Repositioning Mailchimp SMS from Email Add-On to Fastest-Growing Multi-Channel Product

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventure Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the true author, Wade Burrell.

When I started at Mailchimp in 2017 it was already the largest email marketing platform in the world, with 12 million-plus businesses as customers. Over the next eight-plus years the company pursued a broader vision of becoming an all-in-one marketing platform; Intuit’s 2021 acquisition only accelerated that push. The market, however, still fixed Mailchimp as “an email company.” That gap between what we were building and how the market saw us was the constant tension. SMS and messaging launched in early 2023 as the next growth channel, but we shipped it as a standalone MVP—an add-on that wasn’t baked into the product the way it needed to be. Our initial positioning, “the number one email marketing platform, now with SMS,” simply tacked the new channel onto the reputation everyone already knew.

We needed to position SMS so it could compete with native tools like Twilio and Attentive even though we were a couple of years behind on pure features. The real question was Mailchimp’s right to win in this channel: why should customers choose our SMS at all? Internally there was intense debate with product, leadership, and engineering about whether SMS stayed a bolted-on feature or became something deeper. The early “now with SMS” framing made the problem obvious—it still felt like an add-on rather than a reason to rethink the whole platform.

I went into customer research from the beta with an open hypothesis instead of a deck to validate. I asked beta customers to walk me through how they reach people when something is time-sensitive or when a promotion drops, then I shut up and listened. The quote that stuck was: “I don’t need more tools. I need tools to talk to each other.” Roughly 86 % of our base was already using SMS somewhere else—transactional, marketing, fragmented across systems. That insight let me reframe the differentiator away from feature parity and toward the platform we already owned: the contact list, automation logic, customer relationships, and trusted data from 12 million businesses. I brought the voice-of-customer verbatim into roadmap conversations, shifting priorities from a standalone SMS add-on to unified data, unified automations and customer journeys, and unified reporting across email and SMS. We also owned our constraints: we would never out-Twilio Twilio on deep SMS infrastructure, so we flipped the trade-off into positioning—“if you want SMS that actually talks to your email campaigns, contact list, and automations without duct-taping three platforms together, that’s us.” Finally I pressure-tested the new platform pitch with sales before anything went external, watching whether reps could use it naturally in their own voice.

In the first 12–18 months we launched SMS in 12 major countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia and others). By the time I left, roughly two-and-a-half to three years later, we were live in 37 countries despite heavy regulation and compliance work in each market. That drove about 300 % revenue growth in year two and another 200 % year-over-year growth in year three, making SMS the fastest-growing product at Mailchimp. Multi-channel (email + SMS) became a company-wide priority; leadership folded it into the broader brand and go-to-market narrative so that every customer-facing moment was “email and SMS,” not just email. The product’s trajectory literally changed Mailchimp’s trajectory as a company.