A few years ago MailChimp decided to take video seriously. Well, in the beginning, the videos themselves were never very serious, in fact, quite the opposite. But they have always served a very serious purpose, which is to help our customers learn how to use MailChimp, learn about new features and learn about our awesome customers.

But how do we know if these videos are doing their job? I get asked that a lot. Well, it’s all about the stats.

Graph of viewership, spiking the day we emailed the Wavelength video.

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Every once in a while we get complaints from customers who want to run really complex segmentation criteria in MailChimp, but they keep bumping into our segmentation limitations. Truth is, we put those limits in place to keep a handful of customers from destroying our servers for the 900k other users on the system. Some of their queries could really turn our databases into a hairball of a mess. To get around those limitations, we’ve seen customers create multiple MailChimp accounts, open up separate tabs to run more segments, and all kinds of crazy hairbally stuff that would make our servers choke.

So we created Hairball. It’s an Air app that you install on your computer, and it syncs with your MailChimp list. Then, you can GO NUTS building all kinds of segments with your list. When you’re done, you sync it back up to MailChimp.

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Occasionally, we receive requests for instructions on how to export a group of contacts from your email address book to MailChimp. If you take the time to clean up your address book and avoid a full address book dump, you can import your list safely. We’ve already got a few KB articles that explain how to export contacts from Outlook, Apple’s Address Book and Entourage. But if your list lives in Apple’s Address Book, Chimport might be for you and it’s available on the Mac App Store for free.
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Are you one of our loyal customers or even just an outside admirer who loves the MailChimp branding and all that cutesy stuff we do? If so, you probably want to quietly click away now because I am not some creative designer or even one of our awesome UI/UX folks. I maintain all aspects of our APIs and have for quite a while. So yeah, those guys don’t like it when I touch things that aren’t code.

3 ½ years ago, right before our v3.0 launch, the powers that be decided they wanted to heavily invest in our API. Sure, we had an API in one form or another prior to that, but it wasn’t versioned or well documented, and did all sorts of other stuff that wasn’t “web scale”. At all. That was a time when we were sporting about 40k active customers and looking at a few hundred API users (tops). Before we get into fun things like today’s real numbers, charts, and pretty pictures, let’s take a little stroll through the API’s history from conception….

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We’re very happy to announce that MailChimp now integrates with SurveyMonkey (and when we get happy, we start giving away cool t-shirts, so keep reading).

With this integration, you can send a survey link to your list from MailChimp, and then do some really cool tracking and targeting. Here’s how it all works…

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