Mailchimp is a

marketing automation Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitiv ...

platform and

email marketing Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to s ...

service. "Mailchimp" is the trade name of its operator, Rocket Science Group, an American company founded in 2001 by

Ben Chestnut Ben Chestnut (born 1973/1974) is an American billionaire Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder (with Dan Kurzius) and former CEO of Mailchimp, an email marketing company. As of November 2022, his net worth was estimated at US$4.1 billion. ...

and Mark Armstrong, with

Dan Kurzius Dan Kurzius (born 1971/1972) is an American billionaire businessman, the co-founder and chief customer officer of Mailchimp. Early life Kurzius's father ran a bakery-deli in Albuquerque, New Mexico that was "eventually forced out of business by ...

joining at a later date.

History

Mailchimp was launched in 2001. The platform was named after one of their most popular e-greetings card characters, and earned a few thousand dollars a month. Mailchimp began as a paid service and added a

freemium Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium," is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical (o ...

option in 2009. Within a year, its user base had grown from 85,000 to 450,000. By June 2014, it was sending over 10 billion emails per month on behalf of its users. According to the statistics, more than 600 million emails are sent through the platform every two days. In 2016, Mailchimp was ranked No. 7 on the

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

Cloud 100 list. In February 2017, the company was named one of

Fast Company ''Fast Company'' is a monthly American business magazine published in print and online that focuses on technology, business, and design. It publishes six print issues per year. History ''Fast Company'' was launched in November 1995 by Alan Web ...

's Most Innovative Companies of 2017. In August 2017, it was reported that Mailchimp would be opening offices in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

and

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...

. In February 2019, Mailchimp acquired

LemonStand LemonStand was a Canadian e-commerce company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, that developed cloud-based computer software for online retailers. LemonStand was shut down on June 5th, 2019. History LemonStand Version 1 was launched on ...

, a smaller competitor. Mailchimp later announced its plans to shift from mail distribution to offering "a full marketing platform aimed at smaller organizations." This shift includes allowing customers to record and track customer leads within the platform, build landing pages and websites, and run ad retargeting advertisements on

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

and

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

. As part of this, Mailchimp acquired the London-based media and magazine company Courier Media, in March 2020, with the stated goal of international growth. The magazine has a readership of 100,000 readers in more than 26 countries. The Mailchimp founders started with no outside funding, no plans for an IPO, and for 20 years turned down acquisition offers. Chestnut and Armstrong became examples of a growing list of successfully bootstrapped startups. However, on August 31, 2021, ''Bloomberg'' reported that

Intuit Intuit Inc. is an American business software company that specializes in financial software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and the CEO is Sasan Goodarzi. Intuit's products include the tax preparation application Tu ...

was in talks with Mailchimp about the possible acquisition of the email marketing firm.

Acquisition by Intuit Inc.

On September 13, 2021,

confirmed it would acquire Mailchimp for a valuation of approximately $12 billion in cash and stock. On November 1, 2021,

officially completed the acquisition for $5.7 billion in cash, $6.3 billion in

common stock Common stock is a form of corporate equity ownership, a type of security. The terms voting share and ordinary share are also used frequently outside of the United States. They are known as equity shares or ordinary shares in the UK and other Com ...

, and 573,000

restricted stock Restricted stock, also known as restricted securities, is stock of a company that is not fully transferable (from the stock-issuing company to the person receiving the stock award) until certain conditions (restrictions) have been met. Upon satisfa ...

units.

Marketing campaigns

As an early

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing ...

advertiser, Mailchimp sponsored the launch of '' Serial'', a podcast exploring a murder case over multiple episodes. One ad became memorable for its inclusion of an unscripted mispronunciation of the company's name -- "MailKimp" -- as spoken by a 14-year-old girl from

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...

waiting in line for an

iPhone 6 The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are smartphones that were designed and marketed by Apple Inc. They are the eighth generation of the iPhone, succeeding the iPhone 5, iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S, and were announced on September 9, 2014, and rele ...

. The ad was parodied and "MailKimp" became a

meme A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural i ...

. In response, Mailchimp bought the domain name mailkimp.com and redirected traffic to mailchimp.com. In 2018, Mailchimp underwent a brand redesign to help visually demonstrate an evolution from an email marketing tool to a larger marketing platform. This redesign included an updated logo, color palette, typeface, new imagery, and illustrations. It updated the Mailchimp

wordmark __notoc__ A wordmark, word mark, or logotype, is usually a distinct text-only typographic treatment of the name of a company, institution, or product name used for purposes of identification and branding. Examples can be found in the graphic iden ...

to "Mailchimp" rather than "MailChimp" with an uppercase letter "C".

Transactional email

In February 2016, Mailchimp announced it was merging Mandrill transactional email service into Mailchimp as an add-on feature, and gave customers 60 days' notice to switch to the new pricing structure or find an alternative service platform. The new pricing structure required a paid Mailchimp plan before being able to purchase Mandrill credits, resulting in customers paying for two products to access Mandrill. Previously, customers were able to purchase Mandrill credits for sending emails without signing up on Mailchimp. The credits were originally priced at $9.95 for 25,000 emails but increased to $20 for the same number of emails under the new pricing scheme. In addition to needing to purchase Mandrill credits, customers now need to be on a paid Mailchimp monthly plan (the minimum monthly plan being $10 a month), even if the customer has no need for Mailchimp services and only wants access to Mandrill. Mandrill was later renamed Mailchimp Transactional.

Data breach

In March 2022, Mailchimp suffered a data breach wherein intruders gained access to the data of 319 of their customers through social engineering. The exposed data includes email address, IP address, and the approximate location of their mailing list recipients.

References