Email Marketing Gets Social With NutShellMail Acquisition

EmailEmail marketing powerhouse Constant Contact (whose client numbers now exceed 350,000) has acquired NutshellMail, a free service that enables marketers to monitor, manage and interact with customers through social media. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

NutshellMail's service works by collecting and organizing  (aggregating) the latest messages and activity from social networks - including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace¬¨¬®‚àö√ú - into a snapshot that is delivered to marketers via email. Users of Constant Contact's service will soon be able to customize the content they want to track from social media, add search terms, and choose how frequently they want to receive updates.

Integrating this social media tool into email management service makes a lot of sense for Constant Contact, and the benefit of being able to reply to social media updates from within the interface is going to be very appealing to SMBs.

"We started NutshellMail to help solve the problem of social network overload. As part of the Constant Contact family, we're going to help some of the busiest people on the planet, small business owners, turn what might seem like social media chaos into a smart marketing tool for growing their business. It's like a DVR for your social networking activity," said Mark Schmulen, co-founder of NutshellMail.