MailChimp
Delivering Seamless E-mail Integration and Automation Capabilities

More than eight million people and businesses around the world use MailChimp to design, send, and track email newsletters. The company is experiencing a rapid growth in their user base because of robust features like segmentation tools, marketing automation workflows and A/B testing. MailChimp’s open API gives customers the power to build deep integrations with other major web services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Salesforce, Shopify, and more.

“We are in a unique position of being able to balance an intuitive interface that is accessible for users of almost any skill level, combined with a deep and powerful set of features that can support businesses sending millions of emails a month,” says Mark DiCristina, MailChimp’s Director of Marketing. “We’ve taken the kind of enterprise-level features you’d expect to be costly and cumbersome, and democratized them for today’s email marketer.”

Headquartered in Atlanta, MailChimp was founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius, who continue to lead the company. Along the way, MailChimp has empowered customers to grow their businesses by giving them tools to easily communicate with and learn more about their audiences. The company has grown to a family of products including TinyLetter, a personal newsletter service, and Mandrill, an API for sending data-driven transactional emails, including targeted e-commerce and personalized one-to-one messages.

MailChimp’s data science and research teams analyze how businesses use features, what makes users successful, and countless customer feedback responses. “Our support and client relations teams also work closely, providing feedback directly to the product team based on what they see during customer conversations,” says DiCristina.

Two of the email marketing industry’s major challenges are finding ways to use automation and integrating data from third-party services to offer personalized communication for customers. “Our newly built API is more efficient and flexible,” says DiCristina. “This makes it easier for our product team and development partners to create integrations that help our customers target and personalize content using data from other web services.”

The company has worked hard to make its automation more powerful for its customers, while continuing to make the tools as intuitive as possible.

MailChimp is a do-it-yourself service, so they don’t have account reps working directly with customers. But the company uses their blog to regularly highlight how customers are using MailChimp to grow their businesses and communicate with their subscribers. One recent example: eco-lifestyle blog Little Green Dot used MailChimp’s automation features to create an email course called “How to Be a Morning Person.”

We’ve taken enterprise-level features you’d expect to be costly and cumbersome and democratized them for today’s email marketer

The idea was simple: Readers would sign up for the course, and receive one email per day for 28 days, each including advice from a variety of experts on night time and morning routines, healthy eating, exercise, and more. Little Green Dot’s original goal was to connect with existing readers and reach 1,000 new subscribers. But thanks to some well-timed publicity, the first session of the course was delivered to more than 26,000 readers. And the second session went to 10,000 more. They hit their goal of 1,000 new subscribers within the first week. “I find that a lot of people are a bit reserved when it comes to leaving comments on the website or on Facebook, but I get a lot of incredible emails from readers,” points out Little Green Dot co-founder Militza Maury.

MailChimp regularly releases updates and new features, and DiCristina says the company will continue to improve their marketing automation, reporting, and testing features. “We’ll focus on how to make it easier for our customers to communicate and learn from their audience,” he says.