“Marketing is not just art, and science is not necessarily the enemy of marketing,” Fay Kallel, VP of product and design at Intuit Mailchimp, told Mediaweek after taking to the stage at the recent FWD: Sydney conference.
“Marketing is art and science; it’s the science of AI and data and multiple channel strategies with the art of how you engage with your audience.”
At the conference, Mailchimp unveiled a range of exciting new additions to the platform for marketers that balance both elements, including SMS marketing, pop-up forms, tech integrations, and AI built into the platform to be invisible.
SMS and pop-up forms
Last year, Mailchimp launched SMS Marketing as an outreach channel. Kallel explained that the combined power of email and SMS resulted in a 97% uplift in click-through rate for its customers.
She told Mediaweek that pop-up forms have helped their customers reach existing audiences. “With pop-ups and the variety of templates we’ve produced, leveraging those and putting them on your website allows you to increase your lists, grow your lists and convert new leads.
“So, we capture conversions that reach customers with new deals and opportunities. That becomes an interesting new paradigm in expansion for marketers so it’s not just managing existing lists, it’s also growing your lists.
“We have seen customers grow their lists by 260%, leveraging some of these early forms capabilities. It’s yet another channel that truly helps you own but also grows your audiences.”
Kallel noted that feedback from customers on what it has done to their marketing strategy has been positive, with many noting the seamless and effortlessness of the editor.
“There has been a lot of initial growth to their lists which then helped them activate even more email and SMS campaigns. They’re seeing the holistic nature of all of these channels come together to help them grow and manage their audiences.
Kallel: ‘With pop-ups and the variety of templates we’ve produced, leveraging those and putting them on your website allows you to increase your lists, grow your lists and convert new leads.’
Canva partnership
Mailchimp was proud to highlight its enhanced integration with Canva to enrich how its customers can reach their audiences at scale through personalisation and targeted messages. The partnership affords its customers millions of media assets from Canva to Mailchimp.
Kallel said customers can leverage the media assets in templates and create deeply immersive campaigns. “We just took a step over the last six months to enhance it and make it first class for all of our customers.”
Keeping AI invisible in design
In the stage presentation, Kalell noted that Mailchimp does not see AI as an add-on but rather as a built-in and incorporates it to be invisible in the design across the entire experience so people can “work faster, smarter, and be more creative.”
Mailchimp’s Done-For-You experiences help the customer take advantage of recommended campaigns, optimised automation, and advanced insights about audiences.
“Over the last few months, we’ve delivered six billion emails that are campaigns recommended by AI for our customers, and the great impact of those campaigns is they delivered over 53% lift in engagement and 28% lift in iterated revenue.”
Kalell said: “The buzz around AI introduces a lot of questioning how much of the marketing workflow or how the marketing job is going to be reinvented with AI. We have a strong conviction that AI empowers marketers in the way it’s embedded in the experience.
“For example, if you are a marketer you come into Mailchimp you look at all of your campaign pages to discern the performance of various campaigns, and in that view, we insert recommended campaigns based on what we have learned of your campaign performance. Maybe there are optimisations that we have come up with, that’s one way of it being pervasive but not disruptive to the marketing thinking and creative workflow.
Kalell also shared another example currently in early prototype and available soon to all customers is creating different segments of customers to target with a campaign.
“What we would do is we would automatically create those five versions allow you to review, edit and send, which accelerates your ability to build that economy of scale from one campaign to as many as you need.”
“Those are the ways where it’s invisible in the sense that it does a lot of this Done-For-You work behind the scenes and presents you with drafts to review and approve and we’re seeing, a lot of engagement and revenue attributed lift that customers enjoyed.”
Kalell: ‘The buzz around AI introduces a lot of questioning how much of the marketing workflow or how the marketing job is going to be reinvented with AI. We have a strong conviction that AI empowers marketers in the way it’s embedded in the experience.’
What’s next for Mailchimp
Kallel said that there will continue to be more opportunities to bring predictive AI and drafted-for-you types of concepts throughout the experience.
“We’re looking diligently at the entire workflow the journeys, audience management, reporting, and insights that we want to expose to customers and take a look at how we can turbocharge that workflow.”
Looking at what is ahead for Mailchimp in the Australian market, Kallel noted that personalisation is asked about a lot. “That gives me assurance and validation that our thinking around getting more data, building more predictive, generative capabilities and AI within the platform really will help empower our customers with more personalisation tools.”