Newsletter company Mailchimp’s expands partnership with Australia’s Canva

The world’s most popular newsletter company is trying to reinvent itself in Australia, and part of that plan involves utilising the popularity of Canva.

Mailchimp general manager Rania Succar

The world’s most popular email marketing platform is attempting to reinvent itself down under by hiring an Australia-based general manager and leaning into an expanded partnership with Canva.

Mailchimp wants to leverage the design giant’s popularity as it begins to invest heavily in what the company describes as the market with the most potential in the world.

Newsletters perform better in Australia than anywhere else, the company’s statistics show, with Aussies having an open rate and click-through rate of 35.89 per cent, almost double the global average of 18 per cent.

Mailchimp boss Rania Succar said despite the prevalence of mobile apps, browser notifications and alerts from wearable devices, there was still a major commercial opportunity with newsletters. And that opportunity is even larger in Australia.

“A brand should think about trying to get 50 per cent of their revenue from email and SMS marketing,” she said.

Ms Succar spoke to The Australian during a trip to Sydney from the US as Mailchimp tries to attract local marketers to its platform.

Mailchimp general manager Rania Succar

Like most companies, Mailchimp is banking on AI to do something worthwhile for the company. It has invested heavily in the technology.

It is also banking on AI developments of other companies, with its expanded Canva partnership allowing customers to drag and drop content, images and videos they created through Canva’s AI product Magic Suite directly into newsletters.

“It’s one of our most important technology partners around the world and it’s going to be critical for this market,” Ms Succar said.

“Our customers really carefully build their brands and they want a consistent brand voice across their entire organisation. Often they build their brand assets in Canva and now they’ll have the ability to automatically sync all of those assets, files and folders in MailChimp.” The timing of the expanded partnership could not have been better for the company as Canva this week acquired up-and-coming AI design giant Leornardo.AI.

Mailchimp believes some of its own AI developments might benefit consumers.

That could include less marketing spam as the company develops AI tools that rebuke customers for emailing people too often.

Failing that, it would provide advice on whether that next campaign has a chance of making a profit, with an estimated return now available through an AI-powered tool called Revenue Intelligence.

Determining whether a company will see a return on investment in marketing campaigns is turning into a business model, with the realisation that companies will pay to find out.

Mailchimp's “From Here to There” conference in Sydney

Australian start-up MagicBrief, which recently raised $2m in a funding round led by Blackbird, is one of the players in the area.

Founded by former Eucalyptus creative director George Howes, the start-up has landed major Australian clients including his old employer as well as Koala, Quad Lock and Mosh.

While AI generated content might make the mass creation of marketing emails easier, Ms Succar said she hoped marketers would instead make smarter, data-led decisions.

The company was acting with caution after ACMA’s spam crackdown, which saw $12.5m worth of penalties handed out over the 18 months to January this year, she said.

Notable businesses that were fined for breaching the spam act included Kmart, DoorDash, Ticketek, Uber and CBA.

Mailchimp had also developed tools to stop marketers importing the personal details of consumers that had been bought from brokers, she said.

“It’s very common in marketing and sales. But we don’t allow you to use a purchase list and send emails through a purchased list on our platform,” she said.