MailChimp & the new umbrella
Notes on re-positioning
1 - Evolution takes time. Millions and billions of years, yes. But also many months and in-between moments. There is a Missing Link between man and fish. There will be a missing link between Marketing Platform and Email Service Provider.
2 - MailChimp revealed their greatest grand ambitions, and those ambitions involve an expansion from email marketing into all aspects of marketing. MailChimp fancies itself a small business marketing platform. And there is no reason to think that they won’t succeed with that fantasy.
3 - They’re on track to make $700 million in revenue this year. In context:
Marketo made $300 million in 2018.
4 - Their move toward an all-in-one Marketing Platform seems to point them squarely at the HubSpots and Marketos. But then there’s this:
One product that Mailchimp does not want to touch for now is a sales CRM. “No plans for CRM services,” Chestnut said. “We are focused on consumer brands. We think about small organizations, with fewer than 100 employees.”
MailChimp does not want to become a CRM.
And yet their product is now centered on Audiences, rather than Campaigns.
What’s the difference?
The difference is semantics and branding, really. You don’t want to be a sales CRM because sales CRMs are clunky, obtrusive, enabling machinations with bad reputations. Why be a CRM when you can be a tool to help small businesses thrive?
Potato, potato, it’s a CRM.
By expanding to absorb multiple marketing disciplines, they are not looking to put niche products out of business. There is still room for the ConvertKits and the Buffers of the world to solve specific problems for customers who demand robust solutions to those problems. MailChimp is aimed to solve many, many problems, well enough.
5 - The fact that they’re doing this with small businesses in mind is brilliant. They have already achieved scale with their email solution. They have gone scale hunting, not whale hunting. Now, they are poised to continue to add value to this segment by bringing all these many different marketing activities into one place. They already have this audience in the door, and this is precisely the audience who values efficiency over power. The small business owner does not need best-in-class social advertising software today; they need to save five minutes.
6 - The move makes sense from a growth perspective. If you’re into that sort of thing. There’s something to be said about the nobility of “enough growth” and the spurning of growth for growth’s sake. There’s also something to be said for ambition. And once you corner the market for ESPs — if ambition is on your mind — you need to find new markets. This shift toward Marketing Platform will do that.
7 - If you squint, you can see the influence of DTCs in MailChimp’s approach. You can see disruption. Salesforce and Marketo have a reputation for being unenjoyable. HubSpot can come across as more polished and upmarket. MailChimp seems to have inserted themselves in the perfect place to get their foot in the door of the CRM field by delivering a delightful experience to an underserved segment.
8 - They changed their umbrella. What used to be email marketing is now a Marketing Platform. The umbrella ties all these various components together — email marketing, social ads, direct mail, social media, asset management. MailChimp didn’t choose the CRM umbrella, not yet. They went with the small business marketing umbrella because it is the umbrella that makes sense for where their product is at now.
9 - Did you catch the hyperbole in the release?
Most announcements have it. MailChimp is a social media management platform — because they can do one or two social media things.
They will have “data on 4 billion individuals” — which can’t possibly be unique people unless MailChimp is huge in Africa, Asia, and with children.
10 - But you’ve sometimes got to fake it ‘til you make it. This move is less about where MailChimp is today and more about where MailChimp wants to be. These things take time. But like with any journey, you have to pick your destination before you can make directions.