Conversen’s customers are innovative marketers. And Conversen is an innovative company also. Conversen offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that lets marketers communicate with their consumers through a variety of digital channels, including email, Web, SMS, RSS, and social media. They have now added print to this mix by licensing Pageflex Server and integrating it into their platform. Traditionally, we work with companies that are experts in print communications and are expanding their efforts to support digital forms of communications. It is nice when we see the digital frontier acknowledge the importance that print, and especially VARIABLE print, still plays in marketing to consumers.
Paul Mandeville, Conversen’s COO, recently explained to me the market need that lead them to use Pageflex. “CMO surveys consistently show that integrating offline and online communications is a high priority, and this partnership with Bitstream to bring Pageflex digital print capabilities into a platform that already supports email, web, SMS, and social content is powerful.”
Paul went on to say that ““Marketing services companies and agencies will tell you that they spend more time being general contractors of multi-channel programs than they spend creating the program concepts and creative, and that’s an imbalance that needed fixing. By integrating Pageflex into the Conversen platform, we’ve essentially untied the hands of marketers everywhere.”
Conversen uses business rules within their platform to drive the variable composition of Pageflex templates using both demographic and relational data sources, as well as Conversen’s built-in activity- and response-based logic. The result is a highly personalized, print-ready, digital asset that can be downloaded and printed locally, or sent to the client’s print vendor.
Conversen CEO Philip Chischportich calls it “an amazing efficiency play,” and says that “we’re already seeing clients save between 30%-50% on printing costs.” I’m looking forward to sharing some real-life case studies in the coming months!