Did You Mean … MailChimp?

Everyone that has one time or another worked in digital marketing, has probably heard of even worked with MailChimp. It is an email marketing service which also provides marketing automation for businesses.

However, probably few people know how they reached their success and became one of the most popular email marketing service providers.

Just to put words into context, here are a few figures regarding their business in 2016:

· MailChimp made $400,000,000 revenue with 550 employees

· Acquired nearly 4 million users (which increased their user base by 30% — from 12 million to 16 million)

· Over 246 billion emails were sent via MailChimp

MailChimp’s success isn’t coincidence. They has invested in many innovative marketing campaigns and splashed big bucks on them.

MailChimp or MailKimp?

But probably the most memorable and audacious is their Did you mean MailChimp? campaign. In 2014 MailChimp sponsored Serial — a crime podcast with a huge audience base. Each episode began with MailChimp’s pre-roll audio ad voiced by anonymous individuals.

The inspiration for their campaign was the “MailKimp” mispronunciation of the brand’s name by one of the participants in the pre-roll.

Instead of trying to hide the mistake, as other brands would do, MailChimp embraced it and even made it central in one of their most successful marketing campaigns. They saw that people actually really love this play on MailChimp mispronunciation.

This inspired them to created nine fake brands, everything from fashion trends, sandwiches, hit singles and short movies. The names had one thing in common, they sounded really similar to MailChimp. These are the brands:

They didn’t stop here. MailChimp produced 1-minute promo video for MailShrimp, KaleLimp, and JailBlimp in collaboration with an agency. They even created websites and actual products for six other fake brands. Looks like MailChimp takes pronunciation really seriously… some may say too seriously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4KnG4iZMnk

The videos were run mainly as pre-roll ads on Youtube. At least this saved MailChimp some money, because of Youtube’s policy where advertisers pay only after a user has watched at least 30 seconds of the video.

Besides Youtube, MailChimp also displayed printed ads to promote brand awareness. They used billboards, subway trains, subway stations, and sponsored Instagram posts:

The campaign turned out to be a huge success for MailChimp and it got them the earned brand awareness, traffic and free media. However, not everyone loved MailChimp’s campaign. But publicity even negative is still publicity, especially spread through word-of-mouth.

As you can imagine, the Did You Mean MailChimp? campaign cost an enormous amount of money. On the bright side, you don’t need to splurge in order to understand and apply the creative framework they used in their campaign.

MailChimp’s 3 Part G-Map Framework

The creative marketing framework MailChimp used consists of three parts:

• Goal — What is your goal? (MailChimp’s was mass market brand awareness)
• Marketing Angle — What is your marketing angle? (MailChimp’s was creating weird, attention-getting brands that rhyme with MailChimp)
• Promotion — How will you promote it? (MailChimp used single page websites, YouTube video ads, Instagram ads, Subways ads and Billboard ads)

Curiosity Gap

MailChimp knew that creating brand awareness and interest in the nine fake brands wasn’t enough, they had to direct people to their own legitimate website. They achieved this by using the creativity gap.

The idea was to get people interested in their campaign websites and then get them to want to learn more about MailChimp using creativity gap. However, MailChimp only discretely included their logo at the end of every video, just like in the JailBlimp video below:

Besides this tiny logo at the end of every video, there is no other description or mention of what MailChimp is and what it does. Even in the videos’ description, there is no information about MailChimp. They created separate Youtube channels for every single fake brand.

They didn’t tell people what was actually happening and used curiosity to make them find out by themselves. They also had a clever idea for this step. When someone clicks on one of the brands’ landing pages and scrolls to the end of it, a smart bar pops up with a CTA button “Learn More” and the MailChimp logo. The copy only says — Hi, We’re MailChimp — that simple.

However, the smart bar still doesn’t say anything about what MailChimp does. When you click on the “Learn More” button, you are finally taken to a MailChimp landing page where the mystery is revealed.

https://media.sumo.com/storyimages/b569a672-822c-4601-95a8-34d1a750b7ca

Even though visitors get a little bit more information as to what MailChimp does, they don’t say what products or services they actually offer. They only state their moto and how they can help people. If visitors are interested to find out more, again they have to click on the “Lean more about MailChimp” button.

This is how MailChimp leads visitors from their fake brands’ websites to their own website using curiosity gap without openly mentioning the product they offer. MailChimp cleverly leveraged one unfortunate mispronunciation of their name and turned into a very innovative and successful campaign, which brought to them brand awareness and website traffic.