Situation: Mid-sized marketers and small businesses need to reach their customers with personalized messaging, but it’s increasingly difficult for them to do so. They have customers in different segments, with different interests, at different points of the buying journey, lapsed customers, new customers, loyal customers … you get the point.

Brief: We had to change the way marketers viewed the issue of personalized email marketing. We needed to show them the problem they were creating by NOT personalizing their email marketing.

Objectives: Create an integrated campaign that brings to life our B2B audience's problem and show how Mailchimp's AI powered email marketing and automations make it easy to convert more customers through personalization at scale.

Enter, The Clustomer. The Clustomer is a visual personification of what happens when marketers fail to segment and personalize their messaging to target specific audiences. The Clustomer is a tangled mess of undifferentiated customers, all receiving the same generic marketing message, all clumped together in a metaphorical ball they can’t break free from.

We presented the Clustomer, and then we presented Mailchimp as the answer to Clustomers. Mailchimp’s advanced personalization tools help marketers turn Clustomers into customers, by automatically creating messaging for specific customers based on their specific needs.

By presenting this complex- and let’s be honest, rather dry- problem in an engaging way, we were able to break through to marketers and showcase Mailchimp's platform value proposition–enabling businesses to personalize at scale– in a fun and memorable manner that led to breakthrough results.

Acquiring new customers is the #1 priority for every marketer. But when it comes to making their marketing more personal for those customers, we found that 3 out of 4 marketers are overwhelmed by the different personalization options available today.

Their fear of messing up outweighs their fear of missing out and they end up not doing much personalization at all. They often send the same generic message to everyone.

Our strategic approach was to ratchet up the tension of what happens when marketers do nothing. By not taking advantage of a key marketing strategy, they were creating a monster. A tangled mess of customers that you treat exactly the same.

To create the Clustomer, we first used artificial intelligence to generate and prototype images of what a Clustomer ball made of people might look like. After settling on the art direction, we decided that we would create the Clustomer practically. Not soon after that, we realized the enormity of this undertaking.

Soon we had constructed a 12ft x 8ft steel jungle gym like orb. We cast a mix of gymnasts, contortionists, and aerialists, strategically placing them around the ball. We then choreographed their movements to make the Clustomer look like a living, breathing thing trapped in a marketer’s workspace.

Once we created the Clustomer, we then showed marketers how to destroy the Clustomer. Using Mailchimp’s advanced personalization tools, marketers can turn Clustomers into customers, by targeting each individual with a personalized email message.

Presenting this problem in an engaging way allowed Mailchimp to break through in the B2B space.

Achievement against business targets

• 42% increase in unaided brand awareness

• 28% increase in positive brand perception

• Scored in the top 1% of all campaigns ever tested in Ipsos database

Reach

• Global total reach of the campaign: 854,392,217

Engagement

• 1,001,310,421 video views:

Impact

• Helped lead to an Increase Small Business and Self-Employed Group revenue by 18 percent for the quarter.