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

Case Study-4 for Media First Brand - Mailchimp

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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 is aimed at doing one thing - helping 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.¹

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.

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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.

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