Mailchimp Can Teach You Marketing

MailChimp can teach you a thing or two about business, branding, and marketing. Why not? It does well for itself. We could learn from it.

If you could, you’d be able to pick lessons from absolutely anything in your life. Your own experiences, from others, from the single-minded pursuit of an ant, the slyness of the snake, from the faithfulness of the dog.

A lot to learn right? But this isn’t a blog on life skills. However, we can learn a thing or two from Mailchimp — the granddaddy of email marketing service providers.

For a long time now, MailChimp has always had a great product and a long-standing offer that’s just been unbeatable. Use it free for up to 10,000 emails or 2000 subscribers. Ever since launch (which was a long time ago), they’ve made their product unbeatable with only a few other worthy competitors such as Drip, Campaign Monitor, and Convertkit. In fact, Mailchimp literally obliterated many other email service providers as it were.

In the true sense of the word, Mailchimp started from nowhere, grew up, evolved, and is now a behemoth in its own way.

As it pertains to us, it’s one of those few companies that also grew organically by using the best of what the digital media had to offer.

We got things to learn from them.

Here are some of those lessons from mailchimp that we could all use:

Branding, done right

MailChimp has everything in place to catapult it to a global brand that it is today. It has a minimalistic, straight-forward, and high-converting home page design (built like a landing page) that just works.

A memorable mascot, excellent typography, a regularly updated blog (we are talking close to 10 years of publishing), and an active social presence.

Of course, Mailchimp does beautiful emails too (how can it not?).

For MailChimp, it all comes together. Just like that.

We might not be MailChimp (we have different businesses, don’t we?). We can learn how to keep a clear focus on acquiring users, building a coherent branding strategy, blog regularly, and get to be at least as good as Mailchimp?

Confident about your business? Let the market decide

Too many of us want sales to happen. Without ever thinking about whether or not there’s demand for your product, or whether you are in anyway better than your competition. Most businesses don’t even seem to care about how customers might feel about their products.

MailChimp has always been confident about what its product could do for small businesses.

Unlike other businesses that start and then try to figure out the best way to acquire users, Mailchimp always had the “freemium” model and it actually benefited from it.

Give more than you take

The folks at Mailchimp could already had a great product when they launched — way better than others who were around then such as AWeber and Constant Contact.

They had an easy to use drag-and-drop builder for emails, the best email sequencing workflow (before the likes of Drip and Convertkit came in), and a way for you to segregate subscribers into segments and groups.

But they never stopped at being content. They launched marketing automation features followed by an ability to create Facebook Ads and retargeting ads from within the platform. Also, they now have a way for you to build landing pages too.

MailChimp just keeps building on its product. It never stops. It never rests. It wasn’t just going to sit on its ass, was it?

Won’t Flinch; won’t stop: won’t step back

If you look at the ESP industry closely, you can’t help notice this invisible — but strangely strong — vibe of a collective step back in the industry. It feels like everyone else who’s been around when Mailchimp was launched have taken a gasping step back.

The old boys seem to have stalled. They retired.

Look at Aweber: it was once a favourite; now, it barely survives and it still has a user interface that belongs to the 90s.

Constant contact is unable to breathe and Vertical Response now survives only thanks to its affiliates.

MailChimp, however, still thrives. It just won’t step back.

MailChimp didn’t even flinch when new age email marketing automation tools like Drip and Convertkit come to town.

Gotta learn. We gotta learn.