Mailchimp built its legacy on email. But as consumer behavior evolved, the company saw an opportunity to help those same customers reach their audiences in a faster, more personal way: text messaging (SMS). I led the design vision that connected these two channels, creating a foundation for unified insights and a more cohesive cross-channel marketing strategy.
By mid-2024, we’d seen 5.5 million new SMS contacts, 2x growth in revenue per user, and an internal shift in how teams thought about marketing impact.
ROLE · Senior Product Designer
TIMELINE · August 2023 - March 2024
SERVICES · UX research, strategic visioning, service design, B2B, e-commerce
15
15
SMS features prioritized
5.5M
5.5M
SMS contacts added
2x
2x
average revenue per user
PROBLEM
In July 2023, we launched a private beta to a small group of customers to validate early hypotheses and learn quickly.
Despite strong initial interest, adoption was lower than expected.
User research and post-launch surveys revealed three key friction points:
Table stakes features were missing, making the product feel incomplete.
Onboarding was unclear and time consuming, especially for customers migrating from an existing SMS platform.
Value wasn’t visible early enough - customers struggled to see how SMS could improve their marketing strategy.
Addressing these issues represented a significant opportunity: our data suggested that solving them could unlock engagement for more than 290,000 prospective customers.
MAPPING OUT THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Doing this exercise helped myself and our cross-functional partners understand what areas of drop off we were seeing. It also helped us to get really specific on what areas of the experience we needed to prioritize.
We realized the key areas to address were owned by other Mailchimp teams.
In a large organization like Mailchimp, this was challenging - other teams had their own roadmaps, their own KPIs to meet. Gaining support and influencing these roadmaps that weren’t owned by our team was critical to successful customer adoption.
THE VISION
With a team of 3 other designers, I helped drive a 1-2 year vision that showcased how SMS and email could work together as a unified marketing platform.
The vision centered around 3 core themes that addressed the biggest blockers we had identified:
Discovery: Help customers understand why SMS mattered by surfacing clear product value tailored to their business.
Richer demos and sales-assisted walkthroughs to guide hesitant customers.
Onboarding: Reduce friction by supporting a smooth transition from their existing SMS platform
Guided setup and personalized transfer plans to ease data migration
Seeing Results: Showcase the value of cross-channel marketing earlier
Integrated reporting at the 30 day mark showing how email + SMS drives results together
The resulting vision artifact became a storytelling tool we used to align stakeholders across five product areas and inspire leadership buy-in.
Our vision was endorsed by the CEO and directly led to 15 table stakes features being prioritized across teams, creating alignment and momentum for execution.
BRINGING OUR VISION TO LIFE
Our next challenge was to translate the vision into a shippable roadmap.
I took ownership of the “Seeing Results” theme - partnering with our Analytics team to design an omnichannel reporting experience. Pairing with their deep-rooted knowledge of Mailchimp's analytics capabilities, I iterated on concepts that could help customers clearly see the ROI of combining email and SMS.
Ultimately we landed with the concept that breaks down key metrics by channel due to our conviction this would show the value of using both channels. It was also the most feasible for our engineers to build within the 3 month timeframe.
Over three months, we delivered the foundational experience that now powers Mailchimp’s multi-channel analytics. This set the stage for future iterations that continue to drive adoption and unify how Mailchimp measures marketing success.
THE OUTCOME
We released this portfolio of end to end improvements in March 2024, marking Mailchimp’s first major step toward unifying email and SMS into a single, cohesive marketing platform. By June 2024, we began to see clear proof that the vision was working:
5.5 million new contacts were added to the platform through SMS campaigns.
Average revenue per user doubled, rising from $31 in February to $62 by June.
These results built trust and confidence, unlocking continued investment in our roadmap. By the fall of 2024, we expanded our SMS offering internationally to 11 new countries - establishing Mailchimp as a truly global multi-channel marketing platform.
