HCL Unica Reviews & Insights

Score7.9 out of 10

54 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for HCL Unica are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Versatile Selection Process: Users have found the selection process in the software to be versatile, allowing for both simple merge/purge processes and the use of raw SQL queries. This flexibility has been appreciated by multiple reviewers.

Efficient Campaign Flowchart: The campaign flowchart feature has been highly praised by users for its efficiency in managing multiple channels and campaigns within a single flowchart. This capability has been mentioned by several reviewers as a standout feature of the software.

Contact History Management: The Contact History feature has received positive feedback from users as it facilitates effective management of contact points with customers or prospects. It also allows for providing compliance information or responding to complaints. Multiple reviewers have expressed appreciation for this valuable functionality.

Reviews

15 Reviews

IBM Campaign is still the leader

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 30, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to generate the majority of the marketing campaigns that my company sends out. Predominately through email but also through direct mail, web and social media.

Pros

Ability to translate Multiple SQL queries into a very easy to use visual GUI.
Provides the ability to pre-define segments, run them once in off hours, store them in their own system tables for quick youth and a significant reduction in CPU utilization on the database.
It’s use of Reusable objects. Including user variables to pre-define calculations one time, macros that you can create and pass values to parameterize the SQL code And the creation of templates to easily replicate work.
It’s ability to bring in external data on the fly that can very easily be mapped into any flowchart.
It’s flexibility and creating UNIX script via triggers to automate sending of files to multiple vendors with different FTP sites
It’s flexibility in the output layouts that it can create.

Cons

The system tables are too convoluted and there should be the ability to have a single view of contact history without having a drawing to have to be tabbed together.
Utica is not a very efficient creator of SQL is very resource intensive.
I would like to see more functionality in their marketing operations tool to allow more customization and easier creation of monitoring reports including KPI’s.

Likelihood to Recommend

It’s fantastic for a list-based generation. I’ve been in a number of fortune 500-row class organizations using the tool and for the most part, there’s very little and can’t do.

Eric Bahme

Marketing Campaign Manager in Marketing at Delta Air Lines (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

16 years of experience

View profile

IBM Campaign is Powerful

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 1, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been using IBM Campaign as a campaign management tool for 5 years now. It is so powerful for us to know exactly what we send to our customers or non-customers and when they received it. For a call-center perspective it is extremely useful, but for a marketing perspective as well. We can build predictive models more powerful than before with these insights. In addition, the response tracking helps us to know which campaign has been more successful, based on their lift. So, in this case, it is easier to adapt our communications for our market.

I strongly recommend this application.

Pros

Contact History of our campaigns.
Response History to know what kind of campaigns work well.
Extremely powerful. If you have the right access to the database, the sky is the limit.
Perfect for larger companies in telecommunications or banking.

Cons

The version 8.6 was not user-friendly at all. This is not ergonomic compared to other applications.
Complex to learn at the beginning.
You can have some glitches and IBM is not the best for fixing this, unless you are one of their biggest clients. Better to have a good third party to help you like us.

Likelihood to Recommend

You can produce every type of multichannel campaign. With a good dedicated team for this application (guys from IT, marketing and/or finance) you can do whatever you want. With this application, we were able to leverage our knowledge of our competitors with some geo-marketing campaigns. As we do Email, Door to Door, Outbound Telemarketing, Inbound, Unadressed Mail, Unsold and Direct Mail campaigns, IBM Campaign is a really good choice for our company. Otherwise, for small player, maybe it is too complex.

Gabriel Racine

Analyste CRM & gestion de contacts in Marketing at Cogeco Connexion (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Quick Review of IBM Campaign

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 1, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Campaign is used across whole organization at our company. We started with one division but later scaled to other divisions. It is used for outbound and inbound segmentation of audience. Later it sends the list to eMessage for email delivery or uses IBM Interact to display dynamic personalized banners on website.

Pros

Campaign canvas is very powerful and rich functionalities
Strong integration with eMessage
Strong integration with iBM Campaign
Supports Hadoop Database

Cons

UI is a little clumsy
Integration with IBM Marketing Operations is not that great
Huge Temp files auto-generate when flowchart runs and cause issues

Likelihood to Recommend

If the organization has tons of data to segment, IBM Campaign is more powerful than many other products. The availability of mDue to zero coding approach, developers are not required to learn any programming language in particular manipulation tools and advanced functions in IBM Campaign is unmatched. I believe the users must have knowledge of SQL to get the most out of the tools. Typical business users using Eloqua would find it tough to migrate into IBM Campaign.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

IBM Campaign: A Wonderful Tool to Navigate Audiences

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

April 18, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Campaign provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface that supports the direct marketing process of selecting, suppressing, segmenting, sampling, and creating output lists of customer IDs. It really helps put everything all into one place, and it streamlines everybody's workload. IBM's UDI data communication layer lets you to seamlessly access and manipulate data from all of your data sources.

Pros

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.

Cons

May be a little confusing to pick up if this is the first time you're managing a campaign.
Some of the commands are a little slow to response.
Live data can sometimes be misconstrued.

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Campaign helps you target your audience, so if you're into digital marketing and want to find the defining line (i.e., what drives the most 'clicks', what content drives the most traffic) this will be a very useful tool. It's great for big businesses/websites...may be inappropriate for smaller businesses and websites with less than 100,000 unique visitors everyday, but that's just me speaking from experience.

Verified User

Partner in Marketing (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Get IBM Unica for less work inorder to get best results

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 7, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are Using Unica to find the right contacts from the huge database based on the requirements. It is being used to support company business and the media departments in the organization. Whenever the marketing team decides to contact their users based on necessity, they are able to generate the right contacts list by using different filters. That’s how they can filter the unnecessary contacts from the targeted list and the company can save on budget and can hold valuable customers. Indirectly it will increase the company revenue.

Pros

IBM Unica offers more than one module as we can start from market planning and can end with analysis of post campaign results. Not required to work with different tools and can skip having the difficulties while integrating them for automation.
Can design multi wave, multi touch, multi-channel automated campaigns in one place and incredible automation while setting up triggers and schedules to avoid more manual work in order to save resource time. Having valuable user guide to answer whenever we had questions while setup /design phase.
Able to get output list without writing huge lines of SQL when there are multiple number of table joins as you can join as many tables as you want to the table catalogs to fetch the output data in seconds..

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

It supports multi-wave campaigns, external command line triggers and automated scheduled functionality. Scheduling functionality is useful for ad-hoc and multi touch campaigns. Platform independent scheduler can schedule regular / irregular intervals.

But it’s not compatible for non-enterprise organizations.

Vasu Vetcha

Sr.Campaign Designer in Marketing at Cox Communications (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Unica compared to SAS CM, Alterian and Teradata

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

December 12, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The implementations I supported were primarily used by my clients' Marketing departments. IBM EMM (aka Unica) for these clients is primarily used for the very granular segmentation of customers for multi-channel marketing such as Direct Mail, eMail and Social. The solution (the application and underlying datarmart) allows the client to efficiently create segments and campaigns; capture promotion history and assign responses.

Pros

The application has very robust and flexible functionality while maintaining a relatively high ease of use. Relatively complicated segmentation logic can be created for a campaign by a knowledgeable user and the application design supports efficient execution.
The application supports the logical "storage" of campaigns in support of a multi-faceted marketing organization: multiple divisions; field marketing; different channels etc.
The application allows SQL to be hand coded and inserted into the segmentation process.
The application supports exit points for custom code to be executed instream.

Cons

I don't see a lot of areas for improvement in the actual application software - I see a lot of areas where you need to have someone that really knows what they are doing do the implementaton; configuration and tuning.
Different datamart mappings should be created for different groups of users or types of campaigns. I see a lot of implementations where the team was pretty lazy and just mapped everything and left it up to the user to sort it out. This slows down the creation and execution (running) of the campaigns as well as causing a longer learning curve for new users.
It would be nice to have more tracking on the components that are added to the templates section so that users know when it was last updated and by whom. I see a lot of companies set up templates and then either never use them (instead just copy/paste last months campaign) or worse - not maintain them and therefore potentially introduce errors.

Likelihood to Recommend

Key questions: 1. What can you afford? 2. What do you really need? 3. Do you need something that runs superfast like Alterian? or something that is slower but much more sophisticted and robust like Unica? 4. How complicated is your datamart? How many customer rows? How much transactional data etc. 5. How quickly and how often do you have to incorporate new data? suppression files; zip files etc.

Verified User

Consultant in Marketing (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

After 4 years, still not convinced ...

Rating: 4 out of 10

May 6, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used by 2 departements.
It is used to "program" campaigns. 2/3 of the campaigns are one shot, 1/3 is recurrent. 1/2 are commercial campaigns, 1/2 are administrative campaigns to inform clients of p.e. changes in interest rates and so on.

Pros

The most powerful in Unica are the audience swaps. They are very helpful for cleaning up audiences like households, if one of the members of a household has a product, you can easily exclude the whole audience.
When working with segments in a flow, this goes really fast.
The use of templates is easy and helps to standardise the working process.
The mappings of tables can be different in every campaign

Cons

Logging is not easy to read and is incomplete. It has a lot of information i'm not interested in, but the queries that really interest me, p.e. the queries used for calculation of derived fields are missing. I also miss the queries that add the result of the derived field to the final selection.
Difficult to document a flow in a good manner.
No way to search in a flow. and over all the flows where something is calculated.
No way to have a good overview of what is happening in a flow or a process in a flow.
The calculation of derived fields is far too slow.
You can not make decisions in a flow based on data.
You have to promote flows by copying them manually from a test environment to a production environment.
This might lead to inconsistence over the environments.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it is wel suited for a business with a lot of one on one relations in the database. For example a supermarket that sells products to a client and gives a reduction on that product. It is nice if the selection process is not to complex and does not involve to many calculations. It is also nice if it is very clear what you want to follow up.

In our environment we have lots of many-to-many relations. for example one product is held by more then one client. And that client might have more of those products with other clients. These kind of situation demands for a lot of calculations with derived fields(*), and there things go far too slow. Unica is probably not such a good solution for us, because our environment is too complex, and so is to process of creating the selection, we often have to change things in the selection flows. Because of the complexity it is difficult to see what the flow is exactly doing afterwoods, it also takes to much time to modify existing campaigns.

The interface is not handy to work with, if you have long lists of variables, of tables or derived fields(*) you have to scroll through trough them, you can not really search them or reorder them. You can not drag and drop fields or other objects like derived fields in the flow, what would be easy if you have to make frequent changes to the proces flow.

When you copy objects something the content of the object changes because the links with other objects or lost.

(*) derived field: field to calculate something

Verified User

Technician in Marketing (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

IBM Enterprise Marketing Management - best of breed

Rating: 10 out of 10

May 3, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At Purple Square Consulting Ltd, we implement IBM EMM (also known by it's legacy name Unica) suite for many clients across Europe. We provide design services, aswell as implementation, configuration, training & troubleshooting.

Pros

Marketing Automation - the scheduling capabilities are incredibly sophisticated.
Multi-wave, multi-channel capabilities within single Marketing Campaigns.
Highly advanced reusability. Every aspect of the users experience can be templates, allowing workflows & objects of every kind to be used again and again.

Cons

Greater integration of real time (Interact) capabilities with outbound channels, in particular IBM eMessage Email & SMS delivery.
Additional outbound channels to be integrated into eMessage, including Facebook Fanpage & Twitter DM broadcasts. At the moment these are possible only through custom additional integration.
Support for additional marketing database technology, e.g. MySQL, Exasol, ParAccel, WX2.
Provision of database technology with software purchase, as Web technology (IBM WebSphere Express) is supplied for free, but no database is supplied - since IBM also market DB2, which is a supported technology it seems a shame.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Tim Biddiscombe

Principal Consultant in Marketing at Purple Square Consulting Ltd (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

3 years of experience

View profile

IBM Unica

Rating: 7 out of 10

March 31, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM Unica to manage all of our email marketing campaigns and a large number of direct mail and telemarketing campaigns. We use the Distributed Marketing tool to allow our field employees to generate corporate compliant marketing emails to members and prospects.

Pros

Campaign and eMessage have proven to be well integrated and reliable tools for managing email campaigns.
Use of segments and templates in Campaign allows for easy use of recurring data selection processes.
eMessage features, such as the document editor, Global Suppression, and activity tracking, have been relatively reliable and easy to use.
Distributed Marketing tools is flexible in its application with lots of potential applications.

Cons

Integration of Distributed Marketing and IBM Scheduler with Campaign and eMessage still needs work.
Transporting projects betwen development, test, and production environments does not work well.
Distributed Marketing tool still seems to be immature, particularly data security mechanisms (XML documents that, when refreshed, require JVMs to be restarted).

Likelihood to Recommend

Well-suited for email campaigns. Requires a decent investment of resources to install and develop user processes. Works relatively well for projects with short turnaround times in an environment where data is pulled from multiple sources.

Myles Mckee

Marketing Specialist in Marketing at Thrivent Financial for Lutherans (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

IBM Unica Campaign Rocks!

Rating: 10 out of 10

March 28, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Unica is used as a marketing platform for full service and self service clients. We build and support our client's marketing databases and this is a product that we use for clients across many different industries for delivery of thier marketing campaigns.

Pros

Flexibility
Robust functionality
Ease of Use

Cons

The new version 9.1 eliminated some functionality that was present in earlier versions and I would like to see that functionality restored. For example: the ability to maximize process box windows; Single click on drop downs;
The Audience box needs to be enhanced to accommodate the ability to select one per household after multiple levels of segmentation criteria is applied without losing the ability to apply that criteria to the audience being deduped. Currently, the product will randomly select an individual regardless of whether they met the criteria in segmentation. There are ways around this, but would be nice if IBM would resolve this issue.
Would like to see performance enhanced when processing Unica macros and derived fields.

Likelihood to Recommend

I personally like the tool as it is so flexible and robust. IN ten years of use, I have never had a campaign that could not be coded using this tool.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Loading Reviews List....

After 4 years, still not convinced ...

Rating: 4 out of 10

May 6, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

The most powerful in Unica are the audience swaps. They are very helpful for cleaning up audiences like households, if one of the members of a household has a product, you can easily exclude the whole audience.
When working with segments in a flow, this goes really fast.
The use of templates is easy and helps to standardise the working process.
The mappings of tables can be different in every campaign

Cons

Logging is not easy to read and is incomplete. It has a lot of information i'm not interested in, but the queries that really interest me, p.e. the queries used for calculation of derived fields are missing. I also miss the queries that add the result of the derived field to the final selection.
Difficult to document a flow in a good manner.
No way to search in a flow. and over all the flows where something is calculated.
No way to have a good overview of what is happening in a flow or a process in a flow.
The calculation of derived fields is far too slow.
You can not make decisions in a flow based on data.
You have to promote flows by copying them manually from a test environment to a production environment.
This might lead to inconsistence over the environments.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Technician in Marketing (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience