Have you ever wondered about how your favorite newsletter ended up in your inbox? Who sent it? Why was that email scheduled for that particular time? What is being tracked when you click that open button? Most likely, those questions haven’t crossed your mind, but that doesn’t change the fact that the digital trail a simple email creates can have a lasting impact on your online persona. Welcome to the world of email marketing, specifically the Mailchimp universe, which includes an all-in one marketing platform that delivers more emails daily than the average consumer can fathom.

“We didn't send two billion emails on Black Friday, we delivered two billion emails. What's really interesting for Mailchimp as a platform is that delivery is hard and it's a big part of it but that's really where the story begins. At least when it comes to the email side of things, because delivering it starts it, and then they open it, which gets tracked. They click it. And then when they click it, and they go out to do a thing, they now land on a Mailchimp property. All of those activities the user is taking is going to drive their marketing properly.”

Eric Muntz is the CTO of Mailchimp, and on this episode of IT Visionaries, he dives into the ins-and-outs of how the email delivery giant has expanded its offerings in an effort to democratize marketing tools. Eric also touches on why email delivery is just the beginning of any marketing journey and how Mailchimp effectively scaled from a few thousand users to millions of users.

Takeaways

• Just the Beginning: Email delivery is just the beginning when it comes to the world of email marketing. When you open up an email, that email collects various forms of data and multiple user touchpoints. From the link a user clicks on to determine if the email is secure, to the potential landing page where a person winds up, it all creates multiple responses within the Mailchimp platform, which will then trigger follow-up emails, promo codes, etc. 
• Thundering Herd: Thundering Herd in technology circles refers to the amount of stress that is placed on servers that have traditionally been passive but are now being asked to carry high-traffic loads in a short amount of time. Think of ecommerce sites that get bombarded the second a highly anticipated product goes up for order. In order to avoid crashes and stresses on your infrastructure, you have to constantly be backing up and batching your servers. 
• Started From the Bottom Now We Here: When you’re rising through the ranks of your organization, one of the most important skills to learn is how you go from working on a product to understanding how you can give your team the tools to effectively do their jobs. Likewise, when hiring a staff, it’s important to really focus on the applicants that are just as excited about the project and product as you were when you joined the company.

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