Unica Affinium Suite Improvements

Unica Corporation (Nasdaq: UNCA), a global provider of enterprise marketing management (EMM) solutions, today announced enhancements to its Affinium suite that will improve marketers’ abilities to optimize the selection and delivery of the most relevant and profitable marketing messages for each customer—across many channels from potentially billions of possible combinations of offer, channel, and timing. This latest release also delivers performance enhancements and tighter suite integration for improved productivity, time-to-market, and accuracy. With marketers under mounting pressure to deliver more relevant and frequent inbound and outbound offers, Unica’s automated analytics, integrated suite, and cross-channel capabilities can help streamline the entire marketing process.
As products and services proliferate and customers divide their time across a growing array of channels, marketers are increasingly challenged to identify the combination of offer, channel, and timing that maximizes relevance for each individual customer and ROI for the organization. Marketing optimization accomplishes this while simultaneously ensuring compliance with customer contact frequency rules, channel capacity limits, budget constraints, and other business rules.

“Unica's enterprise marketing management solution has positively impacted our marketing efforts in that we have been able to integrate offer optimization with overall campaign management,” said Nancy O'Keefe, director of Campaign Management, Discover Financial Services. “As we continue to increase the sophistication of our marketing campaigns, we expect the new version of Unica's optimization module will enable us to efficiently optimize campaigns involving multiple user-defined constraints and analyze how changes to them can positively affect our goals.”

Unica Affinium 7.3 includes improvements to its campaign management, optimization, modeling and marketing analytics modules. Among the new capabilities introduced are:

• Patent-pending optimization software that enables definition of custom capacity rules to implement the most relevant interaction with each customer

• Improved scenario analysis that allows marketers to test different scenarios to ascertain, for example, the amount of profit incremental marketing investments would deliver

• Usability and performance enhancements to Unica’s statistical data mining module that offer increased user productivity

• Smoother integration between modules that makes it easier for marketers to incorporate the insight gained from Affinium’s analytics modules into more targeted and effective campaign strategies, and then to measure their full bottom-line impact across channels

Unica’s optimization solution is unique among pure marketing automation providers and can be leveraged to solve one of the most pressing problems facing marketers today—maximizing returns while minimizing costs. Recent independent analyst coverage points to the importance of this technology to marketers. Forrester’s most recent prediction in the January 2008 report, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Marketing Platforms, Q1 2008, indicates true contact optimization capabilities are elusive because most vendors are challenged to combine complicated mathematical algorithms with the intuitive scenario planning capabilities that marketers desire.

“At Unica, we have an ongoing commitment to our customers, to ensure their continued success, improve their performance and boost their productivity,” said Yuchun Lee, chief executive officer of Unica Corporation. “Marketers’ jobs are more demanding and complicated than ever before—from engaging empowered consumers to effectively marketing across multiple channels to delivering results. Our newly enhanced solutions and analytical capabilities enable marketers to more effectively identify intelligent opportunities and execute profitable customer interactions across all channels, which will further strengthen their abilities to improve efficiencies and response rates.”