Mailchimp, like many startups, started its life as a side hustle for its founders Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius. Ben and Dan operated a web design agency called Rocket Science Group and repeatedly noted that their smaller and mid-sized clients in particular mentioned their need for email marketing services. So, over time, on the side, they built the first Mailchimp email marketing service for small businesses.

Both Ben and Dan had parents who ran and operated their own small businesses throughout their childhoods and so they saw first-hand how difficult it could be for entrepreneurs to compete with better-equipped or larger competitors. This drove them to what ultimately became the mission of Mailchimp – to empower the underdog. In 2007, Rocket Science Group ultimately ended its agency work and turned all its efforts to developing Mailchimp into something specifically designed to provide small and medium-sized businesses with an email marketing tool as their initial entry point into marketing and staying in touch with their audiences.

Over the next decade, the needs of marketers steadily increased and became more complex. As the market pivoted more heavily toward diverse types of digital marketing, this drove Mailchimp to add more channels to be able to continue to equip the businesses that grew with them with what they needed to stay competitive. Of course, not only was this a benefit to long-time Mailchimp customers but it also ensured over time that Mailchimp stayed an ideal platform for new folks to start and grow with.

Over 20 years, this specific focus on small and medium-sized businesses and the commitment to the success of its users really propelled Mailchimp from being a bootstrapped, quirky, obscure, small email marketing platform into being a globally recognizable brand that does so much more. It kept much of what made it quirky and scrappy but certainly made its way to the front of the pack. This brings us to the current-day Mailchimp marketing platform.

Now that we have had a look at Mailchimp’s journey, let’s walk through a quick overview of the online marketing universe and then define some general terms and specific terms used in Mailchimp.

Online marketing specifically refers to platforms that empower you as the end user to use multiple, digital channels to reach an audience. Most commonly, since the 21st century, the drivers that foster the prevalence of online marketing instead of other traditional marketing channels are the internet, big data, and smartphones. Additionally, if we consider that market trends overwhelmingly point to each new generation leveraging more digital screens than the one before it, we can see that creating a holistic, data-informed marketing strategy becomes more and more critical.

Trend predictions from industry leaders such as Forbes, for example, point specifically to the need to think about your marketing strategy as omnichannel or multi-channel instead of as completely distinct efforts from one another. Businesses should consider all-in-one platforms as the predicted trend in terms of leveraging data about their contacts to build an overall journey. This empowers them to guide their audiences through all of their marketing content instead of maintaining them nested to specific channels.

As you begin your journey into considering different platforms, the key pieces of information to think about as you assess various marketing platforms is to think about categorizing their available channels into one of three buckets for you and your needs:

• Non-negotiable: These are the channels that are either already critical to your marketing or are biggies, such as emails
• Known growth: These are the channels that you know would be helpful but that you haven’t attempted to work into your marketing efforts
• Curious: These are the channels you’re either unfamiliar with, or you haven’t previously considered how they would fit into a marketing effort for your needs

In Figure 1.1, we can see these hierarchies illustrated as a hierarchy from bottom to top; highest priority to lowest:

Figure 1.1 – Hierarchy of marketing channel needs

The reason I think of these needs as a hierarchy or categorization when considering platforms is that if you are starting with growth in mind, thinking of at least the two first categories when choosing a platform means that you have a longer runway for the growth of your marketing efforts. This is, of course, where multi-channel marketing platforms such as Mailchimp, instead of single-channel marketing applications, come to the forefront of your mind.

In the context of what we’ll be discussing, we’ll be thinking very specifically about Mailchimp-specific terms and then the most common digital marketing channels, which we’ll define a bit more in the following section.

Mailchimp is most popular for (and built its business on the basis of) its email marketing features. However, the reality in the platform today is that you can manage more of your business and content creation within various channels all from one place, instead of needing different applications for each channel beyond the email channel. Today, it would be most accurate to refer to Mailchimp as a marketing and commerce platform.

Digging in, let’s get specific with how we will be using some general marketing terms to refer to something more targeted within the platform itself before we get into the features themselves.

Channels

Speaking more generically, a channel is defined as the people, organizations, and activities that make goods and services available for use by consumers. When using it, people may be referring to a myriad of formats, such as direct sales, outbound calling, conference and industry events, and, of course, bulk or targeted emails.

Within Mailchimp’s platform and knowledge base, a channel has a narrower definition – here, we’re specifically referring to the mechanisms available to you within the application using which you plan to connect your business or content to your contacts. This is a narrowed definition to largely digital means of design and communication with your target audience.

Campaigns

When we say campaigns in a marketing context, we are usually referring to a set of strategic efforts and outreach to promote something or put certain content in front of your audience by leveraging various means. These are typically coordinated but different types of media, such as print, radio, and online platforms.

Within the context of Mailchimp, we are specifically referring to email marketing campaigns when we use the word campaigns. Even if we talk about classic automation and customer journey builders later on in the book, when we begin to turn our eyes to automating contact with our subscribers, these are collections of campaigns that rely on events occurring between them. More on this later though in Chapter 12.

Additional terms will be defined within the relevant chapters, but channels and campaigns are persistent terms that we will use throughout the book using their narrower scopes defined here.

So, keeping those key terms in mind and the relative hierarchy for how we should be considering these various channels inside the Mailchimp platform, next, let’s take a look at some of the common reasons people come to Mailchimp. This will include a very high-level definition of some of the most popular channels such as Classic Automations, in addition to common reasons people generally use Mailchimp. So, let’s take a quick, high-level view of these automated channels.

Classic Automations

Throughout the application, there are several features that, at least conceptually, seem to be a product that will automate something for you. You’ll see as we go from feature to feature within the product that some of these things really will automate more for you than others. In the context of the platform itself though, you will see references to Classic Automations. These are sequences of emails that the Mailchimp application will generate for you with event-related logic in between. The terminology here refers to linear, prebuilt automation. What I mean by linear specifically is that these automation styles rely on single emails with single events between them. They will not fork or diverge to alternating emails. For example, the automation sequence might look something like this:

• Event 1: New subscriber joins Audience A
• Email 1: 1 hour after subscription, the application sends Email 1
• Event 2: Subscriber opens Email 1
• Email 2: 1 day after Email 1 is opened, the application sends Email 2

As we can see here, there are no forks or deviations from a single thread of logic.

Customer Journey Builder

This is also an automation-based feature. The main difference between Classic Automations and Customer Journey Builder is that Customer Journey Builder does enable you to apply forks to events. You may have heard the term customer journey elsewhere specifically in the context of product management and development. You can think of it as a feature within Mailchimp that empowers you to create more advanced marketing pathways for your audience to move through. When we refer to a customer journey map specifically in Chapter 12, we will talk about the visual that the application makes for you as you develop your event and email maps that relate to how your audience members move through the content that you’ve pre-made.

Let’s get into some common utilizations in which multiple channels might be helpful. At the very end of the book in Chapter 16, we’ll dig deep into these use cases and talk more about the business models and how they connect and ladder into the Mailchimp platform. Here, we’ll take a look at who you might be as a marketer or commerce customer.

Let’s check out some quick profiles for the following:

• Digital content creators
• Brick and mortar
• Service providers
• Mensa marketers
• E-commerce marketers

Digital content creators

This is a huge umbrella – it includes traditional internet denizens such as bloggers, but is now synonymous with anyone on the internet who creates content for education, entertainment, or both. Most commonly, it’s associated with digital content creation and platforms such as Mailchimp that offer a home from which these creators can drive a lot of their content channels.

Brick and mortar

There’s little I love quite like a small, independently owned, local business. Maybe that’s a side-effect of working on products to support them for so long or growing up in a Latin community with bodegas on every corner and entrepreneurs hustling to build a new life. Mailchimp makes a great platform for businesses with physical locations or popups looking to expand brand awareness in their city or even outside of their immediate area.

Early industry estimates project that global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic may have sped up the rate at which Mom-and-Pop shops and other small stores will pivot to a digital presence. Pre-pandemic estimates predicted that the pivot would likely be within the next 5-10 years, but that gap has been narrowed to 1-5! With platforms such as Mailchimp, brick-and-mortar businesses selling goods can marry their email marketing efforts with basic e-commerce store features that empower that pivot to a digital presence.

Service providers

The service industry has been a steadily increasing portion of the commerce space for years and with that in mind, there are specific channels designed to empower this use case specifically. With appointment features, you can add to your omnichannel strategy, which likely includes things such as emails and automation as its foundation. Mailchimp can help you even if the items you’re selling or promoting are more intangible than your brick-and-mortar counterparts with physical goods.

Mensa marketers

I think of this utilization as graduating to letting the platform do as much for you as possible. This is probably the ideal state, in which you have a handle on your fundamental marketing needs and core brand identity. We can even think of this as being your own agency. In the event that you are an agency that manages client accounts, the goal is likely to make as many of your channels as accessible and on-brand as possible. In this category, you’d be leaning more into Customer Journey Builder and Classic Automations to automate outreach to your users and leveraging social ads to make sure that engagement continues outside of their inboxes wherever possible.

E-commerce marketers

This utilization is almost the opposite of brick-and-mortar utilization. These are direct-to-consumer businesses that started their company on the internet to begin with. Instead of looking to make a digital pivot, they’re likely to be thinking about how to expand their digital footprint or consolidate their marketing efforts into one platform. Mailchimp can help with integrating their e-commerce platform data with the campaign tools inside the Mailchimp platform itself to help automate outreach and better target their marketing to the purchase behavior they may see in their e-commerce business.

So, now that we know a bit more about the terms we’ll be using and the background of why we even want to consider a marketing platform such as Mailchimp, we’ve set the groundwork for jumping into the product itself.

We’ll work quickly through this section, since presumably if you’re interested in optimizing or making ideal use of Mailchimp for your marketing, you likely already have an account.

Important note

A couple of things to note: by default, when you create a Mailchimp account, the default pricing plan selected is the free account. That being said, because the book will cover features from the basic email campaign features all the way through to reviewing integrations, commerce, and automation, the feature sets we’ll be covering span various plans. However, even starting with a free account, we’ll be able to cover quite a bit of ground.

To start with, you won’t necessarily need a wealth of information just to create the account, as it can be edited in the account settings later. Indeed, if your Mailchimp account is going to be the centralized home for multiple businesses or audiences, you might not need or want to name your account after a single business anyway.

The main piece of information you will need to establish an account will be a personal email address for the account to be associated with (this can be at a private domain or with a popular email service provider such as Gmail, for example).

From there, you would take the following steps to create an account:

1. Choose a username and password for your account (your username can match your email address if you would prefer not to make the username distinct).
2. Choose your starting plan (this is where you can compare plans if you would like to start with something other than the free account).
3. Finally, input your first name, last name, business name, and, optionally, your website URL for your business if you already have one. Figure 1.2 shows the Account Set Up page with the details filled in:

Figure 1.2 – Account Set Up page

As you move through the account creation pages, you will eventually arrive at your new account dashboard. Here, we conceptually see the three primary tasks that any new marketer should be thinking about as their starting point. In Figure 1.3, we can see the new account dashboard for a sample account, and the three sections identified there:

Figure 1.3 – New account app dashboard

The Mailchimp platform points out these three main calls to action to consider as you begin because you can think of them as the foundation of how you will start building your marketing effort. These three sections are as follows:

1. Create your first campaign: In this section, you will have the option to choose the type of campaign or channel you would like to start with. For example, as we can see in Figure 1.3, you were prompted to begin thinking about whether you would like to start with an email campaign, automation, or a website as the starting point for how you are going to interact with the audience. We will talk more at length on each topic in Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 respectively later on.
2. Add your contacts: Here, you will be focusing on importing your subscribers, cleaning up your existing list, or if you’re early in your marketing journey, how to set yourself up to capture an audience.
3. Launch: Then, of course, the final initiating step is launching your new channel or campaign, whichever you choose as the right one to start your journey with!

Now, as you may have noticed if you’ve been a heavy user of web-based applications in the last decade, account creation and different user interfaces change a little bit over time. This is generally rooted in experimenting with small ways to help you get more use out of an application. These types of experiments are to help you understand what you’re most interested in over time and how the application can help you find a feature most relevant to you.

While I’ve highlighted the most critical pieces of information to provide if you’re in a hurry and trying to speed through the rest of the account creation process, depending on when you’re reading this, it might be advisable to check out the additional, optional questions posed by the Mailchimp application as you create your account.

As Mailchimp adds more features in the future, signing up will change incrementally with more prompts being created in the app or even sometimes adjustments to what you see in the main calls to action I have referenced here.

So, we only just kicked off on our journey together, but we’ve covered a lot of ground already. Much like the journey Mailchimp as a company went on throughout its evolution, we’ll be following in those same footsteps. If we keep in mind the hierarchy of needs outlined in Figure 1.1, we’ll be starting with an exploration of audiences and the email campaigns that cater to them – every marketer’s bread and butter.

Our modern lives revolve around our screens and particularly our inboxes so much that email has become almost everyone’s first non-negotiable channel. Throughout the book, we’ll spider out our strategy based on the use cases for additional channels.

So, in the next chapter, we’ll start where everyone starts – audiences!

Each chapter moving forward will have this section listed at the end to help provide you with some additional resources in case you’re interested in further reading on the topics covered in the chapter. In this case, you’ll find links to the definitions I referenced and articles discussing the broader digital marketing world:

• The Evolution and History Of Digital Marketing:

https://online.uwa.edu/news/history-of-digital-marketing/

• Forbes overview of the future landscape of digital marketing:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/03/28/what-is-the-future-of-digital-marketing/

• Glossary definition of a marketing channel:

https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/glossary/marketing-channel