How Mailchimp is moving beyond email marketing

Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, check us out on Spotify and hear us on Stitcher. This is our RSS feed. Tell a friend! Mailchimp is known for its email marketing, but the 21-year-old brand has recently been showing up in a host of unexpected places as it strives to drive awareness to its offerings. The company, which was acquired by Intuit last year for $12 billion, invested in a Super Bowl spot early this year and last month debuted a new campaign that included an appearance at New York Fashion Week. “Mailchimp has always been all about these creative industries, and fashion designers are a great group of people, so showing up in a creative place in a cultural space, that’s always been a sweet spot,” said Mark DiCristina, VP of brand experience, speaking on the latest episode of the Marketer’s Brief podcast. “We felt right at home.” Mailchimp’s Fashion Week push included a partnership with the Black in Fashion Council that created a showroom for five emerging Black designers to exhibit a special capsule collection. That line sold out, DiCristina said, adding that Mailchimp plans to return to the event next year. The Fashion Week appearance is part of a large global brand campaign that Mailchimp unveiled earlier in September. Called “Guess Less, Sell More," the push was the first sizable campaign created by the brand’s in-house creative studio Wink. “Marketers, even advanced marketers, really struggle sometimes with knowing what to do next or whether this thing or that thing is going to be the right direction to go in terms of finding a greater audience,” said DiCristina. “The campaign is all about helping remove some of that guesswork.” On the podcast, DiCristina also discusses Mailchimp’s sponsorship of the “Serial” podcast back in 2014. The series covered the true crime case of Adnan Syed, who was released earlier this week from prison, where he had been serving a life sentence. Following Syed's release, Mailchimp reached out to the New York Times, which now owns “Serial,” and arranged to run its original 2014 Mailchimp ad, tweaked with a customer update, alongside yesterday's “Serial” episode. “Mailchimp is not typically showing up in the true crime genre, but it happened to work really well for us at the moment,” said DiCristina about the 2014 sponsorship. “We always like being in places that are culturally resonant, and we like to be in places that are rich creatively and that original podcast certainly fit the bill.” Ad Age Next: CMO Get your tickets for the Dec. 7 event in New York Register here

How Mailchimp is moving beyond email marketing

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