Nimble: The Tail Wagging the Monkey

“WE HAVE SINNED!” opened the email that I had to send manually to my entire email list. It went on…

Being swashbuckling guinea pig marketers, we always test on ourselves before making recommendations to our clients.

Yesterday, we pushed Mail Chimp too far! We have been found GUILTY of committing a Mail Chimp Carnal Sin for which the only redemption is begging your forgiveness and asking you to opt into our mailing list! 

So here’s the deal:

If you do us the favor of opting in here, we will tell you the sin we are guilty of — cool huh? 

When the Internet Gods hold their bible secrets too close to be known, being very very bad is the best way to learn where the boundaries lie 🙂

Looking forward to your opting in… here

Aw hell, let’s make this even more fun! I’ll buy lunch for the 7th, 17th, 27th and 107th person to opt in, and I will share the rest of the seven deadly sins we’ve committed over pasta Fra Diablo!

Be well and stay out of hell!

Deb

As promised:

MailChimp shut down our ability to import our corporate house list because our list was riddled with problems and resulted in too many hard bounces. How many is too many? According to MailChimp we were pushing 30%!  And given that, it is no surprise we were shut down.

But how did the list get that way? The real problem was with the program we were testing before we got to MailChimp: Nimble. Nimble was the tail wagging the monkey.

Why Nimble?

A week does not go by when a client doesn’t ask me to recommend a good CRM (customer relationship management) program to easily manage their customer/prospect lists and associated information. Most of our clients are mid-sized businesses. For these companies, the IT world provides very little in the way of truly useful solutions. They fall into one of three categories:

• Overpriced, once global applications shrunk down for smaller companies,
• Overly complex and overpriced SAAS (Software as a Service) offerings (such as salesforce.com that has gotten so complex it requires consultants to customize it), and
• Products so lightweight as to be laughable. (such as Full Contact, it has a slick little interface that allows you to photograph business cards that are beamed to India where workers type what they see — yes you read that right, manual typing means better accuracy.  Beyond that, attempting to manage your lists on Full Contact is a horror show of near zero functionality.

Nimble Integrates Your Contacts on the “Big 4” Social Networks into One Fabulous River of Posts

That’s why when I found Nimble, even my jaded geeky self felt a shimmer of excitement. The price was right $15 a month. The functionality was cool:

Nimble features integration with Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin plus your own email client and brings them all together in one nice interface. That means that when you upload your house list Nimble fetches all of the user profiles from those services AND their posting streams and integrates them into one river of posts that can be viewed by individual contact or as a group.

And what about those followers, connections and “friends” that are not on your house list? It brings them right into the interface as if they were on your house list. Integrate your email and send and receive mail, posts and tweets all from one interface. Well slay me now!

To that Nimble spices it up with the ability to connect company credit ratings and a host of other details in a very nice tabbed interface. Leads can be attached to “deals” that can be tracked.  It tells you the last time you communicated with a contact, you can attach Google docs (such as proposals), and when you receive mail you can see the backgrounds of everyone on the thread. It features a bevy of integrations, I was particularly excited about its integration with MailChimp.

The benefits are huge! People I had not seen in years, and for whom I had old addresses would be found on Linkedin, Google+, Facebook or Twitter automatically and I could populate their card with the latest contact information. And for an old bird like me with many old contacts scattered hither and yon that was just magic!

But Nimble is a Roach Motel!

I quickly hooked it all up and discovered when integrating my Apple Mail, sent emails would not sync with my Apple client. It ends up that Apple Mail is not supported by Nimble. For most of my clients this is not an issue. For me it was a speed bump. The joy of connecting all my communication streams kept my attention. Nimble became my go to contact list.

Then Linkedin pulled the plug on their integration. I figured it was for “walled garden” reasons — Linkedin is notoriously uncooperative with other services. But that just meant I had to bulk download and upload my Linkedin connections. Another speed bump.

Overtime I synched all my accounts regularly so I’d be sure to keep all my lists up to date.

And then I noticed something dark: my list always seemed to get bigger never smaller! It seems that Nimble is like the Roach Motel — roaches check in but they can’t check out. 

New contacts are added, but contacts that have stopped following you are NOT deleted. This is especially a problem with Twitter where followers blow in and and out like the wind.

In fact many of Nimble’s integrations are Roach Motels! The ramifications of this did not fully sink in as I was dazzled by the concept of one beautiful river of social postings coursing through my interface. But it did hit me like a bad hangover after MailChimp whacked us.

Still smarting from our MailChimp hangover I kicked myself for assuming that everyone keeps their social media accounts up to date — they don’t — and that just meant more bounces. I also realized that the MailChimp integration was another Roach Motel: Unsubscribes or bounces would not be fed back into the Nimble mother list from Mail Chimp. Making Nimble useless if you want to keep a clean house list.

Bottom line: I so want Nimble to work! What a concept! Practically until Nimble works out two-way integration taking a wrecking ball to its Roach Motels it is not fully functional. And as we learned the hard way, it cannot be relied on to deliver clean up-to-date email lists. That said, Nimble has demonstrated that they have an engaged development team. I remain optimistic. I think they will be a great service one day, but they are not there yet.

As for the Fra Diablo pasta lunches — we have our winners and I’ll be emailing you soon to set up a date.