HCL Unica (acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018) is a suite of enterprise marketing management tools including marketing automation with cross-channel campaign management, budgeting and forecasting, project workflow management, asset management, brand management and spend management.
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WebEngage
Score 7.5 out of 10
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WebEngage calls itself a multi-channel user engagement platform. It automates communication across a user's lifecycle and helps companies send messages via these channels:
Web Messages
In-app Messages
Push Notifications Web Push Notification
Email Marketing
SMS Marketing Facebook Remarketing According to the vendor, cross-device tracking helps keep communication coherent and contextual, making the…
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Pricing
HCL Unica
WebEngage
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HCL Unica
WebEngage
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Pricing is customised according to the customer usage and requirement. Contact support@webengage.com to know more about pricing plans.
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
WebEngage can easily reduce turnaround time for product and marketing teams to execute marketing campaigns for specific user segments as well as remove any dependency on internal tech teams for the development and maintenance of automation journeys. Further, A/B tests can be executed to measure the performance of message variants in real-time directly from the panel. But WebEngage lacks a robust Analytics platform. While basic metrics such as open rate and click-through rate for messages being sent can be considered for reporting, attribution is still not the strongest suit in case the marketing team relies on multiple Ad networks for acquisition. Thus, as per experience, it's better to use the automation suite offered by WebEngage with a different data analytics platform.
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.
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.
There are three main factors to renew a licence: 1) Cost to migrate to another platform would be rather expensive and time consuming, plus the requirement of retraining employees to use a new tool 2) It has been proven time and time again that it is a market leader in the space (10 years +) 3) It can be built upon, with the addition of additional IBM EMM modules - despite theories it does have very strong digital capabilities.
- 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.
WebEngage's dashboard is relatively more intuitive and easy to understand. Further in terms of cost as well it is value to money as it delivers excellent ROI. The after-sales support is also better in terms of responsiveness and helps in case of issues with the execution of campaigns. The account managers also ideate and help in the optimization and creation of new user journeys.
