Common utilizations

Let’s get into some common utilizations in which multiple channels might be helpful. At the very end of the book in Chapter 16, we’ll dig deep into these use cases and talk more about the business models and how they connect and ladder into the Mailchimp platform. Here, we’ll take a look at who you might be as a marketer or commerce customer.

Let’s check out some quick profiles for the following:

• Digital content creators
• Brick and mortar
• Service providers
• Mensa marketers
• E-commerce marketers

Digital content creators

This is a huge umbrella – it includes traditional internet denizens such as bloggers, but is now synonymous with anyone on the internet who creates content for education, entertainment, or both. Most commonly, it’s associated with digital content creation and platforms such as Mailchimp that offer a home from which these creators can drive a lot of their content channels.

Brick and mortar

There’s little I love quite like a small, independently owned, local business. Maybe that’s a side-effect of working on products to support them for so long or growing up in a Latin community with bodegas on every corner and entrepreneurs hustling to build a new life. Mailchimp makes a great platform for businesses with physical locations or popups looking to expand brand awareness in their city or even outside of their immediate area.

Early industry estimates project that global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic may have sped up the rate at which Mom-and-Pop shops and other small stores will pivot to a digital presence. Pre-pandemic estimates predicted that the pivot would likely be within the next 5-10 years, but that gap has been narrowed to 1-5! With platforms such as Mailchimp, brick-and-mortar businesses selling goods can marry their email marketing efforts with basic e-commerce store features that empower that pivot to a digital presence.

Service providers

The service industry has been a steadily increasing portion of the commerce space for years and with that in mind, there are specific channels designed to empower this use case specifically. With appointment features, you can add to your omnichannel strategy, which likely includes things such as emails and automation as its foundation. Mailchimp can help you even if the items you’re selling or promoting are more intangible than your brick-and-mortar counterparts with physical goods.

Mensa marketers

I think of this utilization as graduating to letting the platform do as much for you as possible. This is probably the ideal state, in which you have a handle on your fundamental marketing needs and core brand identity. We can even think of this as being your own agency. In the event that you are an agency that manages client accounts, the goal is likely to make as many of your channels as accessible and on-brand as possible. In this category, you’d be leaning more into Customer Journey Builder and Classic Automations to automate outreach to your users and leveraging social ads to make sure that engagement continues outside of their inboxes wherever possible.

E-commerce marketers

This utilization is almost the opposite of brick-and-mortar utilization. These are direct-to-consumer businesses that started their company on the internet to begin with. Instead of looking to make a digital pivot, they’re likely to be thinking about how to expand their digital footprint or consolidate their marketing efforts into one platform. Mailchimp can help with integrating their e-commerce platform data with the campaign tools inside the Mailchimp platform itself to help automate outreach and better target their marketing to the purchase behavior they may see in their e-commerce business.

So, now that we know a bit more about the terms we’ll be using and the background of why we even want to consider a marketing platform such as Mailchimp, we’ve set the groundwork for jumping into the product itself.