HCL Unica vs. MarcomCentral

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.

We have used Marcon Central for some time now, and the quality of our ads have improved. With better content, ideas, sharing tools, and all other programs such as case studies, bogs, material and more the platform has helped us to improve our ad quality and focus on what is important without losing track of certain market trends and changes.

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

• Organization / categorical structure for content
• Customizable templates for users who might not have design skills
• Clean, simple design

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

• No significant cons to report. The product definition process can be a bit time consuming, but the bulk upload tools help with efficiency.
• I do not think customers can choose the option to download and customize the same file - I've only seen either one or the other option next to a file; it would be great to have both possibilities/ two buttons (download and customize) next to a file (or perhaps I'm not aware that such an option exists).
• Burn through support hours quickly; coding required by Marcom team for anything involving variable pricing by format within 1 product (single- vs double-sided included)

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

The thing I love most about this software is how easy it is to use. For someone not super-tech-savvy, it is so easy to set up products and display them in the catalog. It's user-friendly for our employees and customers too. They can easily navigate to whatever item they need without any issues!

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

• Our ability to offer customers a very robust solution has increased customer retention and profitability.
• Our ability to increase volume without increasing overhead has also be a big win.

Incentivized