MailchimpGrowth. Leadership. Brand evolution. Digital transformation. Customer experience.
Growing beyond what made you successful.
Mailchimp built a distinctive and trusted business around email marketing. As the company expanded into a broader platform for small-business growth, its brand, products, and customer experience needed to evolve with it.
Led during Gene Lee's tenure as Chief Experience Officer at Mailchimp, in collaboration with internal teams and agency partners including COLLINS. Work predates MAP.
The challenge
Started with email. Grew into much more.
Mailchimp's brand equity was strongly associated with email marketing. But the company was expanding into a much broader set of tools and experiences designed to help small businesses grow.
As new products, capabilities, and touchpoints were added, the experience became harder for customers to understand as one connected platform. The business had evolved faster than the story and experience around it.
Customers experience the whole.
Customers don't experience departments or org charts. They experience one Mailchimp — across advertising, the website, onboarding, product, support, and every interaction in between.
Understanding the whole
See the journey before fixing the pieces.
A shared team vision
“To create experiences that empower every small business to grow.”
Build the system
A simpler Freddie. A bigger system.
Express it everywhere
One brand, across every touchpoint.
Out of home
Small Mall — a pop-up retail experience
Website
A website that grew with the business.
From email tool, to a broader story, to a platform — with navigation clear enough to hold it all.
Product and mobile
One experience, across product and mobile.
Experience detail
Design the moments people remember.
The Mailchimp Dollar turned a customer's first online sale into a physical keepsake.
Leveraging AI
Creative Assistant. A designer and marketer in a box.
Our first AI-powered feature turned a website URL into a brand style guide — extracting logos, colors, fonts and imagery — then designed hundreds of on-brand ads and layouts for Facebook, Instagram and other social channels using design principles.
A lasting impression
Outcomes
Signals of impact.
- #1
- Brand ranking among competitive set
- 29%
- Lift in paid signups
- 1M
- New signups
- 26%
- Decrease in bounce rate
- 20+
- Awards and recognitions
Results reflect the work of many teams and partners across Mailchimp, not any single person or discipline.
The bigger lesson
Growth changes the problem.
MAP helps leaders see the whole, decide what matters most, and connect the experiences around where the organization is going next.