Mailchimp is moving to Intuit. Here’s what you need to know

I’ve been supporting clients using Mailchimp and Intuit for several years now. The two companies have been powerhouses in their respective industries, with Mailchimp well known for newsletter and email marketing whereas Intuit is home to QuickBooks and other accountancy related software.

According to a press release about the merger, “Intuit Mailchimp” is aiming to deliver an end-to-end customer growth platform for small and medium-sized businesses. In a nutshell, this means all tasks related to acquiring customers, managing them and getting paid can be done via this one platform. They also say that experts will be available to assist with tasks through the platform.

Mailchimp’s focus on marketing

Many of us associate the name Mailchimp with email marketing and being able to create newsletters to send to our subscribers quickly and easily.

However, Mailchimp has been working to develop a full CRM system. This has meant you can use Mailchimp for creating websites, landing pages, automated sales funnels, ads, and social media marketing in addition to email marketing.

This “one-stop-shop” marketing platform is useful for many business owners who want to simplify their processes as much as possible. There’s an argument that having one dashboard in which to control and monitor your marketing efforts makes it easier to focus on planning your time and resources around your objectives with the relevant results and analysis at your disposal.

However, I wonder if there’s an argument that using the right app/native channel for each marketing task is perhaps going to yield better results. It’s a bit like having a shopping mall with all the shops you could want under one roof. It sounds fantastic and certainly makes life a little easier, but you’re potentially missing out on the specialised products that can only be found with the local independent shops.

Making numbers easy with Intuit

Intuit has been established within the accountancy industry for many years. Most of us have heard of QuickBooks in the UK, but they also offer tax filing services (US clients) with TurboTax, budgeting and planning software with Mint and credit score optimisation app Credit Karma.

Most of their services have been US-oriented but with ‘Making Tax Digital’ on the horizon for us small business owners within the next couple of years requiring the use of an authorised accountancy app to submit tax reports to HMRC quarterly (or monthly in some cases) it makes sense for them build on their UK market offering.

Who will benefit most from this merger?

I think if you only use Mailchimp for sending out newsletters to keep in touch with your customers and have established processes in place for the other tasks in your business, then it might be time to look for a different provider. As this Forbes article suggests, the focus of Intuit Mailchimp will be on using sales-driven data to deliver marketing campaigns to increase profits.

Mailchimp has been aiming to be a full CRM for a long time and this merger will add new functionality and integrations to enable just that. It’s certainly a good idea to be able to move an existing subscriber to your client list, have the onboarding materials there ready to send, can invoice at the click of a button and then add them into a marketing campaign to upsell them to higher-priced package.

Will this benefit small business owners? I certainly think it can do but it’ll take time to learn how to use the platform, set up the sales funnels, marketing, onboarding templates, etc and I think perhaps this is where it might fall down as many of us don’t have that kind of time to spare.

I think those who work in the marketing, virtual assistance and online business management spaces might benefit most from this merger. It’ll mean a business owner can use the platform for what they’re familiar with (invoicing, etc) and enable them to invite others to take care of the other aspects they don’t have the time for such as marketing, customer management, and business planning.

I think the ability to support business owners by collaborating in this way with this platform is actually quite exciting! But what do you think? Do you currently just use Mailchimp for newsletters and don’t think you’d use the other features? Are you more likely to change Xero for QuickBooks if you’re already using Mailchimp? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.