Connecting the dots: How Intuit Mailchimp and Canva are redefining growth-driven marketing

Businesses have never had more ways to reach customers. However, the challenge is no longer creating campaigns – it’s connecting the dots between customer data, marketing activity and business growth.

While Mailchimp has traditionally been known as an email marketing platform, the company’s latest product updates reflect a broader shift in how it sees its role in helping businesses grow.

“Email remains one of the most effective channels available, with 69% of marketers still identifying it as a core revenue driver,” he says. “What has changed is what marketers can do around it.”

SmartCompany spoke with Ose Amiegheme, head of email product at Intuit Mailchimp, to find out the exact ways modern marketers can drive meaningful growth.

Marketing teams don’t need more channels, they need connected data

Today, marketers across Australia are juggling more than ever. 

“Businesses today are under pressure,” explains Amiegheme. “They’re managing more tools and channels, navigating reduced headcount and higher expectations around ROI.”

Winning attention is getting tougher as consumers become more discerning about what lands in their inboxes and fills their social media feeds. To keep up, marketing teams have added more customer touchpoints, creating both new opportunities and new complexity, says Amiegheme.

“[Now] teams may have one platform for design, another for email, another for analytics and another for ecommerce, with none talking to each other,” he explains. “These isolated systems not only create extra work, but they slow execution and make it hard to actually understand and take action based on what’s driving revenue.”

In Amiegheme’s view, the businesses seeing the strongest return on their marketing efforts aren’t necessarily those with the biggest budgets or boldest creative ideas – they’re the ones connecting the data they already have.

“When teams have a connected view of their customers and performance, they can make smarter decisions, create more relevant experiences, and spend less time managing systems,” explains Amiegheme. “In a market where every resource counts, that kind of clarity can make a real difference.”

Closing the gap between design and execution

For many marketing teams, disconnected tools can also slow down the work required to get a campaign out the door.

“We consistently heard from marketers who loved creating campaigns in Canva that they faced a frustrating process of exporting, rebuilding, troubleshooting formatting issues and manually preparing campaigns for launch,” explains Amiegheme.

Mailchimp’s Canva integration is one example of how that workflow gap can be reduced. It allows marketers to design email campaigns in Canva and publish them directly into Mailchimp, with the layout and formatting preserved.

Given more than half of Mailchimp customers already use Canva, Amiegheme says bringing the two platforms closer together was a “natural next step”.

By cutting down the manual work involved in campaign production, lean marketing teams can move faster and spend more of their time on the work that drives results.

Better data, better decisions

Streamlining campaign creation is only part of the equation. For growing businesses, understanding what happens after an email campaign is sent is just as important.

While traditional email metrics like opens and clicks still have value, Amiegheme says marketers increasingly need to understand how campaigns influence customer behaviour and, ultimately, revenue.

“Businesses have access to more data than ever before, but dashboards alone don’t always explain what’s happening or what to do next,” he says.

Mailchimp’s newer AI-powered tools, including Analytics AI, aim to help marketers spend less time interpreting data and more time acting on it. Rather than requiring users to decipher complex dashboards, Analytics AI allows users to ask questions in natural language and receive insights based on their own business performance.

“There’s a real value in AI in reducing the distance between insight and action,” says Amiegheme.

Mailchimp is also expanding the data available to marketers through features like its Site Tracking Pixel, which gives businesses greater visibility into what customers do after clicking through to their website.

Combined with new SMS capabilities and automation tools, businesses can use those insights to deliver more timely and personalised customer experiences across multiple channels.

Looking beyond email marketing

Instead of treating email as a standalone marketing channel, Intuit is working towards a more connected platform that brings together customer data, automation, AI and business insights.

“When we talk about the growth engine at Intuit, we’re talking about creating a single platform where businesses run and grow,” says Amiegheme.

For SMEs, the opportunity lies in building more connected marketing systems that improve efficiency, support better decision-making and tie marketing activity more directly to business growth.

Find out more about how Intuit Mailchimp is helping businesses simplify marketing workflows and drive growth.