Intuit Mailchimp unites and optimizes its content with Contentful AI Actions

You’ve probably heard of Intuit Mailchimp for its email marketing service. Chances are, there’s a message from one of their customers in your inbox right now. But email isn’t all Intuit Mailchimp offers. 

In 2019, the company expanded,  introducing an all-in-one marketing and ecommerce platform outfitted with customer engagement tools, social media management capabilities, and more. To help its 11 million users get the most value from its products, Intuit Mailchimp built an expansive knowledge base covering everything from how to retarget ads on Facebook to accurately tracking customer leads. This help site shattered industry norms, with 98.8% of visitors finding what they were looking for. 

While this success was exciting, it also drew attention to the shortcomings of its digital setup. Up until then, they were using a spreadsheet to track hundreds of disconnected web properties, and Marketers relied on Engineering to delete commas, edit images, and make every single web update. These inefficiencies added up, stealing hours of valuable time and wasting resources. To sustain its success, Intuit Mailchimp needed to streamline its processes, which started with consolidating and connecting its web content.

Targeting a unified content solution

Intuit Mailchimp teamed up with Work & Co (part of Accenture Song) to migrate its marketing and knowledge base websites onto a single platform. 

After a thorough audit, they realized they needed a more mature, nimble site that matched customer expectations. They also needed to empower the Marketing team to generate content and make changes independently, which meant making all of Intuit Mailchimp's content accessible by storing it in a single place. Intuit Mailchimp was already familiar with Contentful, so when Work & Co presented the platform as its top pick, it was an easy decision. 

Intuit Mailchimp and Work & Co decided to break the project into two parts. First, they would soft-launch Intuit Mailchimp’s knowledge base before working on its marketing website.

Soft knowledge base launch, big impact

At the start of the project, the Engineering team tested Plums — an interface they developed to sit between Contentful and the browser — enabling a streamlined, five-template architecture for the knowledge base. After migrating content from the previous CMS, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French versions of content, it was time to take the knowledge base online. 

The soft launch went smoothly, giving the team confidence as they flipped the switch for the marketing site. Patrick Young, a digital production manager in charge of training Marketing and Engineering teams on Contentful, sums the launch up in one word:  “seamless.” He recalls finding a link that should have gone to a certain location, but it didn’t.

“We were able to fix it with a redirect really fast using Contentful,” said Young. “It showed us how much of a game changer this CMS really was.”

Intuit Mailchimp also felt a shift in productivity once marketers were up to speed on how to create and edit content. Previously, it took 10–20 minutes to fix even a small typo, even longer if that typo lived on other pages.  

“Now it’s pretty much instant,” said Pamela Vickers, Director of Engineering. Whoever spots an error is empowered to correct it with Contentful. “That’s huge. But an even bigger win is that non-technical users can just create a brand-new page without any help from engineering,” she added.

Controlling content, no code necessary

While the Engineering team has a bird's-eye view of recently published pages via a Slack channel, they no longer need to facilitate publication. They can be more strategic, instead of spending the day fulfilling one-off requests and worrying about marketing breaking the site. 

Intuit Mailchimp’s previous CMS had a poor user interface and turned a simple task into a chore. To find knowledge base articles that mentioned a certain word in need of editing, engineers had to write a script to crawl every single user-accessible web page to look for that term within the HTML. 

Auditing content in support of optimization is also more straightforward with Contentful. Intuit Mailchimp’s teams can use the Content Management API to find the content they’re looking for and make sweeping changes in a fraction of the time.

With Contentful’s increased reliability and better navigation, Intuit Mailchimp marketers have also improved the quality of their content. For example, the team sunset 60 low-performing knowledge base articles in just a few hours, ensuring every piece of content a customer lands on adds value to their business.  Contentful made it easy to find and pull these articles.

Leveraging AI Actions to enhance accessibility

With its knowledge base and marketing content unified, Intuit Mailchimp shifted its attention to optimizing content for search and accessibility. A thorough web audit revealed that many of the images were missing alt text – a key accessibility feature, with hefty SEO impact. Manually adding alt text to each image would be extremely time-consuming, so the web team began exploring AI-driven solutions.

After testing several third-party integrations, the Web team determined that the alt text generated was just too low quality. But when Contentful launched  AI Actions, they ran one more test — this time, the output met their high standards.

“It took a click of a button to install. Now we can just open the image, click a single button, and get an alt text output that is higher quality than any other AI-based tool,” shared Ruth Corson, Senior Manager, Global Web Ops Production. With the new tool, Intuit Mailchimp is able to spend 70% less time on preparing alt text, while ensuring no images are missed.

Tracking towards automated translations

Intuit Mailchimp’s success with AI Actions is inspiring the company to explore additional use cases for the tool, namely, translation. 

“In the past, we’ve been hesitant to use AI for translations. They weren’t accurate and often didn’t factor localization in, which is something we try to implement for an even more meaningful customer experience,” noted Corson. 

Delivering connected, optimized content is just the beginning of what Intuit Mailchimp can achieve with Contentful. As the platform evolves alongside emerging technologies, Intuit Mailchimp is well-equipped to create modern, user-friendly experiences for growing businesses, all while staying rooted in a unified content foundation.