N.7 PLATFORM:
WHAT IS A MARKETING ENGINE?
A marketing engine is a fully automated solution to a recurring marketing challenge. Our Nimblefish Nurture™ and Nimblefish Advisor™ products allow marketers to develop marketing engines that automate the creation and production of digital direct marketing, interactive advice, lead nurture,
cross-sell, acquisition, on-boarding, and other important types of recurring marketing activities.
Marketing engines reduce costs of marketing programs by automating operations and increase their effectiveness by improving the relevance and timeliness
of communications.
HOW DO I USE NIMBLEFISH SOFTWARE? DO I NEED TO INSTALL ANYTHING
AT MY LOCATION?
The Nimblefish N.7 platform and all of our software products are provided in a software-as-a-service model. This means that you can use our software with nothing more than your secure login credentials and a web browser.
There are four N.7 software applications that enable you and your staff to manage your marketing engines:
- Nimblefish Nurture™ Content Manager, a web application, lets you create and manage content, generate proofs, and manage approval workflow for your data-driven direct marketing programs.
- N.7 Dashboard, a web application, lets you monitor and analyze the performance of your marketing engines.
- Nimblefish Vision™ Video Composer, a web application, makes it easy to rapidly create relevant, data-driven variable videos.
- Nimblefish Advisor™ Experience Designer, a desktop application based on Adobe AIR technology, lets you create interactive advice experiences that can be easily embedded in your corporate website, microsites, or used in PURL® websites.
In addition, the N.7 Data Integrator can automatically receive and process data via SFTP or HTTPS web services delivery, and PURL websites and advice experiences are hosted using our scalable, secure hosting infrastructure.
HOW IS PERSONAL DATA USED/MANAGED BY NIMBLEFISH?
Nimblefish receives and stores only the information that is necessary to create relevant marketing, which in most cases does not include sensitive data. Nevertheless, we adhere to strict guidelines for the transfer, storage, and
removal of all customer data. Our information security documentation is available upon request.
CAN I INTEGRATE THE NIMBLEFISH DASHBOARD WITH MY INTERNAL TRACKING/REPORTING SYSTEMS?
Yes, the N.7 Dashboard has the ability to “backload” tracking data from your Nimblefish marketing engine to your internal analytics data warehouse, SFA, or CRM systems on demand or in an automated process. In most cases, some minor assistance from your IT department will be necessary to integrate the data backload into your systems.
NIMBLEFISH NURTURE™:
DOES NIMBLEFISH PRINT AND MAIL DIRECT MAIL PIECES?
Yes, the automated creation and delivery of individualized direct mail is a core component of Nimblefish Nurture™-powered marketing engines. The N.7 platform streamlines digital variable print workflow, making it much more efficient and economical to produce and mail highly variable direct marketing on a large scale. N.7 digital production servers automate many of the processes that printers and mail houses have traditionally needed to perform manually when creating a variable or versioned direct mail campaign. N.7 also automates many production tasks, including complicated data processing, list integrity verification, content and template merging, content validation, postal automation, color-calibration, imposition, and production shop-floor tasks. To reduce costs, N.7 produces a streaming output of press-optimized production content that can be produced in high volume and mailed with automation at one of our many regional certified print providers.
By using N.7 to automate the creation of digitally individualized print-ready production output, marketers achieve higher efficiency in their print production, speeding time-to-in-home while increasing relevance and lowering costs. They are also able to print and mail from the optimal geographical location, and can print from multiple locations with consistent quality.
DOES NIMBLEFISH SEND EMAIL?
Yes, the automated creation and delivery of individualized email is a core component of Nimblefish Nurture™-powered marketing engines. Nimblefish Nurture allows you to send email through our certified email production system or, if you prefer, can support custom integration with your third-party email service provider (ESP) to fulfill your marketing program’s email needs.
WHAT IS A PURL®?
A Nimblefish PURL® (personal URL website) is a personalized microsite with an easy-to-remember URL, usually based on a domain name that is thematically related to but not the same as that for your organization’s main website domain (e.g., www.my-domain.com/jane.smith). PURL is a registered trademark of Nimblefish Technologies. Nimblefish is the world’s best-in-class provider of PURL technology, offering a depth of capability, large-scale, cross-media integration, and relevance that is unmatched in the industry. Our PURL websites incorporate a look and feel that makes them appear to your customers to be part of your website, but are in fact dynamically generated and hosted by Nimblefish’s state-of-the-art clustered data center. Using a Nimblefish PURL website, you can create a highly relevant web experience utilizing dynamic offers, messaging, and video that is tightly integrated into your direct mail, email, and CRM data systems.
CAN A PURL® CONTAIN AN ADVICE EXPERIENCE?
Yes. And it’s easy to do. In the same way that you can embed a Nimblefish Advisor™ interactive advice experience in your main website or in a microsite, our software makes it trivial to incorporate an advice experience on your PURL websites and associated direct marketing efforts.
CAN A PURL® CONTAIN AN INDIVIDUALIZED VIDEO?
Yes. In fact, it is something we urge marketers to consider doing to increase the results of their direct marketing efforts. A relevant video is a natural for CRM driven direct marketing, providing an online experience that can enhance and extend relevance in both direct mail and email and dramatically lift response rates. We’ve designed our Nimblefish Nurture™ software to make it simple for marketers to incorporate a data-driven Nimblefish Vision™ video into existing direct mail programs.
WHAT ARE THE TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS FOR VIEWING A PURL®?
PURL® websites created with Nimblefish Nurture™ are compatible with all major operating systems and browsers. In general, anyone who can successfully view your corporate website will be able to view and utilize a dynamic and data-driven PURL website.
Our clients increasingly use PURL website templates that are based on Adobe Flash and, in these cases, it is necessary for Flash Player 9 or greater to be installed. Currently over 99% of Internet users have Flash 9 or greater installed.
WHERE AND HOW ARE PURL® WEBSITES HOSTED?
PURL® websites are hosted at Nimblefish’s state-of-the-art data center using a J2EE messaging architecture and clustered server configuration to enable redundancy, scalability, and automated fault tolerance for rock solid reliability and a satisfying customer experience.
CAN A PURL® WEBSITE BE INTEGRATED WITH MY WEBSITE?
Yes. Most of our clients use PURL® websites that are fully integrated with their primary website and data systems. Popular methods of integration include linking to relevant pages, integration of capabilities such as click-to-chat, dynamic offer generation, secure login, data integration for returning leads, and data on user activity. Although PURL websites are hosted by Nimblefish, they can be integrated with your website by sharing your domain, matching your website’s look-and-feel templates (frames), and linking to your website’s key features and functions.
WHAT DOES MY IT TEAM NEED TO DO TO ENABLE A
NIMBLEFISH NURTURE™ PROGRAM?
For many marketing engines, no involvement from the marketer’s IT team is required. If you wish to enable automated data delivery to Nimblefish, which we strongly recommend, or to integrate performance information from N.7 into your corporate CRM system, your IT Team will need to provide some modest assistance. The N.7 Data Integrator is designed to make these integrations simple, fast, and reliable for your team.
I HAVE DATA IN MULTIPLE SOURCES – CAN YOU MERGE THAT DATA FOR ME?
Yes. The N.7 Data Integrator is easily configured to securely receive, validate, cleanse, merge, purge, de-dupe, and enhance data from multiple systems and data sources to ensure smooth operations, optimally relevant communications, and seamless data exchange between systems. In cases where the N.7 Data Integrator connects to multiple data sources, it is typical to smart-merge updates on the same customer to ensure that a complete picture of the customer’s needs and interests is available to the marketing engine. With N.7, this type of smart-merge is fully automated and simple to implement as long as there is a basis for matching customers in the data feeds, such as a unique ID or name and address data of sufficient accuracy.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO IMPLEMENT A NIMBLEFISH NURTURE™
MARKETING ENGINE?
Depending on the complexity of your marketing engine and your data integration needs, it typically takes 20 to 60 days from kickoff to a live production marketing engine. Once an engine is implemented, content and program updates can take as little as a few hours to make, test, and deploy.
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO PRODUCE DATA-TRIGGERED DIRECT MAIL PIECES?
Once a Nimblefish Nurture™ marketing engine is implemented and running, it can take as little as a few hours (depending on the volume) from the time we receive data to the time a direct mail or email piece goes out to your customers. Most Nimblefish Nurture-powered marketing engines that are triggered by data operate on a scheduled production basis, automatically creating a production run at a preset frequency, such as daily, weekly, or monthly according to your needs.
CAN I USE EXISTING CREATIVE PIECES IN A NIMBLEFISH PROGRAM?
Of course. The Nimblefish professional services group will assist you in migrating your existing creative design files to robust Nimblefish Nurture™ templates. Customers frequently migrate their existing direct mail programs in order to achieve faster time-to-in-home through streamlined production operations and higher response and conversion rates through improved relevance.
CAN I MANAGE/PRODUCE MY OWN CONTENT?
Yes. Using Nimblefish Nurture™ Content Manager, you can access your marketing engine directly online and manage both the content as well as the approval workflow for all of your direct marketing pieces.
WHAT PRINT FORMATS CAN YOU PRINT?
The Nimblefish N.7 platform can print to a wide range of paper stocks, styles, and formats, including cards, bi-folds, business letters, catalogs, and more.
CAN I USE MY OWN POSTAL ACCOUNT?
Yes, you may choose to use your own postal account when mailing through the Nimblefish platform.
CAN NIMBLEFISH HANDLE LARGE-SCALE DIRECT MAIL PROGRAMS?
Yes, Nimblefish N.7 is built for scale. By automating the production of digital print-ready output in a highly scalable data center and distributing print production through a network of certified printers, Nimblefish N.7 achieves very high print production performance and scalability in a cost-effective manner. Our current N.7 datacenter configuration is architected and provisioned to serve production of over 1 billion individualized direct mail pieces annually, each with its own dynamic PURL® site incorporating a relevant data-driven video.
NIMBLEFISH ADVISOR™:
WHAT IS AN ADVICE EXPERIENCE?
An advice experience is a rich media application for use on websites that provides highly relevant and personalized information (often product or service recommendations) to users based on their answers to a series of interactive questions. It enables companies across industries to “advise” their customers and prospective customers through the consideration of their products while they shop online.
WHAT ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR VIEWING AN ADVICE EXPERIENCE?
The only requirements for viewing an advice experience are an Internet connection, a web browser, and Flash Player 9 or above. If your viewers do not have the required Flash version, the advice experience will automatically guide them through a simple process for installing or upgrading their software to the latest compatible version. Currently, over 99% of Internet users have Flash 9 or greater installed.
HOW DO I PUT AN ADVICE EXPERIENCE ON OUR CORPORATE WEBSITE? WHAT WILL OUR IT TEAM NEED TO DO?
Advice experiences use an embed methodology similar to that used by Google Maps, and are very simple to embed in your website or link to in a pop-up window. Most clients find that their content production teams are able to copy and paste the embed code directly into their web content management systems without any involvement by IT.
CAN YOU INTEGRATE AN ADVICE EXPERIENCE WITH EXTERNAL
WEB APPLICATIONS?
Yes. It depends on the specific application, but advice experiences can be easily integrated with a range of web applications, such as sign-up forms, click-to-chat, banner ads, search ads, landing pages, microsites, configurators, and shopping carts. Advice experiences can also be personalized using data from your CRM database or integrated into a data-driven Nimblefish PURL® website.
CAN I USE MY EXISTING IMAGES AND VIDEOS IN AN ADVICE EXPERIENCE?
Yes. Nimblefish Advisor™ was specifically designed to enable our customers to quickly and cost-effectively leverage existing media assets in their advice experiences. Image, audio, and video files can be easily imported into our Vision Video Composer and Advisor Experience Designer applications as needed.
HOW DO I TRACK THE PERFORMANCE OF AN ADVICE EXPERIENCE?
Nimblefish Advisor™ includes tracking and reporting on numerous metrics for all of your advice experiences. We can hook up the metrics reporting to your Google Analytics account, or you may choose to use your existing web analytics applications to measure the effectiveness of an advice experience. Nimblefish can also assist you in analyzing the data and customizing reports for your needs.
CAN I PUT AN ADVICE EXPERIENCE IN AN INTERACTIVE AD UNIT
(E.G., BANNER AD)?
Yes. It depends on the specific ad-serving application, but in most cases an advice experience is as straightforward and simple to add to an ad space as any Flash-based advertisement.
HOW ARE ADVICE EXPERIENCES SERVED?
The content for your advice experiences is served over Limelight Networks, the same Content Delivery Network that serves video for MSNBC, ABC Television, and Facebook. The Content Delivery Network ensures fast, reliable, and scalable access to your advice experiences.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO USE ADVICE EXPERIENCES IN EXISTING VIDEO SITES SUCH AS YOUTUBE, AOL, OR YAHOO?
No. All our video content is assembled dynamically in our Vision Video Player; Nimblefish Advisor™ videos cannot be uploaded to sites that only support ordinary non-variable video.
CAN ADVICE EXPERIENCES BE PERSONALIZED?
Yes, advice experiences can be personalized using data from your existing CRM database or by using the information collected in the questionnaire that is part of the experience.
