Direct-to-Fan: Dear Sir or Madam…

In my role at Nimbit, I spent a lot of time talking about the benefits and features of our brand-new, super snazzy fan messaging system. And I even used it to send Nimbit newsletters and press releases out. This should, logically, make me some kind of expert.

Seems logical, right? Especially if I’m to believe the comments people have been leaving on these posts…

The guys in Hollow Vixen wanted to book some more gigs — and I suggested sending a mass email to the various booking folks indicating the dates, (re)introducing the band, and we could track open rates, clicks, and so on to measure general interest.

Again, seems logical, right?

Feeling confident about using the Nimbit system, I started there first. Similar to Topspin, you upload a list of contacts as a CSV file. You can then group/tag those contacts as appropriate for later use. On the Nimbit side, the upload process didn’t work. My feeling of confidence and ability slipped a few notches. But I soldiered on and tried it a couple more times. I’d identify the file, click upload and then …. nothing happened! It didn’t fail, but it definitely didn’t succeed either. So unless I wanted to enter each contact manually (which I didn’t…), I moved on to the Topspin system.

Topspin (wisely, I learned later…) provides a template CSV file that you can copy/paste your contacts into. I did that, imported the file, and 10 seconds later, I was good to go. This was quite exciting, and I didn’t feel quite so mentally deficient.

Upon adding the contacts, and tagging them, the next step was to compose my message. Again, Topspin made it fairly easy to format a VERY basic email. I could change fonts, sizes, and colors, but that was pretty much the limit to the readily available opportunities. Were I better with HTML, I could’ve done something all slick and fancy, but for now I was limited to the basics. In this case, that was really all I needed, but for future endeavors, it may be wise to hire someone to design an HTML template I can use and re-use. This, of course, would cost additional money — not something musicians are fond of hearing. The Nimbit system includes a template builder that lets you drop in products (Featured product for sale, gig dates, etc.), and create a pretty decent template. It’s not outrageously professional and slick, but it’s better than just text on a screen. You do also have the additional option to use an advanced HTML editor for the fancy (developer/designer) stuff.

I was able to create a Nimbit template separate from uploading the contacts, so you’ll see an image of that there. And you’ll see a screen shot of the email I put together and sent using Topspin.

Having composed my email, the next step (in Topspin) was to select the recipients. Since I had just created the tag, I chose that, and it populated the email with the right group of people. What was surprising to me was that I didn’t see any way to indicate the sender’s email, or schedule when the message was to be sent. Nimbit allows for both — so a booking email could come from [email protected] while others could come from [email protected] or any individual band members, etc. It’s a cool feature, and it helps personalize and organize things a bit.

Anyway, having sent the Topspin email out, I was quite happy. It sent quickly, didn’t get very many bounces, and all seemed well in the world. I even figured out my problem with the Nimbit upload process — turns out CSV files have to have content in every cell. But Nimbit’s upload screen doesn’t mention that all too prominently. Left to my own resources, I uploaded the Topspin CSV file I had created into my Nimbit account. No surprise, it worked fine! But I did feel like I was crossing the streams and messing with the space-time continuum.

Now all would be perfect but for one small, nagging detail. Nowhere on the Topspin email screen, and only in tiny, faint type in the delivered email, does it say the following: “Please do not reply to this email. This is an outbound e-mail only and replies will not be responded to or reviewed.”

Here’s the screenshot of that same message from the footer of the email. It’s rather hard to read, don’t you think?

I left it in this post full size, so nobody could claim I was making it intentionally smaller. Gotta keep it real, people.

Ultimately, I’d like to say that Nimbit’s email system is better. But unfortunately, since I couldn’t actually use Nimbit to send the email ‘cuz I couldn’t get my CSV uploaded, I think this round is sort of a stalemate. Hopefully Topspin adds more marketer-friendly features and Nimbit irons out the wrinkles.