Latest / Content Marketing with Fexingo: Blogs, Videos, and Long-Form Content That Converts / How Mailchimp Used Content to Build an 11 Billion Dollar Brand
Transcript
- Lucas: If you ask most marketers where Mailchimp came from, they'll say it's the email platform with the monkey logo that got bought by Intuit for twelve billion dollars last year. Luna: Right, but that's the end of the story. I think what's more interesting is how they got there without spending a dime on traditional advertising for the first decade. Lucas: Exactly. Mailchimp didn't launch with billboards or Super Bowl spots. They launched with a blog, a magazine, and eventually a documentary series. Content was their entire marketing department. Luna: And it worked. By 2021, they had fourteen million users and were generating over a billion dollars in annual revenue. So what was the actual content strategy? Lucas: The key insight from founder Ben Chestnut was that Mailchimp customers weren't just looking for an email tool. They were small business owners trying to figure out how to market themselves. So Mailchimp became the teacher. Luna: They built the expertise before they built the product reputation. Lucas: Exactly. They launched a content hub called 'Mailchimp Presents' which included short documentaries, a podcast, and a print magazine called 'Grow' — yes, a print magazine in the 2010s — that profiled small businesses and their marketing challenges. Luna: I remember 'Grow'. It was beautiful. Thick paper, great photography. It felt more like a lifestyle magazine than a corporate brochure. Lucas: That was intentional. Chestnut said they wanted to make content that people would actually want to read, not content that screamed 'buy our product.' The magazine had a circulation of about fifty thousand copies per issue, distributed at coffee shops and coworking spaces. Luna: So the audience wasn't just existing customers. They were reaching people who might never have heard of Mailchimp but would see the magazine, think 'this is useful,' and then go look up the brand. Lucas: Right. And the documentary series is where it really got interesting. They produced a show called 'The Narrative' that followed real small business owners. No Mailchimp logos in the episodes, no product placement. Just storytelling. Luna: That takes a lot of confidence from a marketing team. Usually, the CFO wants to see a direct line from spend to pipeline. Lucas: And that's why most brands don't do it. But Mailchimp measured success differently. They tracked brand lift, unprompted awareness, and share of search. Over three years, they saw a 40 percent increase in organic search traffic for terms like 'email marketing for small business.' Luna: So instead of paying for ads on those keywords, they owned the conversation through content. Lucas: Exactly. They calculated that the cost per acquisition from their content was about one-third of what it would have been with paid ads. And the customers who came through content had higher lifetime value because they already trusted the brand. Luna: That's the kind of stat that makes a CFO pay attention. But let's talk about the actual execution. How did they produce a documentary series on a marketing budget? Lucas: They partnered with independent filmmakers rather than an ad agency. They gave them creative freedom, which meant the content felt authentic. One of their early documentaries, 'The Box,' followed a family-owned moving company. It won a short film award. Luna: An award-winning documentary funded by an email marketing company. That's wild. Lucas: It is. And it worked because the content wasn't about Mailchimp. It was about the struggles and triumphs of running a small business. Mailchimp just happened to be the platform that enabled those stories. Luna: So they made themselves the hero's helper, not the hero. Lucas: Perfect framing. And that approach extended to their blog, which wasn't just 'how to send an email campaign.' They wrote about marketing psychology, design trends, even how to write a business plan. They were building a library of resources. Luna: I think a lot of companies hear this and think 'we need to start a documentary series.' But the real lesson is simpler: find the intersection between what your audience cares about and what you can credibly talk about. Lucas: If these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own work, a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. Luna: Yeah, it's that direct support that allows us to keep the show ad-free and focused on the actual strategy behind the stories. Lucas: So back to Mailchimp. One of the risks they took was launching 'Grow' magazine in print at a time when everyone was telling you to go digital. They had to cover printing, distribution, the whole supply chain. Luna: What was the justification for print? Lucas: Ben Chestnut said it was about signal. A print magazine in a coffee shop tells people you're a real company with real resources. It builds trust faster than a blog post because it feels permanent. And it had a shelf life — people would leave issues on their desks for months. Luna: So the medium itself was part of the message. A flimsy e-book wouldn't have had the same impact. Lucas: Right. And they applied that same thinking to their documentary series. They didn't just put videos on YouTube. They premiered episodes at small film festivals and hosted screening events for local business owners. Luna: That's a community-building play masquerading as a content distribution strategy. Lucas: Exactly. And it worked because those events generated word of mouth. People would tell other business owners: 'You have to watch this documentary about the bakery in Portland. It's made by Mailchimp.' Luna: So the content created its own distribution. That's the holy grail. Lucas: It is. And the numbers back it up. By 2022, Mailchimp's content channels were driving over 30 percent of their new sign-ups. That's millions of customers acquired without a single ad dollar. Luna: But here's the thing: most companies can't afford to run a documentary series and a print magazine. So what's the takeaway for a smaller business? Lucas: The principle scales down. Pick one long-form format — a podcast, a newsletter, a video series — and commit to it for at least eighteen months. Mailchimp didn't see results overnight. They were creating content for years before it became their primary growth engine. Luna: And the content has to be genuinely useful, not just promotional. That's the hard part. Lucas: Exactly. Chestnut had a rule: every piece of content should be something you'd share with a friend even if you didn't work at Mailchimp. That's a high bar, but it's the bar for content that actually builds trust. Luna: So the lesson isn't 'copy Mailchimp's budget.' It's 'copy their philosophy of generosity first, sales second.' Lucas: I think that's the right read. And the irony is that by not selling, they sold more than almost any other marketing approach could have. Luna: It's a good reminder that long-form content isn't just about SEO or lead generation. It's about building a brand people actually want to root for. Lucas: And that's a pretty good place to leave it. Next time, we'll look at a company that took the opposite approach — short-form, high-frequency content — and made that work too. Luna: Looking forward to that comparison.