MailChimp recently launched Mandrill, its new transactional email product, and I stumbled across some interesting results while dogfooding it with a couple of side-projects. For those of you who don’t know, transactional emails are just one-off emails triggered by some action like signing up for an account or requesting a password reset.

BillMinder and DebtMinder

Some back story: by day, Drew and I work in MailChimp’s Mobile Lab. In our spare time, we run a little company called R7, and we make a few financial related iPhone apps (BillMinder, and its lesser-known sibling, DebtMinder). Whenever new users downloaded those apps and created accounts, we used Mandrill to send their welcome emails. This post is about how we used Mandrill’s beautiful reporting tools, as well as some design tweaks to our welcome email, to increase unit sales of one of the apps by 57%.

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If you haven’t noticed by now, we put a lot of effort into making it easy for developers to build apps on top of MailChimp’s email delivery engine via our API. As if our $1 million MailChimp Integration Fund wasn’t enough of an excuse, I thought I’d mention a few Ruby gems you can use to make integrating MailChimp with your apps even easier…

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A while ago we released Golden Monkeys for iPhone, an app that helps you keep up with your mailing list VIPs. It’s taken us a little while to get an Android version together since we had to learn how to create Android apps.

Android SDK is quite different from our specialty here at the Mobile Lab, iOS SDK, but there are some really nifty things one can do with it and we’re now feeling more comfortable using it. Anywho, we got our feet wet by releasing ChimpNews for Android (iOS version here), which was a good way to explore Google’s Push Notifications service. Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) requires Android 2.2, which is reasonably well adopted at this point. So we rolled up our sleeves and built Golden Monkeys for Android, which is available now.

Stay tuned. We’re working on more apps for both Android and iOS.

I’m excited to share that Golden Monkeys is now available on the App Store.

Golden Monkeys helps you keep up with your VIPs. You select the folks you want to keep up with, then sit back and let Golden Monkeys alert you (in near real time)  whenever they open or click recent campaigns.

Golden Monkeys for Android isn’t quite ready but it will be available soon. Just a heads-up: it’ll require Android 2.2 (for push support).

Tons of you have already downloaded and tried out Pyow! and we’ve been using it here at MailChimp as well. I thought I would share some tips on how to get the most out of Pyow!.
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