Jim Rudall is Intuit Mailchimp’s GM of EMEA and has spent 15 years in commercial leadership roles in e-commerce and marketing technology. He joined Shopify as Head of Revenue for the EMEA Region in 2020 where he built the EMEA Sales operation before moving to Intuit Mailchimp in April 2023. He sat down for a chat with Seamless Xtra’s Mark Dowdall at Dubai’s Step Conference.
Jim, it feels like every SME right now is under pressure to get on that AI boat, to start innovating and introducing this technology to their business. But, for many of them that might not quite be at that stage yet, what advice would you give to them?
Yeah, it’s a big topic right now. Although I run the EMEA region for Mailchimp, globally there’s a ton of what we would call economic headwinds. So it’s a challenging environment for any organisation and in particular entrepreneurs and SMEs who are looking to make their way and grow and thrive.
I think about AI in two ways with reference to those types of organisations. Firstly, it enables a skill, a competence, an expertise to exist within your business when you wouldn’t otherwise be able to either hire it or you wouldn’t have that expertise yourself as a small business. Small businesses struggle for resources, for funding, for finance and for cashflow so it’s really hard to find marketing expertise when your resources are limited.
AI within Intuit Mailchimp enables entrepreneurs or small businesses who have zero email marketing expertise or hands-on experience to create and execute on campaigns with what I would call minimal marketing creativity. So if you’re not a marketer, if you don’t really understand or have a view on how marketing campaigns should be created and how they should be executed, then the AI tools within Intuit Mailchimp allow you to have that creativity and that expertise in your business.
Secondly, it enables small businesses to have real scale. Small businesses are constantly fighting against large organisations who have capital and have scale. However, AI with its ability to drive huge efficiencies and capacity enables those smaller businesses to punch above their weight and deliver communications at scale in a way they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
Most of these busineses will be looking to grow and expand but what are some of the most common email marketing mistakes you see made by trying to do too much, too fast?
Yeah, when it comes to email marketing I would say there are two mistakes that stand out. First, there’s the assumption that sending hundreds of thousands of emails without any real level of personalisation or segmentation is the right thing to do. We believe strongly that email marketing is still one of the, if not the primary revenue generating channels for any business, but it has to be done intelligently. You need to understand your customer and deliver communications which are personalised, relevant and timely. In many ways, less is more when it comes to email marketing on the assumption that the fewer, but more highly targeted, more relevant emails that you send will have way more impact.
I think a second mistake that I see a lot is the idea that email is a pure promotional tool. Sending out emails with discounts, with promotional offers is super important. It’s incredibly helpful to drive engagement and to drive those first time conversions for a retailer, say. But to use it only as a promotional tool is probably a mistake. It’s an amazing mechanism to engage, deliver content and deliver meaningful brand stories to have a two way conversation with your audience as opposed to just pushing out promotional messages.
Obviously technology is such a big part of your business and to enable others, I would imagine it is vitally mportant to first keep up-to-date with the rapid changes happening in this space. How to does Intuit Mailchimp manage this?
As a business we declared five years ago that AI was going to be the future of the organisation. And we were luckily proved right in the last year or so with this proliferation of Gen AI tools, and of course we spend a huge amount of time, effort and resources on innovation. We have an amazing R&D organisation, product and engineering team. That’s all they think about and it helps that we are part of a large organisation that has the resources to do that.
The other way we think about this is through our partner ecosystem. So we partner with many of the largest tech companies globally, like Shopify, for example. There’s many others and they help by being part of that ecosystem as well. We have this great two way exchange of innovation by being part of the global tech ecosystem. And there’s examples of those tech partnerships in dozens of countries in most of the regions across the world.
Is it fair to say then that the typical Mailchimp client tends to be at the beginning of their journey?
Well, the heritage of Mailchimp has been helping entrepreneurs get started, definitely. So, we have an enormous global user base who use Mailchimp to kickstart their email marketing strategy from solopreneurs to entrepreneurs to microbusinesses to SMEs.
Our product has evolved significantly over the last few years, particularly post acquisition by Intuit. We’ve become increasingly relevant to what we call advanced marketers, larger businesses who see our advanced features as a really relevant solution as they get more sophisticated in their marketing automation and their email communication. So the short answer to that is all businesses are customers of Mailchimp. We’ve kind of gone on this journey and we continue to love our mission to help entrepreneurs and SMEs thrive and we are now starting to enable those larger organisations to execute too.
Now, you’re here in the Middle East for a couple of days and you’re attending the Step conference. What are your aims for the region and what are some of the key differences you see here?
Well, that’s one of the reasons I’m here. I was hired nearly a year ago now to lead the EMEA region. We have such a vast customer base across the whole of the region, what’s really curious is that we have never had localised teams trying to get really deep in understanding our customers across all of these different countries in EMEA. So I built a team in the UK, starting a few months ago, and it’s grown significantly. And our continuing mission is to try and understand the relevance of Mailchimp and the evolution of what Mailchimp should be across all of these different countries in EMEA with the Middle East being a really important part of that.
