Preface

I’ve always quite enjoyed writing, and writing a book synthesizing years of my experience with the Mailchimp platform felt like such an interesting opportunity to try and put together something that told a cohesive story about developing your marketing strategy. After over a decade in the technology space, and a huge chunk of that with Mailchimp, writing this has felt like such a fascinating and new challenge. I’ve moved from customer-facing roles to infrastructure roles throughout my career, but what has always kept me grounded and coming back to thinking about the strategic use of technology is the people and organizations I’ve encountered along the way.

I am a first-generation, American-born child of Cuban immigrants. Growing up, we didn’t have very much, but I watched my family hustle to support each other, and I saw first-hand the value of a community that supports one another. In a way, I think that an immigrant story, or any story of struggle, really creates this clear-sighted belief in the power of investing in your community at every opportunity, big or small. My Tia Maggie was so good at community building, raising money, and really engaging with people. While she ran a non-profit, at the center of her role was telling a story, marketing the benefits of public radio dedicated to jazz music, and compelling people to invest in the public good for the community. Growing up, our family watched and supported her as she grew that radio station from a trailer in a rural area outside of Miami to a multimillion-dollar, multi-use arts and music facility in the heart of the city of Miami.

Sometimes, in the early days of Maggie’s marketing, my cousins and I spent days leading up to fundraising drives stuffing flyers in envelopes (these were the days before affordable internet) to help her market her station. This was in the 1990s, before she had many other volunteers or employees. Even much later on, into my 20s and 30s, when the station was more successful and well known, a marketer’s job was never done. She would sometimes call me to ask about the latest in marketing technology and talk through how technology might benefit the marketing she was trying out. It’s a perfect illustration of how the means of marketing might change over time, but at the end of the day, it’s always about developing a plan to keep in touch with your audience and get them engaged with you and your business or organization. If I could tell a story a fraction as well as she did, I would count myself lucky to be that skilled.

My mother’s family really instilled in me this belief that being involved in your community, supporting people in your family, and really going out on a limb to build something new was the way to build a community. For my part, that included volunteering, but it also meant that, when I had the chance, I preferred to think of my own personal buying power as a small way to vote with my money and invest in my community. So, buying from small, local businesses is just one small way you can turn a day-to-day action, such as making a purchase, into one that also invests in your local community.

Working at Mailchimp for so long, I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with so many of our customers. Sometimes, this meant interacting with them directly at their most tired, when they’re just trying to piece together their business needs with the best action to take in the app, or chatting directly with entrepreneurs and business owners who shared their precious time with our company to help provide us with context for their daily needs. I’ve heard first-hand from entrepreneurs how excited they were by their first-ever purchases, how pleased they are with the first person who buys a new product from them, and how flattered they are when people share some kind feedback to their newsletters. How could I not become fond of such earnest moments and want to invest in those small businesses, both professionally and personally, when I buy from them?

So, this guide is written with some hope that I can help make the road to successfully marketing and expanding small and mid-size businesses and organizations a little smoother. Whether you’re new to the Mailchimp platform or you’ve been leveraging it for a while, and you’re not quite sure how to leverage as much of it as possible to actually serve your business, this book has something for you. Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform that specializes in email and automations. The content of this book is based on years of watching businesses grow, seeing how businesses operate, and seeing how their audiences respond to their efforts. It’s a strategy that’s based on years of feedback and the development of new needs in the market, as the demand for more digital channels expanded for businesses. The book starts from the most common channels progresses to more advanced channels as you go along, ensuring that if you need to hit the ground running, you can focus on the most valuable channels for you and get back to building your brand and community.