Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

Unica Corporation
Lincoln, MA

Affinium Software Suite
> Customer Value Optimization

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

The promise of 1:1 marketing is increased revenue and lower customer acquisition costs. Unica’s customers are working to realize these goals by improving the way they target customers and field campaigns. A publisher, a financial services company, a direct merchant and a health care provider were among the reference customers. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Improving the revenue performance of outbound marketing

§ Lowering printing and mailing costs through targeted campaigns

§ Automating database marketing so marketers can own the process

WHY UNICA?

Unica helps companies increase the value of their customer relationships by improving campaign design, management, and analysis processes. The Affinium Software Suite allows marketing analysts to build predictive models of customer behavior, create and identify meaningful customer segments, and to differentiate between household and individual consumer attributes. Using Affinium, marketing analysts can quickly incorporate new data sources to create a complete and up-to-date understanding of the customer. Affinium’s Universal Dynamic Interconnect (UDI), a data integration technology that provides in-memory access to multiple data stores, enables this responsive and timesaving capability.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: Unica’s customers leverage Affinium’s hallmark strength in customer segmentation and targeting to make database marketing accessible to a wider group of marketing decision makers. By eliminating redundant mailings and improving campaign development time, one company cut costs by more than $1 million dollars this year after the purchase and amortization of the Unica products and associated deployment costs.

Enterprise innovation: In a world of 360-degree customer contact, customer data proliferates and marketing opportunities abound. Companies are ultimately building a foundation for managing 1:1 campaigns across all points of direct contact. Today, companies coordinate outbound marketing between mail and email. Their long-term goal is to personalize the impressions of customers in contact via the phone, wireless devices, kiosks, and ATMs.

Technology gains: Prior to using Affinium, companies had teams of database analysts managing the integration and modeling underpinnings of their outbound marketing efforts. Now, companies are moving the DBAs to other projects and putting campaign management in the hands of business analysts and marketers. Some reference customers have more than doubled the number of campaigns they can manage simultaneously. By allowing teams to transition to more sophisticated approaches, Affinium has boosted the effectiveness of the entire sales and marketing operations. One Unica client has achieved a tenfold increase in campaign productivity.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: In the field of customer-focused marketing, 1:1 marketing requires the talent of three groups of people: technical marketers, product marketers, and IT. Communication is a key element in planning projects and keeping them on schedule.

Learning: Affinium enables an efficient division of labor via role-appropriate tools. Statisticians have an adequately powerful tool for segmentation. A templated approach to campaign design makes campaign planning intuitive for business analysts and marketing people. DBAs benefit from the built-in data integration technology.

Resources: Affinium customers performed critical steps prior to implementation. They prioritized intended process improvements based on estimated ROI, and they addressed data quality at the start.

Fit: Customer-focused marketing enterprises should consider Unica’s Affinium Software Suite for ROI from 1:1 marketing approaches.

COMPANY INFO

Unica Corporation is a private company with 120 employees.

781.259.5900
www.unicacorp.com
Published: January 2002