GoDaddy Acquires Email Marketing Service Mad Mimi

GoDaddy is adding another tool to its suite of small business services. Once known as just a place to buy domain names and website hosting, GoDaddy says that its latest acquisition – the email marketing service Mad Mimi – further shows its commitment to small businesses.

Terms of the sale have not been disclosed. According to information Small Business Trends has gleaned from a phone interview with a GoDaddy executive, there is no firm timetable for implementing this app into GoDaddy’s product line.

Mad Mimi is largely a free email marketing service. Gary Levitt, CEO and co-founder of Mad Mimi, told Small Business Trends that 80 percent of Mad Mimi users don’t pay a dime for the service.

He described his company as “stable”, noting that it has grown slowly since 2008.

Not only is the Mad Mini app designed to help small businesses with their marketing. Levitt describes his company as a small business, too. But he said he’s excited to have his product exposed to millions of GoDaddy customers as a result of the acquisition.

He described to us how his business has changed and how it has not, up through the acquisition by GoDaddy, when there are now 36 employees:

“We’re not the type of company that launched a year ago. It was just me, then me plus 1 and plus 1. I’m hoping we can keep the structure in place with a small team. The energy in the Mad Mimi development room is exciting.”

Mad Mimi allows small business owners and others to create attractive email marketing messages. The tool works like other services such as MailChimp in that it manages your contacts and tracks the success of your email messages. Messages are created within the Mad Mimi app. The look and feel of those messages can be altered.

Here’s a quick look at Mad Mimi in action:

Premium plans range from $10 per month basic to $1,049 per month for a much larger business. These plans allow you to host more images, send more messages, and make more customizations to the design of the emails you make.

Until the product is fully integrated into GoDaddy’s services, people interested in Mad Mimi are still supposed to sign up for the email marketing app through its original homepage. Full integration likely won’t occur until next year, according to a release on the sale.

In a Small Business Trends interview with GoDaddy Senior Vice President of Business Applications Steven Aldrich say his company has been looking for an email service to add to other small businesses services.

Aldrich explained:

“We’ve been moving to create a full suite of services to run businesses successfully. If we can bring the Mad Mimi product to as many of our 12 million customers as possible, then I know we can help them build better relationships with their customers and hopefully generate new business.”

Aldrich said recent studies show email marketing remains far more effective than social media at converting prospects into into customers. Aldrich added:

“One thing that has always amazed me is the stats with what is happening with email today. We were missing a great email marketing product. This is the next step in making email marketing mainstream for small businesses.”

Mad Mimi will eventually join services like GetFound, and Get Paid (a collaboration GoDaddy has with Dwolla, PayPal and PayPal Here) among the company’s growing number of small business offerings.

That growing portfolio is part of a steady acquisition spree and an international push by GoDaddy to meet the needs of small businesses worldwide.

Image: Mad Mimi

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