How HC Brands uses Mailchimp to manage 11 brands

If you've ever ordered custom stickers for a business or name tags for a new employee, there's a decent chance you've shopped at HC Brands—you just might not have known it.

HC Brands is a Florida-based ecommerce company that operates 11 distinct brands, all built around customizable products. Behind those brands is a small marketing team. In the past year alone, 3 different people have rotated through the team, 2 of them with no prior email marketing experience.

"They're picking it up pretty quickly," says Taylor Lang, who oversees marketing for the HC Brands portfolio. "I think that's a testament to how easy it is to use Mailchimp."

With Intuit Mailchimp, HC Brands consolidated all 11 brand audiences, email and SMS, and its Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) ecommerce data into a single account, providing a frequently changing team a single operational hub to grow their business.

The challenge: Fragmented platforms for a team learning the ropes

HC Brands ran its marketing across separate platforms. Email lived in one system; SMS ran through Attentive. The ecommerce data from its Adobe Commerce stores existed somewhere else entirely, making it difficult to connect marketing activity to actual revenue. Getting all 3 to work together meant constant platform-hopping, and the numbers that came back from each rarely matched.

"Coordination alone was really tough," Taylor says. "Everything was in 2 different platforms, so we'd have to kind of jump back and forth. It was hard to coordinate it all."

Personnel turnover provided another challenge. HC Brands had cycled through 3 people in its email and SMS roles over the past year, which meant new employees were learning how to navigate multiple tools at once in addition to the basics of the job.

And as an ecommerce operation that relies on data, they struggled to get reliable attribution. When the email platform produced one revenue figure and Attentive produced another, it wasn't always clear which campaigns were actually working. Making decisions about where to put time and budget meant working from numbers that couldn't be trusted.

There was also a technical gap nobody could easily close on their own. Setting up popup forms across 11 websites, configuring the Adobe Commerce integration, and getting SMS infrastructure properly in place all required expertise the team didn't have in-house. Without those forms running, HC Brands was missing email addresses from site visitors who left without buying.

The tools: SMS marketing, integrations and popup forms

HC Brands made 4 key structural changes to how they manage campaigns. First, they stopped using Attentive and migrated their SMS marketing to Mailchimp.

From there, they consolidated all 11 brand audiences into a single Mailchimp account and eliminated the overhead that came with managing separate systems. Each brand's subscribers live in their own segment within the account—distinct but accessible from the same place—which made it significantly easier for new team members to get oriented without having to learn multiple platforms at once.

Next came connecting their Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) stores to Mailchimp, giving the team a direct line between campaign performance and revenue. With ecommerce data flowing into the same platform as email and SMS, attribution was finally consistent across channels.

"I don't have to worry about Attentive coming up with their version of the numbers and then Mailchimp's numbers, wondering if they're using the same attribution," Taylor says. "Having everything under one platform, knowing that the data's consistent, has been really helpful."

The last piece was improving subscriber acquisition. Popup forms had never been set up across the 11 brand websites, which meant site visitors were leaving without being added to any email list. Taylor reached out to HC Brands' dedicated Customer Success Manager, who connected the team with Mailchimp's technical support. Together, they built popup forms across all 11 sites, each offering a promotional code to visitors who hadn't purchased.

The results: Increased revenue from early SMS campaigns

Since migrating from Attentive, HC Brands has generated more than $8,800 in SMS revenue from early promotional campaigns. For a channel built from the ground up without existing strategy or infrastructure, it reflects how quickly the team was able to turn a new capability into a direct revenue line.

The SMS program has also posted a 99% deliverability rate across all 11 brands.

Holiday campaigns have driven a 15% SMS click rate. Taylor attributes the performance to the promotions themselves. The offers that work on the HC Brands websites tend to translate directly to SMS, particularly when timed around specific holidays.

Taylor's next priority is building an SMS welcome series.

Q4 offers a big opportunity. Black Friday through Christmas is HC Brands' peak sales window, and this year will be the first time the team goes into that stretch with an SMS strategy in place. Taylor's expectation is that having email and SMS coordinated through one platform, rather than managed separately, will change how that peak season runs.

"I don't know how we would do it if they weren't all under one platform," Taylor says. "Mailchimp makes it easy to keep everything organized and all of our audiences separated out."