Product review: Nifty Images
Designing dynamic marketing emails can sometimes look a little flat, but this month, we tested a potential solution: NiftyImages. Can NiftyImages help you create truly dynamic designs in your email marketing?
Cathrina Dionisio
Hi there, I’m Cat, Creative Director with Ragnarok. One of the most challenging things I have to do is tell my clients, “I’m sorry, but we can’t design that in email.” It’s frustrating from a design and strategy standpoint. In a world of VR and AR and predictive interactivity at our fingertips—certain email browsers can’t even support a GIF. I couldn’t resist diving into Nifty Images’ platform, especially to see how dynamic data and graphics could come together. Here’s my honest, unbiased opinion.
First off, what is NiftyImages.com?
NiftyImages is a SaaS Platform that provides tools for marketers to easily personalize images and dynamic content in their email marketing campaigns. With no integrations needed and being ESP agnostic, NiftyImages seamlessly works with any existing email templates and Merge Tags.
NiftyImages’ tools help improve user engagement and strengthen brand loyalty by delivering a personalized, visual experience for the subscriber at the moment of engagement. NiftyImages has worked with over a thousand clients and served billions of images for leading brands including HBO, Dell, Delta, Shopify, and Samsung. (Pretty fancy.)
(Some of) NiftyImages features
Polls
Dynamic
Maps
Personalized Images
Countdown Timers
How it works:
NiftyImages lets you activate user data (known, behavioral, zero, or first party) to create visually engaging personalized experiences. As a Creative Director, I enjoyed being able to seamlessly blend customer data directly into an image created by my design team.
1. Create
Upload your own custom design or build your own images within the NiftyImages Editor. Determine what data points you want to connect and where to place them within the image. There are many useful design tools to customize user data such as; fonts, text size/color, positioning, layering, and more.
2. Copy
Once the image is designed and saved, simply copy the Image URL that’s provided.
3. Paste
The last step is to paste the Image URL into your ESP of choice.
My First Impressions…
Easy! I was really impressed with how easy it was to use NiftyImages. The entire journey of creating tailored content turned out to be much more simplified than I had anticipated. I enjoyed how clean and simple the UI felt. The added benefit of personalizing content without relying on my development team was a definite advantage.
There were zero integrations needed and unlike other similar solutions, there was no waiting for turnaround time.
Digging In
These are some of my key observations that you can bear in mind when working with this software:
Key Features:
My biggest take away of all the features I used would be the ability to customize the data I use in my images.
- Leveraging Photoshop’s design capabilities through the Adobe Photoshop integration, I was able to create Countdown Timers that perfectly aligned with the brand’s aesthetics. Unlike previous experiences where timers seemed ordinary and inconsistent with my design, this integration allowed for a seamless brand match.
- I was also able to build personalized logic to drive tailored content. Immediately some ideas came to mind for this feature:
- show personalized images to customers based on their loyalty rewards.
- display seasonal products based on the current season
- change images based on the user’s mobile device
- I loved the fact that we could populate charts and graphs with real-time data, and not just add static graphics that represent approximation of data. It’s a level of transparency that is really impressive and takes the pressure off my design team to create graphics for multiple data scenarios.
Additionally, month-to-month pricing is available with no extra costs along with heavily discounted annual plans. I love being able to offer a service like this to my clients while they are in the testing and discovery phase of a new campaign. Less commitment for the client means more opportunities for them to take risks.
Things to note:
NiftyImages is a tool that is meant to be used by organizations that have design and email development teams to maximize its functionality. This isn’t a major pain point for us, but it might be for teams who are interested in trying NiftyImages out and don’t have those resources readily available.
Another thing to note is there is no team login available for NiftyImages. All team members working on the project must share a login. While this may not be an issue for some teams, it is a point worth considering. We ask our clients to create their Nifty account and share their login with us. But we hear that they’re working on team login features!
Ease of connectivity:
NiftyImages is ESP agnostic and will easily work with any CRM or ESP. There is no need for IT Development or Integrations. After you’ve created your desired personalized image or timer, simply use the Image URL provided by NiftyImages and add it directly to your existing email template.
The ideal NiftyImages customer?
NiftyImages is the ideal solution for companies of any size (with creative and email development resources) who want to create personalized, visually engaging, and dynamic email experiences in real time. Having several plan choices available, customers have the flexibility to select the one that aligns best fit their budgets and needs.
Final thoughts
I was really excited about the variety of features available for personalization. Within each feature, there was plenty of room for customization, which is a key aspect for me. I’m eager to incorporate all these features into my campaigns, armed with the expertise to infuse data-driven graphics in my strategies! With their modest price point and robust feature set, you get a lot of bang for your buck!
Ready to start making your emails a bit more Nifty?
Cathrina Dionisio
Creative Director at Ragnarok
