Mailchimp introduces small biz marketing suite
Mailchimp is moving beyond just email. The company that put itself on the map with a concept that doing business emails would be so easy a chimp could even do it, is now adding a full slate of tools to empower small businesses, with a campaign featuring that chimp named Freddie.
Mailchimp's campaign promoting its new platform
Today (13 May), Mailchimp is launching its all-in-one marketing platform for growing businesses, transforming itself from an email-centric company to one that can be used for all small business marketing needs.
The change has come about over the last few years, as the company got feedback from its customers.
“We heard from customers, ‘It’s really complicated out there beyond email and it would be great if you guys would build new functionality.’…So we started building things out and over the last couple of years we’ve built many new features and functionalities,” Darcy Kurtz, vice-president of product marketing, told The Drum.
Mailchimp first created a marketing CRM (customer relationship management), which includes things like an audience view so business owners can see all of their contacts and then organize them with tags then drop them into segments.
The CRM is a central point for small to medium-sized businesses (SMB) to control their marketing campaigns and get to know their customers even better through data and targeting. There, users can see full audience in one central place. They can tag users, see customers’ lifetime value based on how they interact with their marketing and get tips on how to convert their audience into paying customers.
Other newly launched features include ad retargeting on Facebook and Instagram to go along with its current Google retargeting offering; social posting to repurpose content already created in Mailchimp to post to social channels; smart recommendations based on users’ data, industry best practices and AI-driven insights, phone support, pricing packages and recurring postcards.
“We’ve created all of the channels a small business would need…We’re really looking at having full functionality across channels,” said Kurtz.
She also mentioned that all the functionality now built for the desktop will be available on the Mailchimp mobile app.
One other piece of the small business marketing puzzle being put into place is that Mailchimp will be launching websites. Currently, the testing is in beta, but it will unfold throughout the year so that customers can build their websites and start marketing to people immediately through the Mailchimp platform.
Listening to customers
Mailchimp made these changes because its customers demanded them. Research culled by the company found that SMBs make up 48% of the GDP, making it an underserved market. Plus, the average small business owner uses eight marketing tools, in many cases, that’s more tools than they have employees.
In addition, 90% of Mailchimp customers have fewer than 100 employees, roughly 10% of active users don't have their own websites, over 1.25m e-commerce orders are generated through Mailchimp campaigns per day, and over 450m e-commerce orders were made through Mailchimp campaigns in 2018.
In other words, there are opportunities for growth that Mailchimp’s new platform hopes to solve.
“Over 60% of SMBs say reaching their target market is really hard,” said Kurtz. “They have no idea how to go find them. We’re putting intelligence behind the system so they don’t have to do it all on their own…we’re passionate about small business. We believe that if you put customers at the center of everything you do, if you know them better than anybody else and you talk to them in a personalized way, you create customer love, and by creating that customer love, the money and the business grows.”
A blog post by Mailchimp's founder, Ben Chestnut, stated: "We’re dedicated to democratizing marketing technology for small business, and providing the latest, most powerful tools at affordable prices. We’ll continue listening hard to our customers’ needs, constantly improving our platform and building new features along the way. (Have you heard...Landing Pages are here and Websites are on the way?)."
A campaign to promote new features will accompany the rollout. Kurtz said it will be a multichannel global campaign, featuring digital and social, direct mail with postcards, plus out-of-home, radio and streaming. And Mailchimp will continue to use its whimsical illustrations on its website, as well as its signature chimp, Freddie, in its marketing and advertising efforts.
See some of the work by clicking on the Creative Works box below.
