Announcing Nutshell Marketing: Design and send beautiful marketing emails directly out of Nutshell!

The big news we’ve been hinting and hinting and hinting at is finally here.

Our team is proud to announce the release of Nutshell Marketing, an email marketing tool that lets you design beautiful marketing emails, send them to thousands of contacts at a time, and immediately track their impact—all out of Nutshell.

Nutshell Marketing seamlessly connects to your CRM data, so you can easily target your messages to customer segments and ensure that your sellers and marketers are always working off the same information.

Built for simplicity and priced for small businesses, Nutshell Marketing is a stress-free alternative to integrating your CRM with a third-party email marketing platform and keeping the two platforms in sync.

Before we dig into how it all works, here’s why our team devoted the past year to building this thing.

Why Nutshell Marketing?

Nutshell spent a decade as a CRM and sales automation tool, and one of the biggest challenges our team struggled with during that time was a lack of alignment between our sales software and the email marketing tools that we’ve tried to integrate with.

We used every top solution under the sun: Hubspot, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, you name it. But no matter how good these tools are at what they do, making your sales and marketing teams work out of separate contact databases creates confusion and gets in the way of collaboration.

For example: There was no easy way for our marketing team to create email audiences based on customer segments, because our customer information was only up-to-date in our Nutshell CRM account. Our sales team didn’t have full visibility into which marketing messages were going out or which messages were being engaged with the most. Data was getting out of sync, important context was getting lost. And we kept hearing from Nutshell customers who were hitting the same roadblocks.

So, we got to work creating the least annoying email marketing tool we could think of. One that’s designed for ease of use—just like everything we design at Nutshell—and which solves the most common challenges that B2B marketers suffer from.

What we’ve learned by building Nutshell Marketing and then using it ourselves over the past few months, is that having your CRM and your email marketing software under the same roof, powered by the same customer data, solves all of those challenges instantly. It really is the magic bullet.

We didn’t build Nutshell Marketing so we could compete with industry heavyweights like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. We did it because we genuinely believe that uniting sellers and marketers in a single growth software tool helps them work together more effectively, and we hope that translates to more success for our customers.

For a complete rundown of how to use Nutshell Marketing, visit the Nutshell Marketing section of our Help Center. Otherwise, read on for a quick overview.

Getting started with broadcasts and newsletters

To begin communicating with your subscribers, visit the Outreach section of Nutshell, which you can get to by clicking the megaphone icon in the sidebar of the Nutshell app. That’s where you can start designing broadcasts (one-off announcements to your subscribers) or newsletters (recurring series of updates).

In the Broadcasts tab, click the Create new broadcast box or + Add new broadcast button in the top right to start a new announcement. You have the option to create a message from scratch, or build a message based on one of our pre-made email marketing templates or one of your recent broadcasts.

After you make your selection, we’ll take you to the Editor tab of our drag-and-drop design tool, where you can add and adjust text fields, visual assets, and formatting.

Right next door to the Editor tab is the Details tab, where you can add the sender address, the audience (more on that in a bit), the subject line, and the preview text. You can also choose to add UTM parameters to your links for content-tracking purposes, and preview how the message will look on desktop and mobile.

When your broadcast is in good shape, you can either Send a test email to yourself and members of your team, or hit the Prepare to send button to review and schedule the message.

The process for creating a newsletter in the Newsletters tab is mostly the same—hit either of the Create newsletter buttons to get started, then use the email designer tool to make it lovely.

The main difference between broadcasts and newsletters is that once your first newsletter is done, you have the option to add a new edition to the same newsletter or start a new series altogether. (That’s helpful if your customer newsletter has different content from your prospect newsletter, or if you have different newsletters devoted to different product/service types.)

Update, August 2021: Nutshell Marketing now includes the ability to design and send automated drip sequences. Read all about it here!