Mailchimp: Marketing to Themselves and The Pitfalls of a Tool Built for an External World

Mailchimp, the all-in-one marketing platform, has built its reputation on helping businesses, particularly small to medium-sized ones, connect with their audiences. With its user-friendly interface and robust set of tools for email campaigns, automation, and audience management, it’s a go-to for millions. But a key question for any software company is: do they use their own solutions to power their own business? And if so, how has that shaped the product, for better or for worse?

It's known that Mailchimp does indeed leverage its own platform for various internal processes. A notable example cited by Holly Beilin in Hypepotamus ("How We Work: From Offer to Exit, Mailchimp Employees Listen Hard, Change Fast, and Learn Constantly", Hypepotamus), is their use of Mailchimp's campaign features to onboard new employees. New hires receive a series of emails designed to build excitement and provide essential information before their first day, showcasing a practical internal application of their core offering.

This internal usage aligns with Mailchimp's broader philosophy of being customer-centric and iteratively improving its product. The company emphasizes understanding user needs and leveraging feedback in its development cycle. As highlighted on their own resources, such as "New Product Development: From Idea to Market Success" and "Using Customer Feedback to Improve Engagement", Mailchimp is built around the idea of listening to users and solving their problems. It's highly probable that their own marketing and product teams are significant internal users, gathering firsthand insights into the platform's capabilities and potential pain points. One can imagine the internal marketing team at Mailchimp being some of the most demanding users of their own automation journeys, A/B testing features, and audience segmentation tools.

Furthermore, Mailchimp's own features like surveys (Mailchimp, "Create a Survey") are likely employed internally to gather employee feedback, perhaps even on the tools themselves. This internal feedback loop, where employees are also users, can be invaluable. A glimpse into this internal reflection appeared on Mailchimp's Developer blog. Discussing a past pricing model change that negatively impacted developer trust, they acknowledged that the experience taught them to "listen hard to developers, and turn to our own team before making sweeping changes" (Mailchimp Developer, "Empowering developers to empower the underdog"). This suggests that internal perspectives play a role in shaping decisions, hopefully leading to a more robust and user-friendly platform for everyone.

However, while using your own product offers undeniable benefits in understanding its strengths and weaknesses, it's not a panacea. The specific design and focus of a tool heavily influence its suitability for all purposes. Mailchimp is, at its core, a platform designed for external marketing and communication. This is where relying on it for internal communications can become problematic, potentially leading teams—even those outside Mailchimp looking for an internal comms solution—astray.

Several industry voices have pointed out the limitations of using platforms like Mailchimp for dedicated internal communications. As articles from Staffbase ("Staffbase vs. Mailchimp: Why Internal Communicators Choose Us Over Email Marketing Platforms", Staffbase Blog) and Workshop ("Mailchimp for internal communications: is it the right tool?", Workshop Blog) articulate, tools built for external marketing often fall short for employee-facing messaging. Key challenges include:

• List Management: Mailchimp's audience management is built around subscribers who opt-in. Managing dynamic employee lists, often requiring integration with HR systems for automated updates based on roles, departments, or employment status, can be cumbersome. Manual CSV uploads, as highlighted by Staffbase, are inefficient and prone to errors for internal comms.
• Spam Filters & Deliverability: Emails from external marketing platforms like Mailchimp sometimes get caught in corporate spam filters or land in "Promotions" tabs because their servers are associated with high-volume marketing sends. This can lead to critical internal messages being missed.
• Unsubscribe Links: Anti-spam laws (like CAN-SPAM) mandate unsubscribe links in marketing emails, a crucial feature for external audiences. However, as Workshop points out, "employees can unsubscribe from messages you really need them to read, like policy updates, benefits info, or critical announcements." This is a significant drawback for essential internal information.
• Feature Set: Tools designed specifically for internal communications often include features like pulse surveys optimized for employee feedback, different analytics dashboards focused on internal engagement rather than conversions, and better collaboration workflows for internal teams creating content. Mailchimp's analytics, while powerful for marketers, may not provide the right lens for internal communicators.
• Privacy and Security: Publicate, in its article "Internal Newsletter Software vs Mailchimp: How to Choose", notes that Mailchimp creates a web version of emails, which can be a privacy concern for sensitive internal company information.

While Mailchimp itself provides resources on "Internal Marketing Strategies to Strengthen Your Business", these focus on the principles rather than explicitly pushing their own platform as the sole solution for all internal communication needs.

This isn't to say Mailchimp can't be used for some internal announcements. For a small company, or for less critical, broadly cast internal updates, it might suffice. But its architecture and feature set are fundamentally geared towards an external audience. Companies relying on it as their primary internal communications tool might find themselves wrestling with a platform not optimized for their needs, potentially missing out on the benefits of dedicated internal comms solutions.

In conclusion, Mailchimp's practice of using its own software likely provides valuable insights for its core purpose: external marketing. Their own teams, by experiencing the product firsthand, can contribute to its refinement for its millions of users worldwide. However, the very strength of Mailchimp—its sophisticated design for marketing to an external world—becomes its limitation when stretched to fit the distinct requirements of internal communications. This serves as a crucial reminder: while "eating your own dog food" is a valuable practice, it's equally important to recognize when a specialized tool is needed for a specialized job. For complex internal communication strategies, looking beyond general marketing platforms is often the wiser choice.