Meet Kate Kiefer, the content curator at MailChimp!
This interview is long and awesome, so I’ll keep the intro short. Kate lives in Atlanta with her photographer husband and their Great Dane, Leon. She works as the content curator at MailChimp.
All photos of the MailChimp office are courtesy of Kate. She’s in the final pic. I love the wooden desks, the lights and that guy with the beard who looks so serious.
Oh, read this if you’re curious why I’m interviewing copywriters. Otherwise, let’s start the interview already.
/ Hi Kate! So tell us about MailChimp. What do you guys do and how did you join the company?
MailChimp is a DIY email-marketing service. We make it easy to create, send and track email newsletters. We have more than 900,000 users and about 100 employees. Two years ago, there were only 20 employees.
I loved that MailChimp was such a bright light in an otherwise dull industry. When I found out they were ready to hire a content person, I was all over it. I work in the creative department with the public site’s designers, developers and another writer. It’s a super collaborative environment, and every day I’m inspired by my colleagues’ creativity. And lucky for me, everyone here understands that words are important! It’s pretty dreamy.
This Fast Company article gives you a nice picture of what it’s like to work here.
/ Describe your role as Content Curator. What keeps you busy?
I work with MailChimp’s creative team to plan, create and publish our content, and I make sure it gets proper care and feeding.
My role has evolved quite a bit over the past year. So far, it’s been a natural progression from simply writing and editing to truly curating MailChimp’s content. I spent my first month or so reading every page on the site, putting together a content inventory, and having panic attacks because I didn’t understand words like “deliverability” and “user-agent stats.”
After I got my bearings and really got to know MailChimp’s public site and app, I started rewriting most of our guides and editing the website content for grammar and style. I learned so much about MailChimp that way. That led to writing new content, which led to reorganizing existing content. When I started suggesting we throw out bad content, I knew I’d found my place here.
We have another writer on the creative team now, which allows me to spend more time working with our marketing director to improve MailChimp’s content on a larger scale. But I still write and edit every day. I write marketing content, template copy within the app, blog posts, you name it. I even wrote a coloring book.
/ “Content Curator” is a pretty unique job title. How did you get into it?
Aside from some freelance copywriting, my background is mainly editorial. I was a magazine editor before I started this job. When MailChimp hired me, they liked that I didn’t have a marketing background. I tend to approach content from a storytelling perspective, and that works here. I think they also liked that I wasn’t programmed to use corporate cliches and SEO garbage.
MailChimp has always valued content in a way that I wouldn’t expect from an email-marketing service. On my first day here, my boss sent me an article Erin Scime had just written for A List Apart called “The Content Strategist As Digital Curator.” He basically said, “Do that.” A year and a half later, I think I’ve finally figured out what that is.
/ You’re working on the MailChimp Style Guide right now. Why did you guys decide to write one? Who’s it for?
MailChimp publishes blog posts, guides, app copy, marketing copy, landing pages, company newsletters, Customer Stories, case studies, webinars, videos, Twitter feeds, system alerts, forms, messages, templates…I could go on, but my brain hurts.
We needed to make sense of all that content. We have designated writers, but with 100 employees, more and more people are contributing content. Which is great — developers and tech-support people should feel comfortable writing blog posts and help articles, even if they don’t think of themselves as “writers.” I’ve also been getting a lot of writing questions from people around the office. Everything from “Is it login or log in?” to “Do you think this would make an interesting blog post?”
We needed a set of grammar and web guidelines to answer those questions and keep us consistent. I don’t like style guides that read like haughty lists of rules and regulations, so I tried to keep it casual, provide lots of examples and explain the reasoning behind certain guidelines. The style guide is for everyone who writes content for MailChimp — and to an extent, everyone who interacts with customers. It explains MailChimp’s voice, tone, grammar and web guidelines, and it goes over our content types and publishing process.
I even included a section on our mascot, Freddie. He makes quite an impression, but Freddie’s voice only appears within the app, and he never gives feedback or helps users complete tasks.
And if people learn nothing else from the style guide, I just hope they’ll start using contractions.
/ What are you learning about the MailChimp tone of voice? How does that connect with the culture and the brand personality?
MailChimp’s voice is first and foremost human. We’re fun and informal, but we know when to keep a straight face. The brand voice absolutely reflects our culture. We love what we do, and I hope that comes through in every piece of content we publish.
I think of our brand voice and tone in terms of a human’s voice and tone. Your voice doesn’t really change — you only have one. But your tone probably changes all the time, depending on what you’re talking about and who’s at the other end of the conversation. Same goes for MailChimp.
Sometimes we write to loyal users, who are tech-savvy but curious, and sometimes we write to potential customers, who are more skeptical. The reader’s state of mind depends on what she’s doing at the time and what part of our site or app she’s visiting, and our tone depends on the reader’s state of mind. We can be informal and a little techy on the blog and in our company newsletter, because we’re writing to existing MailChimp fans. We can be friendly and helpful on the homepage, without overwhelming potential customers. We can greet active users with a joke when they log in to the app.
But we have to use a more straightforward tone in the Knowledge Base — those people are looking for an answer right away, and they’re probably not going to be amused if a chimp pops up to tell them he’s not wearing any pants. We also keep the jokes out of compliance alerts and critical messages, for obvious reasons. My goal is to have a consistently delightful voice and a consistently appropriate tone.
/ I love MailChimp’s approach to the Customer Story. How did the idea for the Customer Stories come about?
One day I had a long conversation with our marketing director about how fantastic our customers are, and how uninteresting our case studies were at the time. The glorified-testimonial approach to case studies didn’t feel like us anymore.
Was I really going to visit this amazing factory where they make signed and numbered blue jeans by hand, and simply ask them how MailChimp’s autoresponders are working out for them? And given the opportunity to meet the green-bean buyer at a local coffee roastery, was I really just going to ask if MailChimp has improved their bottom line? It seemed like such a waste.
So we got rid of the old case studies. We decided that there’s still a place for case studies, but they should serve a purpose beyond telling people that MailChimp is awesome. Our new case studies are feature-based, and they live on individual feature pages. They’re more specific, and they’re much more helpful.
As for those fantastic customers, we felt like the part about MailChimp was getting in the way of their stories. So many of our customers are smart, creative and passionate about what they do. MailChimp supports them by making their jobs easier and their marketing more effective, but we don’t have to insert ourselves into their story.
And that’s OK — because there’s an implicit message in our Customer Stories: MailChimp has inspiring customers who love what they do, and if you love what you do, then MailChimp is right for you. We tell the stories through videos, written articles and photos, and they’re already starting to evolve.
/ Now some quick and easy questions. What do you read for inspiration?
The first issue of Google’s Think Quarterly is incredibly inspiring to me — can’t wait to see what’s next. I love design blogs, especially Swissmiss. I read A List Apart for web stuff, McSweeney’s for humor, Brain Pickings and GOOD for a little of everything. I like Kristina Halvorson’s book Content Strategy for the Web and Erin Kissane’s The Elements of Content Strategy.
/ What other brand voices do you admire?
Warby Parker, Anthropologie and everything I’ve seen so far from BankSimple. My dog likes The Honest Kitchen’s food, and I like their packaging copy. I admire 37Signals for getting right to the point.
/ Of all the things you’ve worked on and written for MailChimp, what are a couple of your favorites?
The Resources section, the Customer Story on A Book Apart, and MailChimp’s coloring book, Love What You Do. And I always love the challenge of taglines and short blurbs, like anything on the homepage.
/ Best places to eat in Atlanta?
Oooh, fun question! Some of my favorites: Leon’s, The Brick Store, Miller Union, Ria’s Bluebird, 246, Taqueria Del Sol, Bocado, Empire State South. I’m hungry.
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Thanks so much, Kate! Please check out MailChimp and read their fantastic blog. You can follow Kate on Twitter @katekiefer.
