When it started in Atlanta in 2001, email marketing tool Mailchimp set out to help small businesses with the technology they needed to grow. Today, it’s an all-in-one integrated marketing company thanks in large part to the acquisition of AI platform Inspector 6 in July 2020. The startup’s technology and expertise played a key role in the development of Content Optimize, Mailchimp’s latest tool that uses machine learning to boost content performance.

In 2001, Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius opened a web design agency called Rocket Science Group, which soon worked with large companies. At the same time, they developed an email marketing service for small businesses, an alternative to the overly large and expensive email software of the early 2000s.

Mailchimp was born and gave small business owners, lacking the advanced tools and resources comparable to their wealthier competitors, access to a technology that could empower them and help them grow. Mailchimp has continued to grow, it acquired Inspector 6, and Inspector 6’s founder, John Wolf, is now the Smart Content product manager at its acquirer. He started with the idea that while it’s easy to measure the performance of a campaign, it’s much harder to know why it succeeded or failed.

He came up with the answer to this complex problem himself:

“What if we could use machine learning to understand marketing content?”

Content Optimize was therefore developed for newsletters and its functionality can be applied to other marketing tools, such as landing pages in the near future.

Since its creation in 2001, Mailchimp, which now has more than 13 million customers, has gathered a wealth of data that Content Optimize, its new optimization tool, has been able to analyze in part thanks to machine learning. In fact, only data from successful marketing campaigns was processed by Content Optimize. John Foreman, CEO of Mailchimp said:

“We have millions of small and medium businesses on the platform. (…) The arrival of Content Optimize is part of MailChimp’s strategy to invest in features that leverage artificial intelligence and big data. The goal is to provide services to make sure that smaller companies can compete with larger companies in terms of email marketing. And so, not only do we build all of these tools ourselves, which allows us to integrate them from a visual design standpoint (they’re not necessarily acquisitions). But we have this data set from years of marketing to millions of businesses, billions of customers that we talk to. So we asked ourselves how we can use artificial intelligence to also refine how all of these tools are connected.”

When a newsletter is created, Mailchimp generates a report that predicts its results and suggests recommendations to improve its performance. Here are some AI-controlled criteria:

• Sentence length and total word count;
• the number and relevance of call-to-action buttons included in the newsletter;
• A well-balanced text/image ratio;
• the consistency of fonts and text style.

With Content Optimize, Mailchimp enables small and medium-sized businesses that may not have the resources or skills to build high-performance newsletters to create engaging campaigns and improve their conversion rates.

Translated from Mailchimp fait appel au machine learning pour Content Optimize, son nouvel outil d’optimisation marketing