How Mailchimp bootstrapped to 140 Million customers and $800 Million in revenue – Part 3

Author – Abhishek A Agrawal

Founder at Integrately – Easiest integration platform

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Traffic & SEO Playbook (Some Tactics That Even Notion Swears By)

A monthly traffic of 6.2 Million, and 48% of it coming from non-branded keywords! That’s insane!

The secret?? It’s the resources and glossary sections of Mailchimp’s website – A knowledge hub of marketing and business content.

Here you can find a variety of content ranging from guides on email marketing, social media strategies, case studies to in-depth insights on SEO and content marketing, and much more.

Besides, they have a focused content strategy on the organic as well as the paid front.

3 strategies shared by Mailchimp and Notion

1. Product Features as Lead Magnets:

Mailchimp drives significant branded traffic from its features page. Here’s the breakdown:

These features naturally promote the problems that the product solves. This in turn helps generate qualified leads. 

And out of all the features, `Email Templates` drive the highest traffic. 

That’s the same case for Notion, wherein templates have been their biggest customer acquisition channel. Thus,

`Templates can be the best lead magnets for customer acquisition`.

And rightly so, because they offer practical, ready-to-use solutions

2. Emerging Markets are Key Growth Areas

India is a key player for Mailchimp, driving 11% of its organic traffic.

And Brazil is a major source of its paid traffic, a trend also seen with Notion. 

This highlights the growing importance of developing countries as emerging markets with a lot of potential.

For businesses, investing in these emerging markets and focusing on paid marketing could unlock new opportunities and attract more customers.

3. Multi-Lingual Support to Capture Global Markets
As seen in Notion, even Mailchimp’s stats show significant organic traffic coming to its translated pages. This re-affirms that one must surely invest in translated pages to get that quick organic boost.

Since these tactics have proven effective for both of them, I can say that SaaS companies should definitely give a thought to implementing them.

Mailchimp’s own set of strategies

1. Invest in SEO

We contemplate that Mailchimp’s significant increase in organic traffic correlates with its major focus on SEO from October 2015. It yielded them a dramatic increase in keyword rankings, from 11,341 to 125,050 keywords in a single month!

2. Diversify Your Content for Non-Branded Traffic

Although Mailchimp started out as an Email marketing platform, they have been creating diversified content around:

• Marketing,
• Business tips,
• Guides, and allied topics

This not only drives them traffic but also acts as an acquisition channel for their potential customers.

Additionally, it decreases their dependence on paid advertising.

3. Find out how differently people are using your product and bet on it

Mailchimp was not originally designed as a CRM solution. However, they noticed a trend of users managing their contact lists within Mailchimp. Seizing this opportunity, Mailchimp also started promoting itself as a CRM tool – ‘Mailchimp for CRM.’

Mailchimp might seem to have low traffic on their CRM page (only 23.5k!), but it’s a clever SEO move.

Why? Because mostly, people searching for CRM (not Mailchimp) land there. 👇

This is a golden opportunity, as it

• Introduces Mailchimp to new customers unaware of their brand
• Markets Mailchimp as an all-in-one marketing platform, not just email marketing
• Gathers high-quality traffic as anyone who needs CRM, needs email marketing (Mailchimp’s core strength)

Mailchimp’s take on Paid Campaigns

1. Running Ads During Peak Season

Mailchimp strategically ran paid campaigns to optimize their advertising budget for better results during:

• Festivals (year 2018 onwards)
• Major events like the presidential elections (year 2020)

2. Boosting Convertible Pages

Mailchimp has sorted out highly convertible pages like:

• Features
• Solutions

They frequently run ads on these pages that drives them a high paid traffic.

And, whenever the organic traffic on these convertible pages has major fluctuations, they invest in paid campaigns to give it a boost.

3. Social Media Dominance

When it comes to paid marketing, the keyword `SMM panel` is now accounting for 27.03% of their overall paid traffic. Besides, there are 102 paid keywords mostly around Facebook marketing that are ranking for Mailchimp.

This indicates Mailchimp’s strategy to brand itself as an all-in-one marketing platform rather than just an email marketing tool.

• Identify what can be templated and use it as a lead magnet
• Opt for multilingual websites to increase organic traffic
• Identify the emerging markets in developing countries and target them
• Use diversified but allied content to rank for non-branded traffic
• Utilize paid marketing for seasonal events and traffic fluctuations