BigQuery project. This enhancement provides greater flexibility when working with large and complex data structures.
