New Digital Age sat down with Jim Rudall, Regional Director, EMEA at Intuit Mailchimp, to discuss the challenges facing businesses across the EMEA market and how Mailchimp is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help businesses of all sizes to overcome these obstacles.
What are the unique challenges that face businesses looking to scale across EMEA?
You can probably distil the key challenges down to a couple of areas.
The one is a consumer that has almost infinite choice and a very short attention span. This whole dynamic probably started 15 years or so ago with the advent of mobile technology, mobile web, where the power dynamic between a brand the consumer shifted. The consumer no longer had to go somewhere to browse, to buy, to engage. It was available to them. So now, the consumer has all the choice, all the power. And that creates a challenge for any organisation, which is attention.
How do you get the busy, distracted, overwhelmed consumer paying attention to you in whatever channel that makes sense for them and for you? It’s a huge head scratcher for any business, made harder if you’re selling cross-border.
If you’re a UK business trying to do that in, let’s say, France, you’ve got a language barrier. You’ve got a cultural barrier to that attention as well. But it all boils down to: how do you get that engagement from a consumer who can literally engage with anybody at anytime, anywhere?
The other challenge that is a bit more micro is the headwinds that the current trading and cultural environment imposes. So, we’ve had post-covid, a lot of volatility, a lot of challenges in the market in general. We’ve got everything that’s going on in Eastern Europe. We’ve got all the inflationary pressures that impact businesses and consumers.
This makes it hard for any business of any size to drive revenue outcomes, or margin outcomes, and it’s made even harder if you’re trying to do cross-border trade. So, trade barriers have been thrown up instead of removed, and it just makes it harder, particularly for small and medium-sized business, to make an impact and drive growth.
What kind of mechanisms does Mailchimp have to help businesses overcome those challenges?
Mailchimp has an incredible heritage, but also technology capability, which enables a brand or a service provider or a merchant to engage at scale with consumers in a hyper-personalised way using data that you’re able to gather from your audience, customer, or prospects. It’s a platform which allows you to understand and make sense of that information and deliver – for the sake of argument – email communications to hundreds, thousands, millions of people in a way that not only appeals to them, but elicits the reactions that you want. That removes a lot of their headwinds, or a lot of the barriers to communication, and you can do it in a language of your choice. You can do it across markets, across different regions, and it’s only really with the advent of the platform capability, but also the use of AI, that’s enabled small and medium-sized business to do this at any kind of scale. And that’s really compelling.
Why is utilising these solutions for personalisation between markets so important?
If you’re looking for somebody in X country to open your communication, then relevancy is the most important thing, and relevancy is defined by what’s important to that individual. And what’s important to that individual varies based on their demographic, based on their circumstance, based on their context, but also based on the country that they’re in.
The power that you have as a brand is that you’ve got a brand story and a customer problem that you solve that has enabled you to be successful to whatever point that you’re at. And, if you’re able to engage with customers the way that gets them giving you more information about themselves, this value exchange. “You tell us about yourself, we’ll give you really engaging communications and a great experience,” then you’re able to remove the barriers that otherwise exist and talk directly to a consumer in a country that’s not necessarily where you’re based, or in a context that doesn’t directly reflect other consumers in other markets.
How does AI fit into this?
AI, as a disruptive technology, allows a smaller entrepreneurial business to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do, because they don’t have the resource or the expertise. So, for example, my wife runs her own physiotherapy clinic. She has no idea how to create an email campaign or what content would resonate with her audience, how to measure the success of whatever campaign she might be able to pull together. But the AI systems baked into Mailchimp enable her to create content, to create imagery which reflects her brand, to recommend suggestions on how she can engage with her audience in a way that she either wouldn’t have time to do or wouldn’t know how to do, and then send that campaign, and then measure the results and give her advice on what she might do next.
When we enter into large organisations, more sophisticated businesses, we allow them to do things at a scale that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. Even larger businesses often have very overstretched, low resource marketing teams, and they want to send dozens, hundreds, thousands of email campaigns, analyse the results, create content to market to hundreds, thousands, millions of people. The AI capability in platforms like Mailchimp allows them to do that at a scale they wouldn’t have been able to do, and to learn in an instantaneous or iterative way what’s working and what isn’t.
How will AI develop in the coming years?
The amazing thing about AI, LLMs, and the various models and technologies that are out there is that they learn on their own. So, an intelligent system that educates itself in a way at scale that has hitherto not been possible. Everything will happen fast. We will see new capability coming regularly, and the application of that capability will be ever more creative, and it will deliver even more interesting results.
I think what we’ll see in the medium to longer term is businesses getting much smarter about how they deploy AI to achieve their goals. Right now, it’s all very new. Even companies that have been doing it for a while are still trying to figure it out. And I see companies like Intuit and Mailchimp playing a key role in helping them figure out how to use the ever-increasing capability of AI to achieve their goals, because it’s only going to get more powerful. It’s only going to get more impactful. And businesses should, and will, try to understand as quickly as possible how to deploy and make use of it.
What are Mailchimp’s plans going forward?
What we’ve seen over the last few years is this huge demand from larger organisations to leverage our platform. With the advent of not just AI, but the demands being made on marketing teams, what we’re seeing is that they are demanding accessible, powerful, and sophisticated tools that are easy to use and easy to integrate into their often quite vast array of other technologies. As a result, people are coming to us going, “can we see how Mailchimp fits our larger organisation?”
We are developing and refining our capability to speak more and more to that more sophisticated audience. We recently launched a revamped forms capability, which allows marketers to capture more data on audiences and grow their audiences. So, our level of sophistication and the capability of the product will continue to improve to serve that larger audience.
We will also look to understand better how Mailchimp fits in with the broader Intuit portfolio. Intuit owns a number of other software brands – QuickBooks being a leading brand in the UK. How does Mailchimp and QuickBooks together play an important role for large organisations trying to drive growth?
