A decade of innovation that helped build a $12 billion marketing platform
A decade of innovation partnership that helped transform a simple email tool into a $12 billion all-in-one marketing platform
Mailchimp's technology and innovation partner for nearly a decade
For over eight years, Digital Scientists served as Mailchimp's embedded R&D and product development partner — working directly with the chief product officer to accelerate the delivery of next-generation marketing experiences. The partnership spanned AI, e-commerce, advertising, mobile, and platform development, producing 16+ shipped products that helped transform Mailchimp from an email tool into a $12 billion all-in-one marketing platform.
Digital Scientists operated as an extension of Mailchimp's product team, taking projects from initial research and concepting through architecture, design, prototyping, and full production development. Engagements ranged from rapid design sprints and MVP builds to multi-year platform initiatives touching millions of active users.
The partnership encompassed machine learning model development, native mobile applications, SaaS platform features, creative automation tools, and e-commerce integrations — contributing to the platform capabilities that ultimately led to Intuit's $12 billion acquisition in 2021.
Client
Mailchimp (Intuit)
Industry
Marketing Technology, SaaS
Services
R&D, Solution Architecture, Product Concepting & Prototyping, UX & Service Design, ML & Data Service Development
Engagement
2013 – 2021 (8+ years)
Technology & Innovation Partner
Working closely with Mailchimp's chief product officer, Digital Scientists served as an embedded R&D and product development partner — accelerating the delivery of tomorrow's experience.
8+
Years of Partnership
16
Products Delivered
16M
Active Customers Served
$12B
Acquired by Intuit (2021)
Our Role
- Research & Development
- Solution Architecture
- Product Concepting & Prototyping
- UX Design & Service Design
- ML & Data Service Development
Deliverables
- Clickable Prototypes
- Mobile Apps (iOS & Android)
- API Development
- Machine Learning Models
- Production Product Development
Kicking off a long-term partnership in innovation
Mailchimp is currently the largest email marketing platform in the world, with 16 million active customers. When Mailchimp launched its email services 20 years ago, its strategy was simple: make email marketing fun and easy. But by 2013, fun and easy wasn't enough. To fend off encroaching competition, Mailchimp needed to supercharge its innovation efforts.
That's where we came in. Working closely with Mailchimp's chief product officer, we helped fuel the company's innovation pipeline by leveraging our expertise in product development, UX design, AI & machine learning — helping to propel Mailchimp from a basic email marketing service to the all-in-one platform it is today.
Mandrill — Transactional Email (2013)
Our partnership began with market research for Mandrill, a transactional email service delivering fast, personalized emails across a globally distributed infrastructure. We performed market research and provided strategy on market segmentation, brand architecture, and product development — all with a focus on speed, reliability, and global distribution.
From this initial engagement, our relationship took off into what would become an eight-year partnership in innovation.
Activity Tracker — Customer Insights (2013)
Mailchimp hired us to develop a program that could help subscribers gain deeper insights into their customers' behavior. How could small business owners learn more about their customers' preferences to provide a more personalized experience?
Our team created a RubyGem that tracked and stored data on customer activity — open rates, click rates, website visits, and return visits. Through the Activity Tracker, Mailchimp users could generate targeted personalized content across email, website widgets, browser notifications, and in-app notifications.
Deliverables
- Competitive analysis
- Javascript & RubyGem with ElasticSearch
- Cross-platform activity tracking
- Personalized user experience engine
16 products in 8 years
From transactional email to AI-powered design automation, every project expanded Mailchimp's capabilities and deepened the partnership.
Mandrill Strategy
Transactional email
Activity Tracker
Customer analytics
Pop-Up Shop
E-commerce MVP
Direct Mail
Postcards app
Mobile Contact
OCR & import
Reporting
Direct mail analytics
Landing Pages
CMS tool
Ad Network MVP
In-email advertising
Ad Templates
Flexible ad design
Ad Network Interface
Multi-channel ads
Microsites
Website builder
Creative Assistant
AI-powered design
Magpie & Raven
ML data services
Data Enrichment
Clearbit integration
Internationalization
50 languages
Sales CRM
Mobile & desktop
Helping small businesses sell — super fast
Between 2015 and 2017, Mailchimp began to experience explosive growth. While the product team was under pressure to scale, they also needed to drive innovation. Among the ideas bubbling up: "Is it possible to sell products via email?"
Pop-Up Shop
Enabled amateur sellers to create ecommerce pages with as few clicks as possible. Think "Buy it Now" for the Mailchimp crowd. We delivered a functional MVP within 90 days that became the predecessor to Shoppable Landing Pages.
Direct Mail Postcards
Designed and developed an app for subscribers to easily design and send printed postcards — sharing promo codes, announcing events, recovering abandoned carts, or saying thank you with a personal touch.
Direct Mail Reporting
Designed a reporting prototype showing stats and insights related directly to direct mail campaigns — giving users visibility into the performance of their physical marketing alongside digital.
Mobile Contact Import
Implemented three different mechanisms for contact list ingestion within the Mailchimp mobile app: OCR scanning, file import, and address book import — making it effortless for users to grow their subscriber lists on the go.
Empowering users to build, advertise, and grow
As Mailchimp evolved beyond email, we helped extend the platform into landing pages, multi-page websites, and multi-channel advertising — transforming it from a marketing tool into a business-building platform.
Landing Pages
Designed a CMS tool inside the Mailchimp experience to let subscribers easily create their own landing pages — promoting an offer, testing the market, or selling a product. This became the precursor to Mailchimp's Shoppable, Sales & Ecommerce Landing Pages.
Deliverables
- Competitive research & personas
- Use cases & feature specification
- Clickable prototype & final design
Microsites & Website Builder
As landing pages gained traction, a question emerged: "Why stop at a landing page?" We explored enabling users to build larger, multi-page websites within the Mailchimp platform — rethinking the editing experience with novel ideas for desktop and mobile editing. The goal was to allow users to reserve a domain, build a website, and grow their audience all in one place.
The Advertising Suite (2018)
We helped Mailchimp explore the advertising space with three related projects — designing tools that would let small business owners create beautiful ads and distribute them across multiple channels, directly from their email campaigns.
Ad Network MVP
Designed a functional prototype allowing advertisers to create responsive ads within email and monetize their content.
Ad Templates
Explored patterns in online ads and created a set of flexible templates users could leverage to create beautiful, branded advertisements.
Ad Network Interface
Created an interface for small business owners to create beautiful ads and send them out to many channels at once, including email.
Automating creativity at scale
The capstone of our Mailchimp partnership was a series of AI and machine learning projects that automated the most time-consuming parts of marketing — brand asset collection, content pairing, and campaign design.
Creative Assistant — AI-Powered Design
In 2019, Mailchimp acquired a design platform that could help marketing professionals instantly develop branded designs. But one obstacle impeded automation — marketers were slow to build and upload their brand profiles.
Mailchimp engaged us to solve this. Our engineers developed Site Analyzer — an AI-powered feature that automatically detects, analyzes, and classifies brand and campaign content from a user's website. Using machine learning, it analyzes logos, colors, fonts, and relevant campaign content — all in an instant.
Deliverables
- Creative Assistant (v1) integration
- Robust site analyzer service
- Multiple image-based ML models
- Intelligent content pairing service
Creative Assistant in action — automated brand analysis and campaign design
Magpie & Raven — ML Data Services
Created Brand Scraper and Campaign Content Pairing Services for the Creative Assistant. Magpie parses source content, intelligently groups it, and classifies and rates the grouped content. Raven interprets Magpie's output to create optimal content pairings for campaign design.
Data Enrichment — Clearbit Integration
Provided simple, maintainable, and extensible data enrichment microservices for the data science team. Built on Google Cloud Platform with Cloud Tasks, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery — delivering production-ready API integration between Mailchimp and Clearbit for automated contact and company data enrichment.
Scaling to 178 countries and beyond
The final chapter of our Mailchimp engagement focused on platform scaling — localizing content for global audiences and launching an entirely new product category with a built-in Sales CRM.
Internationalization — 50 Languages
As a global leader reaching 178 countries in 50 different languages, Mailchimp needed to enable its marketing site and Knowledge Base for translation. We designed and developed a language selection dropdown and cookies experience, plus engineered a content migration script enabling translations in Mailchimp's Contentful environment.
Deliverables
- Language dropdown in global navigation
- Language-specific messaging
- Session cookies & browser settings auto-detection
- Content migration script for all pages
Sales CRM — A New Product Category
We launched an MVP Sales CRM — a lightweight mobile app and desktop platform that seamlessly integrated with Mailchimp. This represented the partnership's evolution from supporting existing products to building entirely new product categories, delivering both the V1 research and design, iOS app released to the App Store, and full desktop app design and development.
Read the full Tempo CRM case study →
"Our ongoing relationship with Digital Scientists is critical to my efforts at Mailchimp — as we explore new experiences and technologies for our customers. Their team's maturity and ability to deliver while thinking deeply about complex problems helps us gain valuable perspective of what's possible."
Chris Beauregard
Director of Product Management, Mailchimp
From email tool to $12 billion platform
Over nearly a decade, Digital Scientists served as Mailchimp's embedded innovation partner — delivering 16 products spanning transactional email, customer analytics, e-commerce, direct marketing, advertising, content management, AI-powered design automation, data enrichment, internationalization, and CRM.
These innovations helped propel Mailchimp from a basic email marketing service to the world's largest all-in-one marketing platform, serving 16 million active customers across 178 countries in 50 languages.
In September 2021, Intuit acquired Mailchimp for approximately $12 billion — the largest acquisition in Intuit's history. The products and capabilities we helped build were core to the platform value that made that outcome possible.
16
Products shipped across AI, e-commerce, advertising, and platform
8+ years
Continuous innovation partnership from 2013 to 2020
178 countries
Global reach enabled by platform capabilities we helped build
$12B
Acquired by Intuit in 2021 — largest acquisition in Intuit history
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