Intuit’s Acquisition of Mailchimp Makes More Sense Than You Might Think

The value of email marketing is clear — and, at least in Intuit’s case, that value is $12B in cash and stock in exchange for ownership of one of the O.G. email newsletter platforms: Mailchimp.

Email marketing is one of those rare strategies that’s been around for a long time but, rather than falling behind the curve and then being “disrupted” by newcomers, it’s only increased in value.?

For some, it may be difficult to understand why Intuit would want to acquire a 20-year-old software company, but it helps to know that email marketing was a $7.5B industry in 2020, and that’s predicted to grow to a whopping $17.9B in 2027 (Statista).

With an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent (DMA) and nearly double the conversion rates of search traffic (TAG), it’s no surprise that 81% of B2B marketers use email marketing more than any other form of content marketing (CMI).?

And it’s not just corporate newsletters that a platform like Mailchimp is good for. In recent years, newsletters have become an essential tool for connecting with audiences — yes, that means clients and customers, but it also means creative audiences and readers.?

Since its launch in 2017, Substack has grown to over a quarter of a million paying subscribers, and it’s adding more high-profile writers all the time. New authors are encouraged by their publishers to start a newsletter as soon as possible, to drive book sales and potentially develop an income stream through monetization, and while Substack may be the most high-profile platform for that, Mailchimp, along with competitors including ConvertKit and MailerLite, is actually often listed in the top three most popular options.?

Intuit has obviously, well, intuited the meaning of all this: email newsletters are part of an extremely successful business strategy, and they can also be a very lucrative business for enterprise companies that provide the right email marketing tools to SMBs.

Mailchimp slots right in alongside Intuit’s other small-business-targeted offerings, including TurboTax, Mint, Quickbooks, and Credit Karma. Quickbooks will integrate particularly well with Mailchimp’s CRM, enabling business owners to pull customer data from both the marketing and billing sides and build a 360-degree picture of each customer — which will then empower them to personalize content more tightly and reap the rewards to their bottom line.

According to their CEO, Sasan Goodarzi, Intuit’s goal is to “provide an end-to-end customer growth platform to help our customers grow and run their businesses, putting the power of data in their hands to thrive.” (Source) With the acquisition of Mailchimp, the company can add email marketing — and all its proven value — to that growth platform.

Email newsletters are an essential part of most business strategy these days, and if there’s one thing that remains true across all investment opportunities, it’s that essentials are always worth the investment.?

Mailchimp may not be as new or flashy as some other platforms, but what it lacks in novelty it makes up for in established roots — Mailchimp is an established platform with 12M users and more than 60% of the email market share (MarTechToday).???

Given that Intuit is looking to provide a one-stop-shop for business growth to SMBs, they clearly knew they needed to add an email marketing platform, and they couldn’t do much better than Mailchimp.