Direct to Fan Revolution

Nimbit launches the music industry's first complete all-in-one solution for marketing, sales and fan management

By Erik Philbrook

On April 21st, while participating at the ASCAP "I Create Music" EXPO in Hollywood, ASCAP member benefit partner Nimbit debuted nimbitPro, the first fully integrated direct-to-fan platform that allows artists to quickly build their fan base, market and sell direct to them online and at shows, and manage their entire business all from one easy-to-use system.

Years in the making, nimbitPro represents a significant evolution of the company's technology platform, "a realization of the vision we architected from day one," says Nimbit cofounder and CTO Patrick Faucher.

To get an idea of the scope and significance of this newlaunch,we asked Faucher to explain in greater detailwhat the newservice provides.

Can you explain the important new benefits/features of nimbitPro and how it helps the professional musician?

Sure. It's all aboutmaking it easier for artists to do three very important things:
1) Build their fan base more quickly,
2) Create ongoing conversations with those fans, and
3) Present fans with compelling ways to buy directly

The way we did this was to integrate simple fan capture tools (free track for email widgets, download codes, etc.) with a state-of-the-art fan messaging system (email, SMS, social media), add in a very powerful fan list manager (fan profile, history and search) and tie that all into our industry-leading fan commerce platform.

We recognized early on that it was becoming more difficult and time consuming to manage the various tasks necessary for creating a real business around their art. There are so many different applications and services that artists use to manage fans, do promotion and be able to sell all their products, and it's not easy to get themto work together, so we've put the most essential tools into a single system where all the components work together seamlessly.

We really focused on the key fan management and marketing tools that music professionals need. Now, with any Nimbit account, you get the ability to quickly build a robust fan list. Artists can capture fans via their web store, through signup forms, free track for email, across social networks, etc. Every single fan that you have captured to your list, given away promo material to, sold stuff to or touched in any way throughout this process is now in your fan database and accessible from the fan manager tool. The fan manager tool tracks and marks the activities of each fan and even gives you a purchase history.

What are the new messaging tools?

We've created full state of the art messaging center that allows you to easily send out and coordinate messages via email (HTML email like you'd create with Constant Contact) Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and SMS channels. You can instantly embed product offers, promotions and calendar dates into any message and then track the response in terms of opens, clicks and actual sales.

Can you give an example of how a fan marketing campaign would work?

Let's say you have a new release coming out. Using our messaging tool, you set up a campaign called "My New Release" and that campaign is eight weeks long. During the first week, you add two tweets, an email and a Facebook update to the campaign. Using the promo tool, you would embed an offer for free demo track from the new album into those messages. Then, you can measure which channel responded better - Facebook, email, or Twitter - and see who redeemed the free track. The second week you start to create targeted offers to the different channels and segments of your list.

And in week four, I could have an official press release mailed out to my "media contacts" group that I created in my fan list, announcing the new release and tour. Follow that with a blast to my all fans that got a free track about a special pre sale that I amdoing for it. The presale is something you can set up in the catalog tool, where you create special packages of the album that core fans can pre-order directly from your website and Facebook page.

So you could have a series ofmessages going out through different channels at different times with different objectives all leading up to and supporting the new release. And you can set this up ahead of time to send on a set schedule in the campaign manager. Now there's no last minute chaos trying to get everything together.

And this all done through a single Nimbit account?

That's correct. You've got all these ways to target your fans and send messages through the different channels and then because your storefronts are all managed through Nimbit, its literally drag and drop to put product promotions, product offers, calendar dates, anything you want into an email message, into Twitter message, etc., and it'll track the click through on those links so you see over time how many fans have actually opened your message, and how many have clicked and what the resulting sales are - right down to a per link basis.

Now you're talking about "analytics."

Right. You get to see the distribution of opens, what time of day, what day of week, you get to see success by any criteria you want. It is fullblown analytics, full blown campaign management, and full-blown fan listmanagement. You could piece it together by using Google Analytics plus an email tool, Twitter, your Facebook page, plus your own website, plus a lot of time and effort. But it's not as integrated, so the ability to consistently and conclusively measure your results would be difficult, if not impossible.

How are you making it user-friendly?

We added step-by-step workflows to give artists a checklist of what they should do. It's a step-by-step guide to how to effectively run a complete campaign. Our goal is to provide every artist with the ability to get more fans, make more money and do it with less hassle.

For more info, visit www.nimbit.com