Context

Mailchimp developed one of the most thorough content style guides and made it publicly available as a reference for its customers. When I joined the Technical Content team as a Senior Content Strategist, I discovered that our team of technical writers had cobbled together homegrown content guidelines and templates to address their specific use cases, which were not covered by the global style guide.

Problem

The Technical Content team lacked centralized, research-backed guidelines for writing help and educational content. There were nuances to writing about the product and features that were not covered in the Mailchimp style guide. Additionally, the framing of the company-wide segments and personas did not account for learning styles or how customers use content to solve problems.

What I did

• User interviews

  • I spoke to 10 Mailchimp customers representing small businesses across industries (e-commerce, education, professional services, non-profit) and used these interviews to uncover patterns in preferences and behavior for consuming educational and help content.

• Learning personas

  • Based on the user interviews I developed a set of five learning personas. These personas overlapped with the company’s existing marketing personas but added the nuance needed to target effective educational content to specific user segments.

• Expanded tone and style guidance

  • I created a Customer Education Style Guide that expands on the existing Mailchimp Style Guide to address the needs and preferences of the learning personas.

• Article framework consultation

  • Working closely with the Technical Content editorial team, I advised on the initiative to streamline and improve help article frameworks. These frameworks provide the structure and limitations for four distinct article types and use learning goals as foundational direction.

• Team training and documentation

  • I created a live training and video tutorial to introduce the team to the new, expanded guidelines. I also created a resource hub on the team’s wiki for easy access to materials and training.

Outcomes

Creating a centralized repository of guidelines and a dedicated Customer Education Style Guide improved team efficiency and article consistency. The launch of simplified article frameworks laid the groundwork for using AI to organize and draft new articles, thereby reducing time-to-publish. This work closed a critical gap in internal resources and training for the team responsible for Mailchimp’s Help Center content.