They didn’t begin by wondering, “How do we build something monkey cartoon that countless companies may use for sending billions of emails every day?”
Alternatively, when co-founders Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius launched MailChimp in 2001, they were merely trying to help their customers significantly.
During the time, the couple was working a web-style business. When some of these customers began requesting a way to deliver emails, Chestnut made up some old signal he wrote for a youthful project (an unsuccessful digital greeting card product). That signal became the jumping-off place for the MailChimp email marketing service.
For decades, the support stayed a side project. However, in 2007, Chestnut and Kurzius decided to shut down their web-style operation and go all-in on MailChimp.
Why?
Since launching MailChimp, the couple has seen that web style was not their passion. As the New York Instances noted, “What Mr. Chestnut and Mr. Kurzius were excited about was helping little companies grow.”
Mail marketing was not necessarily the best sport to be stepping into for helping little companies grow … at least maybe not in 2007.
For starters, spam was achieving unprecedented heights, and individuals were getting significantly annoyed. (One study found that 95% of emails sent in 2007 were spam emails.)
But possibly even more discouragingly, better-funded companies (e.g., Regular Contact, which elevated $107 million in their IPO in March 2007) already owned the email marketing landscape.
However, Chestnut and Kurzius found email as a cost-effective marketing station — perfect for cash-strapped little companies wanting to achieve their goal audiences.
What’s more, the MailChimp co-founders had a key system to take out the competition.
“An Area to Its Customers”
Chestnut informed the New York Instances that monkey cartoon accomplishment stalks from the fact that it had “a vicinity to their customers that their opponents lacked.”
And he elaborated that since MailChimp “was itself your small business, it recognized what these companies wanted out of these marketing tools. Its choices were cheaper, it included functions more quickly, and it permitted higher customizations to fit customers’ needs.”
In other words, monkey cartoon won by getting sooner to their customers compared to the competition.
And as you hear us constantly claim here at Move, “Whoever gets nearest to the consumer wins.”
Thumb forward to nowadays, and it’s apparent that MailChimp’s customer-driven strategy has paid off in a big way: They will have more than 14 million users significantly and expect $400 million+ in revenue for 2016.
But now, just, was MailChimp ready to have sooner to their customers than their opponents?
At Move, we have discovered three key places wherever MailChimp was able to obtain an advantage.
A lovable brand. MailChimp stood out for being unique and fun in an environment of stark, dull, corporate options.
Freemium. The main element to marketing MailChimp was to let persons utilize it — for free — to see for themselves how amazing it was.
Customer delight. MailChimp reminded their customers that they had created a good choice by regularly locating unique ways to shock and pleasure them.
A Loving Company
There’s a number denying that monkey cartoon has one of the most unique and cute mascots in the commercial: Freddie (full name: Frederick von Chimpenheimer IV).
But as MailChimp marketing director Mark DiChristina after said, “having a pet isn’t an alternative for having an advertising strategy.”
Finally, the critical reason why Freddie operates for MailChimp as a piece of their manufacturer identity is basically that Freddie is an honest representation of the MailChimp brand.
As DiChristina explained, their cartoonish pet “shows some ideas that the whole business stands behind: making work fun, imagination, and independence.”
And MailChimp’s wordmark monkey cartoon having its hand-written, schoolhouse look — echoes these ideas as well.
