Mailchimp's content marketing strategy to become a Media First Brand

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Launched in 2001, Mailchimp is an Email Marketing and automation SaaS that generates revenues worth $800 Million with 140 Million customers. When investors and nay-sayers were busy predicting the demise of Email, and as a result, Mailchimp, this bootstrapped giant got acquired by Intuit for $12 Billion!

While their story is known to be an incredible example of pivoting, persistence, and bootstrapping, there’s also a lot to learn from their content marketing efforts that helped them become a brand worth $12 Billion.

This success primarily comes from the clarity of their target audience.

From messaging, and platform design to content - every aspect of their marketing aimed at doing one thing - help a small business grow.

“Every time we sat down with potential investors, they never seemed to understand small business,” Mr. Chestnut said. Venture capitalists always wanted Mailchimp to serve ‘enterprise companies’, large businesses with thousands of employees and, potentially, thousands to spend.

Mailchimp’s marketing, along with its adorable mascot - Freddie the monkey has come a long way.

In this case study, we will explore various tactics across publishing, branding, and content marketing used by Mailchimp that you could use to inspire your content marketing strategy.

What ideas does Mailchimp sell?

“Mailchimp is an all-in-one Marketing Platform for small businesses. We empower millions of customers around the world to start and grow their businesses with our smart marketing technology, award-winning support, and inspiring content.”

As you can see, ‘inspiring content’ plays a crucial, leading role in ensuring it can achieve its mission to enable small businesses to grow. Their content strategy houses podcasts, a business magazine (Courier Media), tutorials, films, original series, blogs, thought leadership, etc that are all aimed at handholding small businesses to get inspired, learn and execute.

Its content is designed to help you in 3 main areas:

• Launch your business

• Learn to grow business via marketing

• Learn how to scale your business

Another key aspect of helping small businesses, as mentioned by Chestnut, was how Mailchimp wanted to be an example to “prove small businesses that creating success through bootstrapping was possible”.

With the recent acquisition by Intuit, it has become a part of the suite of tools like QuickBooks, TurboTax, etc, where together they have become a powerful customer growth platform for small and medium businesses.

Target audience

"The only companies we could relate to were small businesses, and they always asked for email marketing."

Ben Chestnut, co-founder of Mailchimp

Mailchimp aims to create a Brand Identity by targeting 3 major audiences:

• Small business owners

• Early-stage founders

• Indie-Makers

• Solopreneurs (freelancers, consultants, artists)

• Marketers

• Agencies

• Business developers

One remarkable aspect about Mailchimp is how they have been laser-focused on its target audience from the start while still ensuring they remain in the lane of ‘email marketing’.

Brand emotions - If Mailchimp was a person, sorry, an ape

Source: Ben Chestnut on Twitter

Post-2018, Mailchimp did away with the above colorful logo to adopt its present monotone. They also changed their typeface from cursive to the current more formal font. These moves got mixed reactions, but overall Mailchimp has worked hard to create a consistent brand experience that stands out due to its steady core values.

Our brand framework is made up of persistent and expressive elements, which make room for creativity while maintaining visual harmony.

Mailchimp’s content and design work towards making an impression of a person who:

• Supports and expresses Creativity

• Humble

• Inclusive

• Visually playful

• Actionable

• Simple

• Helping hand

• Doesn’t take itself too seriously

• Educates you

• Dry humor

Mailchimp’s branding and design are very heavy on illustrations and animation. This makes their website experience active and expressive. They have a unique style of crafting illustrations that makes them very recognizable.

While MailChimp's publicly traded competitors acquire customers by advertising on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, the primate-themed mailing-list company builds its loyal customer base like an indie band.

Freddie the Chimp is a part of their brand identity for the past 20 years. It’s iconic enough to be made and distributed as adorable swags like plush toys, tote bags, t-shirts, etc!

Content Style Guide

Source: Mailchimp Content Style Guide

Our tone changes depending on the situation, but it's generally informal. We have a sense of humor, but we value clarity over entertainment. Our priorities are to educate our users about our products without patronizing or confusing them, so they can get their work done and get on with their lives.

You know a brand is serious about their content marketing when they publicly mention their content style guide.

As you can see, most of the writing principles revolve around educating users. All the content written aims at guiding and empowering small businesses to learn and take action. This is done using an informal, relatable, and humble tone, with no expectations of keyword stuffing for SEO gains.

How does Mailchimp build trust with content?

“We’ve always tried to be different and model behavior we truly believe is good for customers. As a result, we’re a yellow banana in a sea of blue.”

Mailchimp is truly a media-first brand. You don’t see B2B SaaS products making relatable films, being cheerful in their tone, or using vibrant colors in their design. It’s because it understands that its customers are first of all, ‘people’.

Here are some remarkable ways in which they used content to build trust:

• Consistent ‘Why’ across their content: Mailchimp is very clear on its goal to help small businesses grow across its website, social media, blog, etc. Consistency in the messaging, target audience, marketing, etc is a great way to win trust. This is especially required in the business sector where one will always consider the most reliable tool/service provider to run their business operations.

• Relatable branding: Most B2B SaaS deliberately adopt enterprise, modern or futuristic brand styles. But Mailchimp’s audience involves individual creators or small businesses whose owners might not find that relatable. Hence, Mailchimp’s attempt to humanize its branding via relatable and fun content across films, podcasts, animations, etc works.

• Active social media: As per their content style guide, Mailchimp is very active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Here’s a screenshot of my interaction with Mailchimp’s team when I mentioned about this upcoming newsletter issue! Notice the playful and fun tone.

Source: Twitter

• Bold marketing hacks: From sponsoring crime podcasts to the viral ‘Do you mean Mailchimp’ ads, this brand doesn’t shy away from trying something new with its marketing.

• Storytelling for entrepreneurs: Mailchimp has produced several free documentaries, short films, and animations that showcase the emotions, reality and journey of small business owners and entrepreneurs. It aims to celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit. For example, 73 cows, a vegan cattle rancher’s story whose conscience prevents him from continuing the business, was a Bafta-winning film. Have you seen any other SaaS creating films for their target customers?

Mailchimp’s Business Model with paid content

The best aspect about being a media-first brand is that you can sell paid content or use a paywall which becomes an additional source of revenue.

All content under Mailchimp’s blog is for free. But, The Courier Media, an entrepreneur-focused magazine acquired under the Mailchimp brand, hosts paid content that readers can purchase. This includes:

• Subscription: an annual subscription of $48

• Pay per content: purchasing individual magazine issues worth $8 each and Magbooks or eBooks varying in the range of $15-$60.

Before its acquisition, the independent magazine Courier Media earned around $5 million in annual revenues! But more than revenues, The Courier Media brings its loyal readership to the table - a key target audience for Mailchimp.

Mailchimp’s Content Funnel

For your Information:

A content marketing funnel is an arrangement under which you create targeted content in each stage of your customer’s interaction with your product that ranges from generating awareness to converting visitors and making final sales.

Mailchimp’s media publishing takes place via 4 primary sections:

• Courier Media: an acquired business magazine for entrepreneurs

• Mailchimp presents: Original content across podcasts, films, series, etc

• Marketing Library: how-to articles on starting, running, and marketing your business

• Success Stories: Case studies, testimonials, and social proofs on existing customers to learn from their experiences.

That’s quite a lot of content created across types, but the primary theme lies in educating the audience about its industry and product.

Marketing Library, Courier, and Mailchimp Presents create content for the Top of the Funnel while sharing success stories to build trust that further helps convert these. Let’s analyze each content type as per the 4 content funnel stages - Awareness, Education, Sales, and Training.

Awareness

Mailchimp’s organic search traffic is 4.6 Million with 41.8 Million backlinks. This traffic is highly skewed to the US with a 28% share, followed by the UK (8.2%) and India (6.9%).

Marketing channel distribution as per SimilarWeb data

The top 3 traffic sources are direct, search, and mail which indicates good brand recognition, SEO and email marketing practices respectively. But since Mailchimp has 13 Million users, a lot of them might be simply logging into the platform as direct traffic. Some key ways in which they use content to achieve these numbers include:

Social:

Out of all the traffic, social contributes only 2.15%. Within this pie, here’s how the distribution between the channels fares:

Social network traffic distribution as per SimilarWeb data

Facebook and YouTube contribute almost 60% of the total traffic which could be due to Facebook and Google Ads. Mailchimp leverages its huge email list and uses Facebook Custom Audiences to target its potential customers across its customer journey funnel (i.e from brand awareness to signing up for free to purchasing or upgrading to paid plans). Content created across the content funnel is itself used for this targeting.

It’s remarkable to see WhatsApp forming a significant share - if anyone knows why do let me know in the comments!

Podcasts:

Courier Media has a dedicated podcast themed around highlighting entrepreneurial journeys. While Mailchimp Presents consists of 6 podcasts that not only explore various shades of running a small business, but also beyond like the future trends, and business lifecycle. It also includes podcasts like The Jump, which is about musicians sharing one song that impacted them.

Mailchimp is also very active in podcast sponsorship. Its sponsorship with ‘Serial’ got them the iTunes tag of fastest podcast to reach 5 million streams and downloads!

Also, a blooper in this series is what inspired their Ad campaign as discussed in the next section.

Ads:

An email marketing SaaS opting for outdoor ads is quite rare. But Mailchimp went ahead with its award-winning ‘Did you mean Mailchimp’ campaign, where they showcased creatives across YouTube ads, billboards, etc with its misspelt name. This gave them word of mouth and brand recognition with 3.8 million searches!

Newsletters:

Mailchimp is big on email marketing (duh!), with 5.71% of total traffic share. They don’t have a themed newsletter as such except for a newsletter digest that includes content from their Marketing Library and Mailchimp presents. While Courier Media too has adopted a weekly newsletter digest format for sharing a mix of its magazine content.

Print:

Mailchimp is among the rare B2B companies having a Print presence thanks to the acquisition of Courier Media.

Video:

Mailchimp has produced short films, documentaries, series, and animations, some of which have won awards too. These are themed on celebrating the entrepreneurial spirit.

Event Marketing

Mailchimp sponsors as well as hosts tons of events and webinars throughout the year. These webinars and conferences are themed on both product marketing and educating about the industry.

Education

Mailchimp’s content marketing is heavy on educating its current and potential customers about building and growing a small business and product marketing-related blogs.

Here’s how it has divided its content for educating its base about industry and Mailchimp:

Mailchimp 101

This section covers best practices and tutorials on using Mailchimp’s product offerings.

Marketing Glossary

This one single segment generates 46k+ organic visits per month!

Here, Mailchimp has demystified marketing jargon by sharing definitions in a glossary format. It’s a great trick to adopt for creating content in any industry and get ranked for SEO since these keywords have good search intents.

How-to articles

The Marketing Library section includes how-to articles on building, running, and marketing a business. They have written these articles based on the following themes:

Marketing tactics: like social media, automation, email, websites, eCommerce, and CRMs

Business stage: blogs on preparing, starting, managing, operations, marketing, and scaling a business.

Courier too hosts a how-to section that covers various shades of running a business across hiring, branding, case studies on starting a business in specific niches, etc.

Case Studies by Courier:

Courier covers interesting case studies on how startups and small businesses grew from their early stages to scale.

Industry Trends by Courier:

Covers profiles of founders, deep dive into industry macro trends and future trends in the small business sector.

Snapshots by Courier:

This is a unique section in their magazine where they share photographic stills of products offered by small businesses (mostly art-related) and their owners in the action.

Sales

Mailchimp has mostly banked on product marketing when it comes to ‘sales-oriented’ content that aims to make people familiar with their product. Some key content types include:

Customer Stories

Like every major SaaS, Mailchimp also houses success stories on how their customers built and scaled their business. They have carefully chosen businesses across industries with various use cases that their product offers.

Free Marketing Tools:

Again product marketing segment, this page specifically covers their free offerings across various product features like CRM, automation, social media, etc.

Mailchimp v/s competitor pages:

A SaaS should have competitor comparison pages as they have high search intent. Mailchimp has compared its product offerings with its top competitors like HubSpot, GoDaddy, Sendinblue, Klaviyo, etc.

Newsroom

The press section features articles and content written by other publications about their brand. That’s a great way to partner with Mailchimp and get a backlink!

Training

Mailchimp has targeted service providers like agencies, freelancers, developers, and other tools as integrations to further their reach to their audiences. Here’s how it did it:

Freelancers and Agencies

Mailchimp and Co is a community dedicated to helping freelancers and agencies with tools, training, rewards, content and resources to grow and manage their clients. This includes becoming a part of the official partner directory that helps them with lead generation and co-marketing opportunities.

Developers

Mailchimp also has a dedicated community built for the developer ecosystem to work with their APIs and run customized and scalable use cases. This is specifically themed on eCommerce, campaigns, and event-based transactional emails.

Integrations

Mailchimp has 300+ integrations and dedicated landing pages for each. Integration pages are powerful, check out our Slack case study to know how to gain traffic using Integration pages.

Product Updates

Mailchimp is specific about making product updates and partnership announcements via its dedicated article section for the same. Having content around this helps gain the trust of new and existing customers on how the product is active and not dormant in innovation.

Help Centre

Mailchimp has spent considerable efforts creating tutorial videos, instructional guides, and troubleshooting articles for its users. This section is also aligned with the webinars hosted by them under event marketing. One unique aspect of their Help section is the ‘Experts Directory’ - which includes their freelancer and agency partners community that users can access for professional help.

Key Takeaways

Mailchimp is a good case study to visualize what a focused and consistent content marketing strategy looks like. The content is designed with a clear intent to help its users understand and use their product by helping them educate about their industry and use cases.

Here are some other major takeaways to keep in mind:

• Have a clear purpose of what your content marketing is trying to achieve and for whom. Mailchimp doesn’t use every trick in the playbook or target everyone. It only uses those that are relevant to its target audience.

• Focus on storytelling and create content that makes your users visualize how your product changes their lives.

• Facebook for B2B isn’t dead! Study more on how Mailchimp executes retargeting via Facebook and YouTube ads.

• Use bloopers for media attention. Their most successful and award-winning ads campaign came from the mispronunciation of their product name in a podcast!

• Podcasts are good for B2B audiences. It’s a good investment to host your branded shows as well as sponsor the ones in your niche.

• Explore merchandising! It’s not necessary to have a mascot, but one can always shape and propel a cult around your product.

• Mailchimp explored mediums like films, documentaries, or animation because their target audience lay in that segment as well, i.e creators. Hence spend on this side of content if it makes sense for your target audience.

Suggestions and Ideas for Mailchimp:

• The podcast episodes lack show notes or summaries which could hamper its SEO.

• Their YouTube channel lacks good organic views. A lot of small business owners and indie hackers use YouTube for their educational and webinar content. An improvement here can provide more organic traffic from YouTube.

• They can leverage their Integration pages better by having dedicated help tutorials for each integration (like how Slack did).

• They can organize city-themed meetups for small business owners (like LinkedIn local) that could further help increase their brand recognition among local businesses.

• Launch paid or free on-demand/cohort-based courses as these are very popular among small business owners for upskilling.

Next: How Airbnb became a media-first brand

Airbnb has successfully convinced the world to let strangers live in your house via its exceptional branding, design, and content marketing strategy.

That’s what Storytelling and Community building can help you achieve. We cover this marketplace in our next issue on how they used content for the same, so subscribe and stay tuned!

Have a company or a creator you think we should cover? Let us know in the comments! Also, if you found this case study useful or insightful, do help us grow by sharing it with your network :)

At Merrative, we can work on the strategies mentioned in this case study to manage your publication or content marketing via books, articles, thought leadership, case studies, reports, podcasts, etc.

Hire from our managed publishing talent marketplace or create your flexible editorial team filled with the top 5% of talent in your industry.

Know More

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Resources:

• MailChimp and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make It as a Start-Up

• Want to Prove Patience Pays Off? Ask the Founders of This 17-Year-Old, $525 Million Email Empire

• Crafting Mailchimp’s new design

• How Industrial Design and Weird Swag Helped MailChimp Find Success

• A yellow banana in a sea of blue

• How MailChimp cracked podcast advertising

• How Mailchimp is driving 46K+ organic visits per month with this strategy