Gone Bananas

or How we cre­at­ed six­ty email tem­plates in six­ty days, for twelve-mil­lion users.

Mailchimp social media image with a teal banana pattern background and email screenshot
About this company

Mailchimp needs no intro­duc­tion, right? The Atlanta-based beloved brand has been lead­ing the email mar­ket­ing indus­try for twen­ty years, empow­er­ing small and medi­um busi­ness­es to grow and reach new cus­tomers with their easy mar­ket­ing suite.

Visit website


Hey, it’s Neil.

A casu­al Fri­day morn­ing call from a US phone num­ber. It was Mailchim­p’s CTO. Whaaat?

They had a lit­tle fun chal­lenge in mind:

Can you come up with one new email tem­plate per day, for the next six­ty days?

Try doing any­thing once a day for six­ty days. Not easy.

And yet we man­aged some­how. The goal was to deliv­er bul­let­proof, great-look­ing, flex­i­ble tem­plates that could adapt to the thou­sands of dif­fer­ent busi­ness­es among their audience. 

We came up with one cre­ative idea, draft, iter­a­tion, cod­ing and test­ing every day for two months. We worked hand in hand with Mailchimp’s amaz­ing team and the reward was far beyond our wildest expectations.

Our tem­plates fea­tured orig­i­nal art­work, illus­tra­tion and pho­tograhy. We even dared to deliv­er a few mobile options — before it was a thing . 

Check out our favorite set cov­er­ing Hal­loween, Thanks­giv­ing, Christ­mas and New Year.

Key Take­aways

Pres­sure & Pure Fun

We hit it out of the park.

For four years, our tem­plates were avail­able for free for 12 mil­lion email mar­keters, who used them year after year to greet their read­ers on these spe­cial dates, on hun­dreds of mil­lion emails full of pos­i­tive wishes.

We got fea­tured heav­i­ly and received amaz­ing praise from cus­tomers and experts in every continent.

In time, our very own designs even cir­cled back to our inbox­es in some of the pub­li­ca­tions we’re sub­scribed to and made us feel quite proud.

Services

  • Cus­tomer research
  • Mar­ket­ing sprints 
  • Email tem­plate design, cod­ing and testing

Tools

  • Mailchimp!