Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways for brands to directly reach customers amid an evolving marketing landscape.
Nearly 59% of marketers said their e-mail marketing campaigns had an open rate between 20% and 50%, while another 23.3% noted their open rates were above 50%, according to a 2024 survey by Statista.
What makes email an effective channel, and how is Intuit Mailchimp leveraging its tech power to offer its clients smarter ways to campaign?
Mediaweek spoke to Katy Pilar, Marketing Lead, APAC, Intuit Mailchimp, about email’s enduring edge, leveraging and implementing AI, balancing automation and human connection, and what is coming up for the APAC region.
Email’s enduring edge – and how Mailchimp is making it smarter
In an era where efficiency, ownership, and meaningful connection matter and economic pressures are reshaping priorities, marketers are revisiting email as a platform to engage customers in targeted, scalable and meaningful ways.
Pilar said: “The thing that makes email special is that everyone knows how to use it. It has billions of users, most of them check it daily.
“We use it as part of our work but also to connect with all the people we love and care about. Email means a lot to people. That’s something we think about a lot at Mailchimp.”
Pilar explained that the goal is to ensure the connections users are experiencing from brands feel consistent, and allow brands to do the personalisation, segmentation and effectiveness work with less effort.
She said: “In the last year, we’ve introduced more than 20 AI integrations throughout our platform that help marketers do optimisation, data analytics, and predict segments previously not accessible to most businesses. That’s where we see the real opportunity for innovation.”
Marketing in a Pressure Cooker: Why Brands Are Reassessing Channels
Marketing budgets have been reduced in spending as a result of macroeconomic pressures, and as a result, customers, who have been cost-conscious, have been more so in recent times.
Pilar said marketers have been pressured to find cost-effective ways to connect more consistently throughout the year and to cut through sales, promotions and discounting.
She called the entry of AI into the market a pivot point for marketing, and that “marketers are seeking channels that give them more control but are also more reliable for them.”
“In the email space, we’re hearing our customers and prospective customers are investing in email because they own it as an end-to-end channel and are not relying on any intermediaries for the connection they’re building with their customers and prospects.
“That is a pivot we’re seeing and one of the advantages is it can be personalised, segmented, customisable and one-on-one than some other channels.”
She noted that in the past it was labour-intensive and now marketers are adopting AI that’s built into the Mailchimp platform and tools to make personalisation, optimisation and responding to behavioural signals efficient and faster.
Efficiency Meets Empathy: How AI Helps Marketers Do More With Less
Striking a balance between AI and automation with human connection with customers goes hand-in-hand. For Pilar, neither are competing forces, and they move toward the same goal.
“In recent years, brands have become better at personalising interests and products. They were making those emails feel slightly more personalised in blocks.
“Now, the quality of the technology is getting to the point where we can use it to make it seamless to communicate to people on a one-on-one level where we know we’re analysing the data and leveraging it to communicate to them.”
Pilar highlighted Mailchimp’s predictive segment AI tool, which analyses data, past user behaviour, and finds users with similarities, as an interesting feature that provides results.
“We’ve seen an aggregate across our customer base that businesses using predictive segments are seeing 140% more revenue. It’s one way of showing some of these tools, while being less labour intensive to use, are also achieving stronger results.”
Pilar also highlighted UNSW as one of the customers using its AI content tools for its alumni communications.
“They have seen incredible results and improved key metrics such as subject lines and engagement with emails.
“Small tweaks were recommended to their proposed content via AI, which are producing results for them.”
Pilar acknowledged it is tricky for marketers to work harder on tighter budgets with the expectation that they will grow customer relationships. Mailchimp has crunched the numbers and done the research on how they can help customers figure out what to focus on.
She noted the recently published Revenue Blueprint, which surveyed marketers across industries, examined what marketers in high-performing, high-growth and revenue organisations are doing to grow well, and how it differs.
“One of the things we saw is revenue leaders’ group, 89% of those marketers said they are automating almost the entire customer journey.
“It’s not careless at all. It’s incredibly careful the way they map the customer journey and think about the touch points they have with their customers and plan ways to maximise every stage and automate it to scale.
“Increasingly, automation and AI are the only ways to scale effective customer engagement in the environment we’re in.”
From Strategy to Software: Why Integration Is the Next Frontier
Looking ahead, Pilar shared game changers for marketers in the year ahead.
She noted that the marketers who will stand out are those who can figure out where to integrate AI into strategy and where to use human ingenuity and creativity.
Pilar said the risk of using AI to plan, strategise, and create content is sameness.
“The brands that are going to stand out are the ones where they’re investing in human ingenuity at the same rate as AI, and they’re investing in humans who have the right critical thinking and perspective to use it effectively.”
“That’s going to be an important balance we need to strike, and smart brands are already thinking about so they can maintain their point of difference in the market,” she added.
Amid the increased momentum of automation, Pilar noted the importance of true and timely connection with customers and responding to their behavioural signals in real time, like a human-to-human relationship.
“The only way to do it at scale is with smart automation. The customers we work with are seeing the strongest results are the ones leveraging automation.”
Pilar said businesses under pressure will stand out if they can better integrate their marketing and growth strategies with financial operations, ensuring decisions are more closely aligned with bottom-line performance.
What’s Next for Mailchimp: Deepening Investment in APAC
Looking ahead on a global scale, Pilar said Mailchimp is working hard on delivering a platform for businesses of all sizes to grow and run their business with Mailchimp and QuickBooks after Intuit acquired both companies over the last few years.
She also noted the email marketing platform will be ramping up its investment in the APAC region.
“We’ve made a couple of key strategic leadership hires recently, investing in more boots on the ground to support our APAC customers and particularly our ANZ customers.
Australia is our fourth-largest region, and it’s important for us to be working hand-in-hand with our customers here and making sure we’re giving them support.
“Our investment in events like Forward and our SXSW exhibition is a good example of the exciting ways that we’re connecting with customers in the region.”
Top image: Katy Pilar