Introduction
Every day, over 376 billion emails are sent worldwide, and the average person receives well over a hundred of them. Most of those emails get ignored, archived, or deleted without a second thought. A small number get opened, read, and acted upon. That gap is not luck. It is craft.
We now have the credentials to prove we know that craft.
Positioning Partners has earned Mailchimp Certification across two tracks, Foundations and Email Marketing, through Intuit Mailchimp’s official Academy programme. It’s formal recognition that our team meets a global, platform-verified standard for building and running email campaigns that convert.
What Certified Email Marketing Gets Your Brand.
- A global, platform-verified standard, not guesswork
- List segmentation and targeting that gets the right message to the right audience
- Deliverability practices that keep your brand out of spam folders
- AI-assisted automation for welcome sequences, re-engagement, and lifecycle emails
- Performance reporting that treats opens and clicks as a diagnostic, not a vanity metric
Email Isn't the Old Channel. It's the Undefeated One.
There’s a persistent myth in marketing circles that email is legacy technology, kept alive by habit rather than performance. The data says otherwise. Email marketing consistently returns between $36 and $42 for every $1 spent (that is roughly R580 to R680 for every R10 invested at current exchange rates). This range has held its own and, in some sectors, this range has grown across independent studies for years, translating to a return on investment (ROI) of roughly 3,600% to 4,200%. No paid social platform or search campaign comes close on a like-for-like basis.
The conversion gap makes the case even more plainly. Email traffic converts to purchases at around 4.24%, compared with 2.49% for search and just 0.59% for social media. A channel built on permission simply outperforms channels built on interruption.
And AI hasn’t displaced email. It’s sharpened it. Organisations using AI to generate and optimise subject lines are seeing open rates rise by roughly 26% compared with manually written alternatives, with dynamic send-time optimisation adding a further 14% lift when combined [4]. Brands using AI-driven personalisation are reporting revenue gains of up to 42%, with click-through rates exceeding 13% [5]. By late 2026, an estimated 61% of enterprise email programmes are expected to use AI for at least one part of campaign creation [4], not to replace strategic judgement, but to sharpen targeting, timing, and relevance at a scale no human team could manage alone.
The lesson for brands isn’t “email or AI.” It’s email, made sharper by AI, still doing what it has always done best: reaching people who already chose to listen.
Email marketing consistently returns between $36 and $42 for every $1 spent (that is roughly R580 to R680 for every R10 invested at current exchange rates).
Why Mailchimp
Certifications are only as credible as the platform behind them. So the fair question is: why build capability specifically on Mailchimp?
Scale and market leadership. Mailchimp remains the most-used vendor in the email marketing category [6], with a user base reported at over 11 million globally [7]. This scale advantage matters because it means Mailchimp’s product decisions, deliverability infrastructure, and AI tooling are shaped by more real campaign data than most competitors see.
Enterprise-grade backing. Mailchimp operates as part of Intuit’s ecosystem, the same company behind QuickBooks, bringing financial-grade infrastructure, security, and long-term platform stability to a tool small and mid-sized businesses depend on daily.
Depth without the enterprise price tag. Mailchimp’s toolkit spans segmentation, automation, landing pages, and analytics in one platform, which matters for South African brands that need enterprise-calibre marketing capability without an enterprise-sized martech stack.
It’s where the credentialing infrastructure lives. Getting certified on the platform most of the market already runs on means our capability is portable; it applies directly to the tool your business is most likely already using, or should be.
None of this means Mailchimp is the only credible platform in the category, and part of doing this work properly is knowing when a client’s needs point elsewhere. But for the majority of the campaigns we build, SME lead generation, corporate newsletters, e-commerce lifecycle emails, Mailchimp’s combination of scale, reliability, and AI-assisted tooling makes it the right default.
What the Certification Actually Tested
A badge is a small thing to hold and a hard thing to earn. It means we were tested on the mechanics that separate an email that gets opened from one that gets archived unread:
- List building and segmentation: reaching the right audience, not everyone at once
- Campaign architecture: subject lines, send times, and sequencing that respect how people actually read email
- Deliverability: the technical groundwork that keeps a brand out of spam folders and inside inboxes
- Automation and journeys: welcome sequences, re-engagement flows, and lifecycle emails that work continuously
- Performance analytics: reading opens, clicks, and conversions as a diagnostic, not a vanity metric
Segmented email campaigns generate up to 760% more revenue than non-segmented campaigns (Campaign Monitor/Mailchimp).
Email Marketing Services, Now Backed by Certification
This certification isn’t a plaque for the wall. It’s now part of what Positioning Partners offers as a full-service marketing and communications agency: certified email marketing strategy, campaign builds, automation, and performance reporting, delivered by a B-BBEE Level 1 agency based in Sandton, Gauteng.
If your brand’s email marketing has been an afterthought, or if it’s running without anyone checking whether it actually works, that’s a conversation worth having.
Get in touch with Positioning Partners to talk about certified email marketing for your brand.
Positioning Partners is a B-BBEE Level 1 marketing and public relations agency based in Sandton, South Africa.
