HCL Unica vs. SmartFocus, now part of Actito

Extremely well integrated in the TelCos and Financial Services areas. Retail & Online Gaming are the next big sectors. Real Time capabilities via IBM Interact are starting to come to the fore as marketers start to understand the necessity for true reactive CRM. Additional functionality using IBM Distributed Marketing is also another very powerful area for the future, allowing regional marketers to fill out web based forms, which initiate and run flowcharts & email delivery automatically.

Before we used SmartFocus we had a simple bespoke drag and drop builder, where we could add as many "templates" as we wanted. In SmartFocus, the drag and drop builder is smoother and better, but you can't add your own templates. If you are happy with the provided templates, then building newsletters will be really good experience.

Incentivized

• Campaign treats a marketing campaign as a discrete entity that is made up of one or more flowcharts, which are in turn comprised of one or more processes.
• IBM Campaign performs actual data manipulation live.
• Users do not need to know SQL to design campaigns.

Incentivized

• Push newsletters to customers
• Managing campaigns
• Drag and drop builder

Incentivized

• Not suitable to small industries even if they really want to use. It would be great to have a lighter version to let any company use in order to make more customers.
• It would really great to have support team available whenever having the issues / difficulties with in the tool itself. At least able to respond asap.

Incentivized

• Drag and drop builder
• 2-factor authentication
• Internal integration (the system is too big for an average user what make it hard to use sometimes)
• Image gallery reliability

Incentivized

I know Unica well and can make it do just about anything I need it to do. I love the abiity to call in custom code along the way for extremely complicated scenarios and optimum performance. Situations that would steer me to other applications are: If already a heavy SAS user with Enterprise Miner and/or Enterprise Guide I would seriously consider SAS CM; if already owning Teradata platform would seriously consider Teradata RM.

Incentivized

I think it is easy to use, if you don't have to do to complex selections.

I didn't use the Unica support since it is with IBM, only before.

- We had to rebuild a part of the datamart afterwards to tighten up and simplify the selection process. But as it was too time consuming to rebuild all the existing campaigns, we no run campaigns on different versions of the datamart. - The response tracking of the campaigns never worked out well, it was impossible to implement a direct response where there is a link between the lead and the response in our operational process

The contact history and the response history are so powerful. You can track whatever you want to help the call center to push relevant offers to our customer. In addition, predictive models can be built, with patience, in IBM Campaign. If you have some complaints from the call center about any campaigns, you can easily validate it into the contact or response history.

Incentivized

We need a service where we can have support when necessary and a system that will handle a high amount of campaigns, with the functionality where even a junior member of the team can create a campaign from assets provided by the graphic team. SmartFocus has that.

Incentivized

• We’ve been able to send out Thousands of communications and generate over 1 billion touches per year because of the speed and flexibility of the tool.
• We’ve helped our marketing partners achieve or exceed some very lofty goals in the past two years because of the tool

Incentivized

• By using Smart Focus we massively cut the cost of creating a new e-mail campaign
• On the other hand, the cost of SmartFocus is much higher than a competitor

Incentivized