The Canva Newsroom is an integral part of Canva’s global communications strategy, and a hub for customer-facing communications. Its writers produce long-form content that covers a broad spectrum of subjects, from education to company milestones and announcements, to product launches and philanthropic efforts.
Since the Newsroom’s beginnings, the team has used Mailchimp to power all its email communications. Mailchimp has helped the Canva Newsroom team grow their audience from 0 to over 120,000 by delivering targeted, engaging content. The email platform has also helped the team shape their content strategy with crucial audience insight.
While many different teams across Canva use Mailchimp, we sat down with Katie Stow, Global Newsroom Editor, and Sarah Campbell, Newsroom Communications Manager, to understand how Mailchimp supports the Newsroom specifically.
“Mailchimp enables us to keep our readers informed about the latest Canva Newsroom articles,” says Sarah. “Our monthly email digest consistently sees strong open and click-through rates. Additionally, we’ve found that standalone emails for major moments, like Canva Create, drive impressive engagement.”
Helping Canva hit their awareness and education goals
The Newsroom’s primary marketing goals revolve around the top of the funnel—notably, brand awareness, perception, and education. By using Mailchimp to get its message to a global audience of both Canva users and nonusers, the Newsroom can stay top of mind.
“The Newsroom is about awareness,” says Katie. “It’s not necessarily about converting people into Canva users. It’s about shifting perceptions and getting our narrative across. If people hear things often enough—which is why we try to amplify our content in different ways—then potentially they will become a Canva user.”
Katie also points out that Mailchimp’s functionality lets them easily target non-Canva users (who make up roughly 60% of their audience) they want to reach with awareness pieces.
“By sending targeted emails to segments interested in our people and culture, education, and Canva in the workplace, we’ve achieved engagement levels that exceed industry averages and outperform our monthly email digest, which is sent to our entire database,” says Sarah. Open rates for Canva’s targeted emails are 50.7% higher than their monthly emails, and 22% higher than the industry benchmark.
The Newsroom is still a relatively new part of Canva, with Katie joining close to 3 years ago and Sarah joining about 2 years ago. Since the Newsroom’s main metrics are page views and growing the readership, it has accomplished an impressive amount—0 to 120,000 subscribers—in a short amount of time.
“We’ve spent our time trying to grow the readership,” says Sarah. “And we have great growth. Having Mailchimp there to be able to expand that database, communicate with our audience, and drive people to the articles has really helped us.”
Using Mailchimp to inform the Newsroom’s content strategy
A large part of Canva’s success with the Newsroom is knowing the type of content that’s going to engage its audience.
The team uses Mailchimp forms to gather information about audience interest as soon as someone joins the Canva Newsroom community. The Newsroom uses this data to filter the audience within the Mailchimp platform into 6 highly engaged segments.
“Our Mailchimp sign-up form allows us to gather direct input from subscribers on the type of content they’re interested in, helping us refine our content strategy to better meet their needs,” says Sarah.
Besides segmentation, other Mailchimp features have helped the Newsroom team refine their content strategy.
A/B testing
“We've A/B tested different layouts, content formats, send times, and subject lines with the goal of better understanding our audience and the type of content they're looking for,” says Sarah. “By testing different send times across our entire database, we’ve identified the optimal windows for engagement and consistently achieved an average unique open rate of 25%.”
Subject line helper
By A/B testing options from the subject line helper, the Newsroom can compare different tones, giving them a clear picture of what resonates with their audience.
Reporting and analytics
“We actively analyze what resonates most with our audience by tracking email engagement metrics like clicks,” says Sarah. While the Newsroom team keeps an eye on open rates and click-through rates, they also monitor unsubscribes and compare the performance of varying content types using Mailchimp’s marketing analytics platform.
Inbox
When readers reply to emails, the Newsroom team can monitor their responses for audience sentiment using the Mailchimp Inbox. This gives them direct feedback and insights into what their audience wants to see more of.
"By testing different send times across our entire database, we’ve identified the optimal windows for engagement and consistently achieved an average unique open rate of 25%."
Canva Newsroom is using the independence of email to its best advantage
With Mailchimp, the Newsroom team can be sure their content will reach the right audience, regardless of whether they have additional resources to put behind it. By including Newsroom content so thoroughly throughout the email program, they don’t have to worry about budgets or algorithms impacting marketing goals.
“Email is a self-serve, standalone amplification channel,” says Katie. “Even if we were to run out of paid advertising budget, or if something were to happen, we always own that database. Even if we weren’t to amplify our content via paid ads or SEO, email ensures the content gets to a group of people who really want to see it. And it’s something that we can manage ourselves.”
Mailchimp also allows the Newsroom to target regions they might not otherwise reach. This is a key benefit for times when they may not have the tools or resources to target paid ads to a certain audience.
Katie points out that this targeted approach is particularly valuable because paid advertising can be broad and less precise. With Mailchimp, Newsroom content reaches people in diverse markets, such as Sweden, Uganda, and other places where Canva doesn’t necessarily have a paid advertising presence.
Mailchimp and Canva: democratizing enterprise software
Canva helps people communicate creatively even if they don’t have the necessary advanced skills or specific software, in the same way Mailchimp makes personalized email campaigns accessible to everyone. Both businesses make complex technology accessible.
“Mailchimp is really user-friendly,” says Katie. “Lifecycle marketing is not my forte at all, and I can easily jump into the reports and pull data that I need and things like that to help inform content strategy. Canva itself is a really great partner with building content in Mailchimp, because we’re all about that same thing—ease of use. We’re both really visual and easy.”
What’s in store for Canva Newsroom and Mailchimp
The Newsroom team is a small (but mighty) team of 2, and they’re looking to scale their email program effectively using Mailchimp. Sarah explains that the Newsroom will be ramping up its wrap-up email to send out every 2 weeks instead of once a month.
“I’m looking forward to seeing what type of content performs and experimenting with a few more segments,” Sarah says. “And I’m looking forward to the short term: continuing to learn a lot more about our audience and what they’re interested in through Mailchimp.”
When it comes to the future, Katie mentioned that the Newsroom will be looking at more ways to grow its database. “We have a couple of ideas for additional segments to add, to understand our audience even more deeply.”
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