Mailchimp Introduces Single Source of Truth for Marketers

A single source of truth. The concept has become a holy grail for digital marketers as companies look for better ways to aggregate data from multiple systems into one location. A new marketing tool from Mailchimp promises to deliver on the idea, providing brands with a way to pull their tech stacks together into one centralized, visual environment. 

“Campaign Manager is the first tool of its kind,” says Jenny Gibson, senior director of product development at Mailchimp. “The technology offers a new-age approach to omnichannel marketing, bringing all marketing mediums to the one platform, simplifying cross-channel engagement and increasing the control marketers have over their marketing campaigns.”

The launch of Campaign Manager means businesses using Mailchimp will now be able to speed up the time it takes to develop and implement monthly marketing plans. The solution includes an integrated calendar that includes all campaign activities, including marketing touchpoints, tasks to complete, and important milestone dates, as well as recommendations based on AI modeling of a brand’s industry and outcomes from millions of other emails sent in Mailchimp. Based on that data, the platform will suggest the best dates to send emails.

Gibson says she’s particularly excited to see how brands use the new analytics features available through Campaign Manager, which will help users understand in aggregate how their campaigns are performing and view the impact that individual touchpoints are having on their goals.

As far as potential use cases, she says a retail chain launching a new product collection could run multiple marketing campaigns to create buzz and drive sales before the collection’s official debut. The company’s marketing team would use Campaign Manager to set up a promotional campaign to get old products off the shelves and encourage past customers to buy merchandise from the new product collection. The marketing team would create multiple campaigns with separate objectives, choose their targeted audiences, and use Campaign Manager’s recommendations feature to optimize send days and times.

“In addition to being able to organize and visualize all activity for a given campaign in one place, Campaign Manager allows users to view in-depth and holistic analytics for a campaign, across multiple touchpoints, enabling marketers to quickly make changes to campaigns based on performance,” Gibson says.

Campaign Manager also builds on Mailchimp’s time warp feature, which supports send time optimization to deliver emails at the optimal time for the contact to open. The feature is fed by billions of emails sent each year. With Campaign Manager, Mailchimp is extending its time optimization to send day optimization. Gibson says this is a unique capability that will ensure businesses aren’t missing great opportunities to communicate with their audience. 

“For the entrepreneur wearing multiple hats trying to save time, to a marketing team working to streamline data analytics to uplevel their efforts. No matter their size or focus, marketers, on average, use seven martech tools to manage omni-channel tactics. Campaign Manager provides marketers a holistic view of their campaign planning, execution, and analytics throughout the entirety of the campaign in every area it’s active,” Gibson says. “This launch unlocks the ability to bring that data together and do something about it.”

Marketers will be able to trigger actions in third-party apps using webhooks—a custom HTTP callback triggered by an event—in Campaign Manager. Gibson says setting up webhooks helps marketers work more efficiently by allowing them to update a spreadsheet, send a status update to customers, or add customers to paid social media ads in just a few clicks. 

Marketers can also connect their third-party SMS provider and then use webhooks to send campaigns, like sharing a holiday coupon code through a text message.

“The channels our customers use and will use are always changing. What was Vine yesterday is TikTok today, and so forth. But how you run your business is evergreen. That’s why building an extensible omni-channel tool that works across all syndication channels that matter for our customers is so important,” Gibson says. “We wanted to build something that would grow and evolve right along with them.”