How Mailchimp Does Marketing

In this clip, we are going to talk about how MailChimp does marketing. But before we do, if you like clips on entrepreneurship, marketing, and growth, don't forget, whatever channel you're coming from, don't forget to subscribe. So let's talk about this. MailChimp, they are an ESP or an email service provider. They've been around the block for a while and they originally started out as an agency and they grew into what they are now. I think they're doing, I think over $400, maybe even up to $500 million a year. They didn't really raise anything at all in terms of venture funding. So we're gonna kinda go down the list here in terms of how we score Mailchimp. And so what I'm gonna do right now is I'm gonna start with how they're doing general marketing, and let's take a look at things they can change. I'm gonna go down the list here. We're looking at their site, mailchimp.com. You can see that they have a call to action above the fold, which is great. Get your audience organized is their headline, and, um, you know, use tags to deliver the right messages to the right people. I think this kind of misses the mark in the beginning because your headline, 80 cents is spent on a dollar, as David Ogilvy would say, and get your audience organized. Like, what does that mean exactly? Um, I'm not sure what I'm getting. It's not just crystal clear to me. And then the tagging thing as a subtitle or a subheadline is just a little confusing to me. Uh, it can kind of throw people off. Pick a plan is in here. So that's, that's a call to action. That's interesting. You scroll down, it's like, okay, what can you, what you can do with MailChimp. Put your audience first, bring your brand to life, create integrated campaigns, turn data into insights. I think that's fine. And as we scroll down, here's a testimonial. I believe this is a small business, so I like how they're relating it to, you know, their, their types of customers because the vast majority of their Mailchimp customers are small businesses. So knowing who your target market is and then switching your marketing messages to be tailored to them goes a long way because you don't want to alienate them. If you're targeting the enterprise and then you're hitting them with small business messages, That's not going to go over well. I do like how they have the blog on the homepage because the homepage from an SEO perspective is good because you are basically sharing some of that equity from the homepage and then pushing it over to these blog posts, which does help. A lot of the people tend to forget about how strong homepage links can be. And even if it's fleeting, even though these are constantly getting dynamically updated, um, it's good that people can see it also from a content perspective too. So we scroll down here. Sure, there's some social proof. And it's not like massive companies. Again, it's like East Fork Chronicle Books, Sweat, like I have Magnolia Bakery. I haven't heard of these companies before. Um, it's easy to get started. So I do like the yellow design too. And then on the bottom they have the apps. I like looking at, for SaaS companies, I like looking at the pricing page as well. So flexible plans that grow with you. I like that part because it's like, okay, how much is this thing going to cost? Right? That's probably one of the biggest objections, especially for small businesses that are going to purchase a software. And I like how the second one is, it starts, it starts with premium and then it kind of goes down instead of going the other way. Usually people will share free on the very left and that's typically what people will click. Um, but starting with the most expensive plan first and going down and then highlighting it, uh, MailChimp recommends common CRO, uh, conversion rate optimization practice. And, um, it's typical. I mean, it'll show like, you know, what you get, what you don't get. Um, and so we scroll down. Um, let's see if there's anything else on this pricing page. And then on the very bottom it's reinforced again. And then there's another option to pay as you go. So, um, they basically will start with the annual plan. And so I think that's interesting. And, um, they have rates for nonprofits and charities. So they're kind of making sure that they serve not only the small businesses but also other people too. And 2-factor authentication security is really important. That's great. And then there's FAQs on the bottom. So the pricing page is one of the most important pages you have as a software company because That's literally when people are about to buy. I think what Mailchimp is missing, and a lot of companies tend to miss this, this is a preference for them, but I think chat is missing. I think chat is one of the biggest opportunities to get people to convert. And you can funnel people based on the responses that they're giving. So you can use a tool like Intercom for chat. And I do think Mailchimp, I mean, if they're trying to collect emails, why not have a really nice looking, well-designed exit popup? Or maybe you have an entrance popup that comes in where you're collecting more emails. And they can, they can message people that way. Ultimately, again, that's their preference. You know, I know for a fact that they actually have a lot of traffic that goes to their site. So I would say, look, in some cases you might use something like subscribers.com for push notifications to drive people back to your site. And that's something that has worked really well. Um, so from a general marketing perspective, I also like looking at, um, you know, the platform. So this is, um, this basically, you know, this section will talk about the product itself. Basically these, These GIFs are really interesting, um, in terms of, well, serving a purpose, right? It's not just, you know, it's GIFs that actually show the product in action. And, um, you know, again, the design is pretty exceptional with what they have. So from a design and general marketing perspective, um, I would rate them pretty highly. And then there's some case studies here as well. So I'm going to scroll up and then I'm going to go to the resources section and then take a look at, um, you know, take a look at content as well. So again, design is exceptional. MailChimp 101, there's announcements in here, there's blog posts, and there's success stories. They're basically putting all their content, blog, case studies, everything, you know, product announcement all in here. And then they have a marketing tips section too. So they're spending a good amount of money when it comes to not only just talking about the product, but also adding value, right? This is typical content marketing 101. And again, we take a look at this and not only are the blog posts done really well, But the blog images are done really well too. So I'm going to scroll down this screen over here. You can see there's a 5-minute read. That's good user experience telling, telling people how long it's going to go for. Again, there's custom designs for each and every blog post. We're going to continue to scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, scroll down. And when did they publish this? Well, let's scroll up over here. They published this July 27th. So I'm hoping that they actually publish more often than this because you know what I would say about content marketing is maybe you talk about your product, maybe one every, 7 times or one every, could be one every 10 times or so. Now let's take a look at this one over here. I just want to see their frequency and we can actually see that when we go to the SEO section. So what I'm going to do in terms of general marketing, because this one's not giving me a date as well, general marketing, I would say when we look at design, when we look at aesthetic, when we look at how, just how they are as a company, as a brand, I would score them an 18 out of 20. And then when it comes to looking at how they're doing things from an SEO and content perspective. We're going to open up Content Explorer over here from Ahrefs. And then basically what I'm going to do is I am going to look at the number of times that they're publishing new content. So maybe we're going to look at first published new content in the last 12 months. So now I can see how, what their content cadence is. And we can see here in just opening these up over here, September 2019, they published 13 pieces, October 31, 31. So, it looks like they're publishing something almost every single day. What I would say is they're missing the mark on republishing content. So, they're publishing a lot of new content, but when it comes to publishing content, you also should be republishing or updating, consolidating or deleting content. That's gonna help you go take your content further, right? So, I think from a content perspective, I'm seeing some stuff, if they're publishing so much, I'm not seeing it so much on the blog. Maybe it's other pages on the site, I'm not sure, but at least navigating right now from a navigation standpoint, I can't find the new content. As easily just by clicking around. So I think from a content perspective, I would probably give them a 16 out of 20. So, you know, decent 16 out of 20. Now, from an SEO perspective, if we go to Site Explorer over here and I open Mailchimp.com, guess what? Let's take a look at this. They have 282,000 domains linking to them. Okay. 282,000 domains. That's 282,000 links, basically unique links. And then they rank for 632,000 keywords, which is a lot of keywords. So their traffic value is $6.4 million, meaning if they paid Google for that traffic each and every month, it'll be worth $6.4 million. Their domain rating, if you look in that section in the orange, is 93 out of 100, which is extremely high. And if you look at the top, their top pages, the types of keywords that they rank for, well, a lot of it's MailChimp, but you can see other types of keywords, you know, that they rank for. Email marketing, for example, they rank number 4 for. You know, if we look at— if we actually use a tool like this, we should exclude specific keywords. So we should take the brand out. Okay. And let's see what we can pop up here. All right. So if we actually exclude MailChimp from the top keywords, we can see they rank for things such as email marketing, email templates, these, these bunch of different keywords, right? From a technical standpoint, we can definitely take a look at how fast their site is, right? So What I recommend here is using a tool called Pingdom. And what you would do with Pingdom is you would basically, I would type in Pingdom Speed Tools, and then you could see how fast their site really is. So if we go over here to the Pingdom tools, and then we type in mailchimp.com, and then we go from San Francisco, we hit start test, and then Pingdom will run the test. It's free to do, just don't try to run too many tests at once. But speed is a really important SEO factor too, right? I would say there's certain elements where they can make decisions on whether they want to— well, do they want to sacrifice page load time for other elements that they might have on their site? So sometimes when you add other software like analytics tracking software or any snippets of code to your site, it's going to slow down your site. And for them, I mean, their site loads at about 1.68 seconds. That is not ideal. If you're loading in maybe like 500 to 700 milliseconds or so, that's like blazing fast, right? 1.68 seconds is considered a little slow. I mean, uh, so that's something that I would want to take a look at from SEO perspective, which is why I would give them a 19 out of 20 when it comes to SEO because they're getting a lot of traffic already. They have the domain authority, they just need to make the most of it. And you know, if they can, if their content team can think about how they can be more creative with their content, almost whatever they publish around email marketing is going to rank really, really, really well. CRO, we kind of talked about already. So I think popups are missing. I think chat's missing. Push notifications are missing as well. I don't know if they're using a customer data platform or not, but you can use a tool like Ghostery to see what type of technology they're using on a site. I happen to be on an iPad right now, so it's not as easy for me to do it. So CRO, they're probably around a 16 out of 20. There's more that they can do. I can tell that they, because they lack a little chat or a little popup or even an opportunity to collect more emails, I think that part's missing because they're an email marketing software, right? I'm not telling them to spam, but I'm saying, look, you know, you're here to teach people marketing and you're collecting more emails. That's literally one of the things that you could be doing better. So from a paid media perspective, they do spend a lot on advertising. I know this for a fact because I've spoken to their team before about, you know, potentially helping them with advertising. So on the advertising side, what I look at when I use a tool like Adbeat is I look at the trends, right? So you can see it says they spent about $2.5 million in the last 180 days. That number is never that accurate, but they are spending money. They're honestly, they're probably spending more than that. A lot of the money is going toward direct buys, meaning that they go to websites, And they will buy the inventory directly. And as a matter of fact, MailChimp was potentially gonna do a deal with us to buy podcast ads on Marketing School. YouTube, they spend about $400,000 or so, which is about approaching 20% of their budget. And then they're spending a bit on Google too, but I'm sure they're actually spending a lot more here. But the key thing here is that they're spending a lot on direct buys. So keep that in mind. And they are spending, you know, here and there on other platforms too. A lot of the spend is going into the major geographies around the US. And you can see their top ads as well. So 54% of their ad spend goes towards the box, the 300 by 250, when they run display ads. And then you can see the campaigns here that have been running for a while. I'd be really keen to see, you know, the top ads that they have and which ones have, you know, on the very right side here, which ones have continually stood the test of time. So, you know, I want to sort by days seen. Okay. So there's no like clear winner here. Um, I would say, you know, you want to see an ad that's been running for quite a while that where you can clearly say like, you know, if they ran it for over a year, it's, it's their clear winner. And maybe they run so much ads that people get banner blindness so they have to refresh, um, pretty frequently. But I can say, you know, their, their advertising is, um, they find maybe they found that direct buys work the best for them and maybe the other channels not so much. Um, at least this is what I can see from Adbeat. So, And I'm going to back up a second and look at their campaign. So see all campaigns over here. So they've been running a campaign for, this one's been going for about 112 days. Um, they started it in maybe a little after March and it's been going up to now. And you can just see here the top ads that they're running, right? This is really good for competitive analysis too. But I can tell just by the, you know, all the different formats that they're using, they're using a lot of different banners. They're all well designed. Um, they're doing a lot of videos as well that they're very serious about advertising. And they're clearly spending a bit of money on advertising as well. So from a paid media standpoint, I'd rate them an 18 out of 20. They get an 87 out of 100 overall. This is how they do marketing. I think they are gigantic. I think they're doing a lot of the right things. Now it's just a matter of, hey, can you tweak a couple of things and get that score into like a 90 or 92 or so? You make a couple of those changes, you're going to collect way more emails using maybe a little simple email collection, or a little chat. I think that's one thing, you know, diversifying your paid media a little bit. Um, you know, trying different, um, you know, they've worked, they've done really well with podcast advertising. Uh, I also think, um, you know, taking advantage of the data that you have, maybe using a customer data platform, that would be helpful. And, uh, from a content perspective, um, really making use of that domain authority and, um, that's going to take you to the next level. So yeah, that's what I think. Let me know what you think I missed in the comments or whether you agree with me or not, um, on the different scores. And don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, whatever channel that you're coming from. And don't forget to check out— if you're on YouTube, don't forget to check out the next video over there. I'll see you tomorrow.