Last month, email marketing company Mailchimp, owned by Intuit, announced a suite of new AI-focused tools aimed at helping users to get closer to their data and audience.
Built on the Intuit platform, the new tools use AI to segment customer data and give users actionable insights. Some of Intuit Mailchimp’s new products include enhanced lead-gen integrations with Meta, TikTok, Google, Snapchat and LinkedIn, over a hundred new pop-up templates, and more insightful reports across email and SMS.
The company also said users can expect to see audience tools that send audience segments directly to Meta and Google Ads, a tool that groups SMS and email customers, and Intuit’s AI Agents – a virtual team of end-to-end AI agents. According to an Intuit’s customer report, 56 percent of customers are making ‘better’ decisions in less time with the company’s AI offering.
To find out more, FutureWeek sat down for a conversation with Intuit Mailchimp’s GM of the EMEA region Jim Rudall.
What is your current approach to AI at Intuit Mailchimp?
When we talk about AI, we talk about the incredibly powerful impact that it can have on our core mission, which is empowering prosperity across the world. Intuit is founded on the idea that technology can enable SMEs to thrive and flourish, and we track everything with that in mind. Years ago, Sasan K. Goodarzi, Intuit’s CEO declared that AI is going to be the most disruptive, powerful, positive force for the world, and we have built the business around that concept. So that’s how we think about it.
How can marketers use natural language in Intuit Mailchimp?
Right now, we have an Intuit system within the platform, so the user can log in and talk to the product by typing in, for example, “create me an email with a promotional message for my most important customers.” And AI will create that content, which you can then review, edit, or discard if you want, or you can have a conversation with the AI assistant and say, “a good first start, but I think I’d like to amend how we’re talking about the promotion,” or “maybe we should change the underlying tone of the message that we created.” You can do the same thing on the campaign side and tell Mailchimp, “can you segment my audience to build a campaign for my highest spending customers?” It’s a conversation you can have with the platform.
How is AI supercharging the “one-to-one” relationship between brands and marketers?
The one-to-one personalised experience has been the holy grail of marketing – e-commerce in particular. I’ve been in marketing for a while, and we’ve been talking about this for years and years. It’s always been challenging, because to get to “a segment of one”, it would require an incredible amount of resources to analyse and interrogate data, to understand attributes and to create the level of personalisation we’re trying to get to. AI enables you to do that incredibly quickly. All the things that would take humans days, weeks, months to do; because it enables systems that are not interconnected to talk to each other. AI also lets a marketer make ‘better’ decisions based on vast data analysis. AI is the engine that allows marketers to engage, learn, and re-engage what you’ve learned at a scale that hasn’t been previously possible.
Can you tell us about the new custom audience tools? How is it helping marketers to understand their audiences?
In a nutshell, you’ll have customers in your audience which allows you to find similar, like-like or even overlapping profiles across the Meta platform. You will be able to find, across Meta’s estate of customers, people who are similar to the audience you have right now. We’re trying to help businesses find customers, grow, and then manage their business in the back end from getting paid. That’s the QuickBooks, historical FMS side of business.
Is there a way AI is impacting email marketing in a different way from other forms of marketing? What is that differentiation?
If we agree that email is your constant billboard – and we should be thinking about email not only on who opens and who clicks something, but in a way of constantly driving engagement with your brand to the people in your audience – AI enables brands to do that, for a scale that wasn’t previously possible, or at least was really hard to achieve; and to enable that conversation to be ever more personalised and ever more valuable. That being said, I don’t think that the impact of AI is particularly unique to email marketing.
What can email marketers capitalise on with AI?
If you’re a marketer of one in an organisation, and you know that you have to create audiences, segment those audiences, build campaigns, and build messaging – that’s really hard. It takes a long time, and AI enables you to condense that process. AI enables you to interrogate audience data far more quickly than you ever were able to by yourself. The idea that AI can create your content for you, and pull all of your assets and your brand story together instantaneously, and create this beautifully crafted, incredibly engaging, fantastic content in an instant – that’s amazing. It will really help that one marketer in a small or medium-sized firm.
What data are Intuit Mailchimp users analysing? How can brands ensure customers don’t mind their data being used to personalise?
If you are a user, you are only using your data, and AI is the mechanism through which you can interrogate your data. If brands are transparent about how they use data, and if brands give a great experience every time that happens, a consumer is way more likely to share more information. We did some research on this earlier in the year, and over time, you have this value exchange where the greater the experience, the more information is handed over from the consumer. A great brand will take this value exchange, and build incredible profiles on their consumers, and use AI to understand that information and deliver insights, or recommend or build campaigns. To do that at scale in the pre-AI era was just not possible.
What might the future of more agentic AI look like for Intuit Mailchimp?
It’s certainly how we’re thinking about it. We’re asking ourselves: how do we leverage agentic AI to be your assistant? All of the things that you want to be done, but that don’t necessarily drive the core of your business. Can we get to a point where agentic AI is your personal assistant? If we take the mobile experience, for example, imagine that in your pocket you’ve got a team of expert agents who you can connect with to solve the most important things when it comes to running your company. That’s definitely where I see it going for us.
What advice would you give a brand on building engagement through email?
It depends what you mean by ‘engagement’ and how well you know your customer. Do you really understand your customers? Do you know what they want? Have you got a good understanding of what engages them? You can use email to find out the answers to those questions. You can send lots of emails to test and learn, and see what works and what doesn’t. It’s all about understanding your customer closely – and AI helps you do that.
