Mailchimp Continues To Evolve From Just Email Marketing Services

Mailchimp is making strides to evolve.

For years, they have rightfully been labeled as the “email company,” with competitors like Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, and Constant Contact.

However, they’ve been busy the last six months, testing the waters of expanding their marketing offerings.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, though. It’s a bit of a challenge considering the word “Mail” is in their name, but the brand certainly isn’t letting that stop them and other companies should take notice.

It All Started With Their Brand

In September 2018, Mailchimp revealed a wholesale change to their brand.

They updated their logo, wordmark, typeface, colors, and all brand photography and illustrations. They even took the capital C out of “MailChimp.”

Gene Lee, VP of Design at Mailchimp reflected:

“As our customers’ needs have evolved, our business and products have evolved right along with them. We built our new brand identity and the overall customer experience to scale and change in step.”

This all lead to the last few months:

Mailchimp Postcards...In the Mail?

Right about the same time as their new brand reveal, Mailchimp started offering a new feature that allows users to send printed postcards to their customers.

These postcards can be created with the same email-style automation as Mailchimp’s email marketing and users can target prospective “lookalike” audiences who are in Mailchimp’s files and similar to their existing customer base -- but with the postcards’ direct mail delivery, they took many by surprise.

The service has earned its audience, however.

Since their launch, customers have sent over 100,000 pieces of Mailchimp snail-mail.

Landing Pages with a Twist

In addition to direct mail, in November 2018, Mailchimp teamed up with Square to give its users the ability to create landing pages with built-in eCommerce features.

Mailchimp has offered landing pages for awhile, but not with the ability to build a full shopping flow with built-in payments right into the pages.

In this tool, you can also track visitors, clicks, conversions, and revenue, as well as track what content is working best for different audience segments.

Facebook Ads

While the last few months for Mailchimp have been a fast and furious evolution, let’s not forget that they started the year with a big announcement for their Facebook Ads services.

You can now use Mailchimp data to create, buy, and track the results of your Facebook campaigns directly within the platform.

This is yet another surprising move by the company, but further proof that they’re taking their goal of helping customers advance their marketing seriously.

What’s Next?

Brands should always be evolving. 

While all this evolution may seem confusing for “an email company,” it’s no joke that Mailchimp is on its way to becoming something more.

As marketers, this is an exciting opportunity to explore a new tool if your current provider isn’t a good match for you. With a new variety of tools, Mailchimp is clearly moving further into the territory of larger marketing technology companies like HubSpot, Marketo, or even Drift.

As an entrepreneur, this is a lesson that no matter what your brand or name, you can successfully pivot.

“Mailchimp now claims more than 20 million customers, up from 16 million a year ago, and almost 1,000 employees, up from 700 in 2017.”

Every step in the growth is one step closer to being a comprehensive solution for small businesses and being a competitor in a larger market. I can’t wait to see what they do next.