Constant Contact to shutter social media inbox NutshellMail on March 22

Constant Contact announced today that it will be shutting down NutshellMail, the social media inbox service it acquired nearly six years ago. The company decided that now was the time because it wanted to “move on to other projects.” NutshellMail will no longer be operational after March 22, 2016.

“Our strategy has always been to invest in what drives the most impact for our customers. NutshellMail simply wasn’t a big piece of that. We made the decision to shift our social and mobile resources to the mobile apps and social functionality that’s important to our customers. And we’re seeing that pay off with significant improvements in adoption and usage of those apps and features,” explained a Constant Contact spokesperson.

The company is recommending NutshellMail users switch to Perch, a digital marketing app for small businesses. Perch was started by Denver-based Closely and offers an email digest, a web portal, and a mobile app.

Founded in 2007, NutshellMail sought to make it easy for any small business to manage and monitor their social media channels in just “5 to 10 minutes a day.” The company described the service as being like a personal assistant that kept track of what people are saying about your brand while delivering the most important and actionable activity in an email digest sent to you when you wanted it.

In 2010, Constant Contact acquired NutshellMail for an undisclosed price to provide its small business customers a tool to “build engaged customer relationships.” Prior to the deal, NutshellMail had raised more than $807,000 in venture capital from the fbFund, Houston Angel Network, and Zelkova Ventures.

No layoffs are planned as a result of this closure.

“While we aren’t ready to unveil what’s coming next, we’re constantly working on new features and functionality to help our small business customers drive success, like our recent launches of our Facebook Advertising tool and new social sharing functionality,” said the spokesperson.