Moving Toward Real-Time Marketing

Only six months after the release of Affinium 4 in April, Unica Corp. announced the coming of Affinium 5, slated for general availability in December. The new version aims to help its customers increase marketing responsiveness, customer loyalty, and revenue generation, company executives say. The Lincoln, MA--based maker of marketing management solutions announced the product upgrade at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, inside Disney World's Dolphin Hotel, in Orlando, FL. "Now more than ever organizations need to equip themselves with the right marketing tools to address the new--and often real-time--requirements of CRM and customer-focused marketing," says Liz Roche, vice president and director of CRM Infusion at the META Group. "A CRM technology ecosystem must have as one of its core components a marketing function. Integrated and open marketing application suites that offer a broad range of capabilities-planning, predictive analysis, campaign management, workflow, marketing content management and reporting are what is needed to respond quickly to market changes, successfully execute on marketing strategies, and support a progressive CRM strategy." Unica's list of 250 customers includes ABN Amro, Bank of America, Brookstone, Sprint, Marriott, and UPS. Unica is offering additional functionality in its Affinium 5 for predictive analysis and relationship optimization with cross-organization tools for planning, workflow, resource and marketing content management, campaign execution, measurement and analytic reporting across all marketing channels. "In today's economy, organizations need to maximize each customer interaction in order to remain competitive and profitable," said Yuchun Lee, CEO and cofounder of Unica. "Affinium 5 enables organizations to better understand and interact intelligently with customers-both in real time and over time-while supporting all the critical processes surrounding those interactions. Using Affinium organizations can capitalize on market opportunities and rapidly respond to changing market conditions while meeting their customer-focused marketing objectives." The upgrade features additions to Affinium's campaign management, e-marketing, planning, and analytic capabilities. With Affinium 5 organizations can decrease time to market, increase visibility across the organization, and handle the growing complexity of marketing. Affinium 5 allows organizations to select the best interaction strategy for each customer over time across all campaigns, channels, offers, and touch points by using dialog optimization technologies, maximizing profitability and increasing response likelihood throughout the customer life cycle. Businesses can also gain real-time visibility into customer behavior, resulting in improved marketing responsiveness and customer interaction strategies. "There is a lot of interest in the real-time enterprise. That's one of the themes with Gartner this year. That fits right in with what we're doing," says Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president of technology at Unica, who is attending the symposium.