In a digital economy where customer engagement and acquisition are critical, a ready tool to reach your target audience for conversion is Mailchimp. Mailchimp is a global customer engagement and marketing platform for growing small and mid-market businesses. It is one popular tool for newsletter and email marketing.
Founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut, Mark Armstrong and Dan Kurzius, the then startup was bootstrapped to become what it is today. It now has around 11 million active customers with a total audience of 4 billion and $800 million in revenue.
The growth of Mailchimp has been staggering thanks in part to the resilience of the founders. Now, the firm has disclosed it is being acquired by Intuit, the global technology platform that makes TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, and Credit Karma in a cash and stock deal. The total is said to be worth $12 billion.
Together, Intuit and Mailchimp will work to deliver on the vision of an innovative, end-to-end customer growth platform for small and mid-market businesses, allowing them to get their business online, market their business, manage customer relationships, benefit from insights and analytics, get paid, access capital, pay employees, optimize cash flow, be organized and stay compliant, with experts at their fingertips.
Delivering on the promise to be the single source of truth, small and mid-market businesses will have the power to combine their customer data from Mailchimp and QuickBooks’ purchase data to get the actionable insights they need to grow and run their businesses with confidence.
“We’re focused on powering prosperity around the world for consumers and small businesses. Together, Mailchimp and QuickBooks will help solve small and mid-market businesses’ biggest barriers to growth, getting and retaining customers,” said Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of Intuit.
“Expanding our platform to be at the center of small and mid-market business growth helps them overcome their most important financial challenges. Adding Mailchimp furthers our vision to provide an end-to-end customer growth platform to help our customers grow and run their businesses, putting the power of data in their hands to thrive.”
Mailchimp brings to Intuit technology at scale along with global customer reach. Founded in Atlanta, GA in 2001, Mailchimp began by offering email marketing solutions and evolved into a global leader in customer engagement and marketing automation fueled by a powerful, cutting-edge AI-driven technology stack.
“Over the past two decades, we’ve vastly expanded and evolved Mailchimp’s platform to help millions of small businesses around the world start and grow,” said Ben Chestnut, CEO and Co-founder of Mailchimp.
“With Intuit, we’ve found a shared passion for empowering small businesses. By joining forces with Intuit, we’ll take our offerings to the next level, leveraging Intuit’s AI-driven expert platform to deliver even better products and services to small businesses. This is an exciting new chapter for Mailchimp, our 1,200+ dedicated employees, and customers.”
Both Intuit and Mailchimp have always worked to solve small and mid-market businesses’ biggest challenges. For two-thirds of small businesses, finding new customers is their biggest obstacle and over 25 percent struggle to retain existing customers, yet almost three-quarters of small businesses have not adopted a customer relationship management solution.
Eighty-four percent of small businesses use pen and paper or spreadsheets to reconcile their inventory across channels and 50 percent of small businesses fail within the first five years due in large part to cash flow challenges. Collectively these challenges create barriers to small and mid-market business success that Intuit’s acquisition of Mailchimp will help solve.
