MailChimp: The Story of an Email Marketing Leader

he Story of MailChimp: How a Fun Brand Revolutionized Email Marketing

The entire history of the company MailChimp has a somewhat playful air. It's not that the product offered under this brand is of dubious quality - on the contrary, over its more than 15 years of existence, this online email service has repeatedly proven its effectiveness. The focus is more on the founders, Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius, their attitude towards their brainchild, and their rather unconventional marketing strategy.

Even the project's start was rather light-hearted! Way back in 2001, Dan and Ben were web designers, and they created MailChimp simply to help their not-so-numerous clients. They say that someone they knew once asked them how to quickly and conveniently send many email messages, and an old code was pulled out of dusty archives. After tweaking it a bit, the friends handed the program over to a friend with a clear conscience and even forgot about it for a while.

Rebirth of MailChimp

owever, in 2007, the friends decided to revisit their creation. It's not entirely clear what prompted them to do so - some say it was altruism and a desire to help small businesses (as achieving this goal in the web design field would have been problematic).

At the time, the situation was briefly as follows - statistics showed that about 95% of all email messages were spam, which understandably annoyed users. So, email marketing was also a dubious platform for small business growth. However, the guys knew what they were doing.

The "Three Pillars" of MailChimp

• A cartoonish, likable brand.
• Freemium model.
• Customer service.

Summing it up, these "three pillars" can be boiled down to one thesis - closeness to their customers. But how did they achieve this? Let's look at it in order.

Brand Concept

s noted earlier, the MailChimp brand has a significant touch of whimsy, even frivolity. Just look at their advertising character - the adorable chimpanzee Freddie in a postman's cap with the letter "M"! Complementing him is the MailChimp logo, seemingly handwritten in a school notebook. Additionally, the service "didn't hesitate" to offer its clients fun slogans when composing emails, as well as funny images and even GIF cards (at that time, this was indeed innovative). In short, MailChimp managed to turn mundane email campaigns into exciting mini-adventures, a whole game. This approach lacked the cold robotic feel, which inherently built trust with customers.

Freemium Model

owever, the product was not widely known, which was a problem. In 2009, the guys found a surprisingly simple solution - transitioning to the so-called "Freemium" strategy (from the words "free" and "premium"). This meant that from then on, every customer got completely free access to the service, forever. No trial periods, no pushy offers to upgrade to an enhanced paid version with much better features - just forever free!

Although a paid version does exist, it's only necessary for clients with very large email volumes. In any case, no one will push you to upgrade until you're fully convinced of all the advantages MailChimp offers.

What's the secret behind this strategy? It's very simple - the same little monkey Freddie! Its cute image now appeared in the footer of every email sent through MailChimp. Consequently, millions of people could click on it and visit MailChimp.com, helping the app go viral. This allowed the developers to expand their customer base fivefold in just one year. Profit also increased - and it's no wonder, as the company was gaining 4,000 paid subscribers per day (out of 30,000 free ones).

Customer Satisfaction

However, attracting a customer is one thing; keeping them is another. MailChimp excelled at that too. The company sent its subscribers cute t-shirts, toys, and even hats for their pets - all adorned in the signature style featuring the image of the monkey Freddie. These gifts may look quirky, but that doesn't make them any less enjoyable. Moreover, they are all made with high quality, and their cost is not as important to the company as customer satisfaction. Hence, they allowed MailChimp subscribers to feel special, as no one else had done anything similar before!

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