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AMBERLEAF’S AFFINIUM ADVANTAGE NEWSLETTER: Volume IV
Welcome to Volume IV of AmberLeaf’s Affinium Advantage Newsletter. This newsletter provides helpful information about new products in the Unica Affinium Suite.
In this installment we will focus on Unica’s continued expansion into offering a full marketing software suite rather than a single campaign management tool. The Affinium Suite currently provides web analytics, user-friendly and integrated reporting, event-detection, campaign management, statistical modeling, real-time offer recommendation, e-mail delivery, lead management, and marketing resource management capabilities. While most Unica customers are only using Affinium Campaign and Affinium Manager, some have implemented one or two other modules. Utilizing more products from the Unica Affinium Suite can help you reduce time to market and increase marketing insight through an integrated, multi-channel architecture.
This newsletter highlights one of our recent version 7 implementations where we implemented 6 Affinium products over the span of 6 weeks. The project proved that an integrated, multi-channel architecture is not just a promise anymore, but a reality. And it doesn’t take forever to implement, or cost a fortune.
During this aggressive 6 week implementation, we installed and configured the following Unica modules:
- Affinium Campaign
- Affinium Leads
- Affinium eMessage
- Affinium Model
- Affinium Reports
- Affinium Manager
This customer already had Affinium NetInsight installed when we began the project. We used the data being captured from NetInsight as a source into Affinium Campaign and Affinium Model. In the end, the customer could generate multi-channel campaigns through direct mail, e-message, and their external sales force (via Leads). The contact list was chosen through statistical models and performance of the campaigns was evaluated through Affinium Reports. The customer now enjoys a complete, end-to-end, closed loop marketing technology footprint.
Below is a summary of what each component offered our client and a bonus technical tip we encountered during the implementation.
Affinium Campaign v7.3
| Primary business advantage: |
Increased the client’s intelligent customer interaction across email, telemarketing and direct mail. Through integration with Affinium Leads, we were able to distribute new leads/opportunities directly to their sales force.
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| Technical product tip: |
We utilized Unica’s response attribution capabilities. Using dates within the response process box can get a little tricky. You need to ensure that date format on your action or candidate table matches the default date format (in this case DT_DELIM_Y_M_D). Realize that the Response Process Box will perform the following behind the scenes checks: customer exists in contact history for this campaign; response date is after the contact date; response date is within the offer start and end dates.
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Affinium Leads v7.2
| Primary business advantage: |
Extended sales force capability and personalized customer contact. Our client will score leads from within Affinium Model and extract the leads using Campaign in order for their extended sales force to work and track these leads. |
| Technical product tip: |
As part of version 7.2 functionality, Affinium Leads is now supported on a Microsoft database platform!
This application is extremely customizable. Given these facts, make sure your requirements for field/screen layouts are thought through before building any inbound ALI (lead import) scripts. Do your lead process analysis.
Make sure to establish a recurring job to run the Leads ETL that refreshes the decision support tables. Otherwise, reports will be inaccurate and incomplete.
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Affinium eMessage v7.3
| Primary business advantage: |
Enabled full internal control of email marketing and realization of integration between Campaign and eMessage for reporting and response analysis. |
| Technical product tip: |
Warning, technical jargon ahead: The delivered weblogic antlr-2.7.1.jar does not allow the application to work properly. You will need to download and reference the antlr-2.7.5.jar within your classpath in order to get eMessage to actually work. If you get a ClassCastException java error, this is a clear indication that you will need to apply this resolution.
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Affinium Model v7.3
| Primary business advantage: |
Offered a key method for the client to optimize their new marketing technology infrastructure by developing a deeper understanding of their customers and how they can help migrate customers from a lower value status into becoming a higher value, longer retained customer. |
| Technical product tip: |
Installation and configuration for Model is straight-forward.
The only catch within this Windows based install was that there is no delivered Model Windows service. You need to create one separately via the mkservice command.
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Affinium Reports
| Primary business advantage: |
Sped up deployment and analysis time by using several of the key delivered Cognos reports. |
| Technical product tip: |
Not all reports for each component of the suite are available by default. When implementing multiple Affinium products, you must import the associated Cognos report package (i.e., zip file) for each product in order to have access to those specific reports.
For response tracking, realize that many of the reports have embedded business rules that may not be obvious while in Campaign. For instance, each response type for the Response Process Box has a flag to "count as response" in the report or not.
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Affinium Manager v7.3
| Primary business advantage: |
Offered single admin and security console for the various components of the Affinium suite. |
| Technical product tip: |
Two known defects:
1) Single suite login to Affinium Model does not consistently work from the other applications.
2) When creating users within Affinium Leads, you also need to create the users within Affinium Manager or build an ALI script. Other applications get their users / permissions from Affinium Manager. You can also use the Leads Admin system repair tool to push Leads users to Manager.
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Last year many analyst groups published surveys about Marketing organizations. Across the board, Marketing’s main challenge was executing and measuring multi-channel programs. Unica is actually defining the marketing technology suite and our newest implementation shows that the installation continues to get easier. Creating a fully integrated, multi-channel marketing technology footprint is today’s reality.
For more information about any of these products, our multi-module implementations, or any of our other AmberLeaf services, including any of our Marketing Automation capabilities, please contact Tim Perry at 312.593.8404 or tperry@amberleaf.net
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