Sometimes at MailChimp, we have ideas for features or new products, and we almost do them. Then for some reason we don’t. Then, we see someone else do it, and they do it waaaaaaaaay better than we would have. Then they integrate with our API. That’s when we say “Wow, we really lucked out there.”

Not because it saved us some dev cycles, but because it could’ve been such a distraction for us to jump into some totally different industry.

Like Lifecycle Marketing. Which is best left to companies like Performable, who just announced a new integration with MailChimp that lets you do some really amazing things.

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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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You know the hardest part about (and therefore the secret of) good email marketing? Telling a good story. Those quarterly newsletters you write should all come together to tell the story of your brand. If your story is all about saving money, then your daily email coupons should tell that story. Starving artist? That automatic email campaign you hooked up to your flickr or dribbble should tell your story (in pictures).

But curating a story for your emails is hard. Sometimes, I want to make a point in my email newsletters, and I end up spending days just writing the back story for it on our blog. Other times, the story is scattered across Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc. Finding them, bookmarking them, clipping and saving them into your story can be a pain.

There’s now an app for this painful process. It’s called Storify. And Storify now integrates with MailChimp…

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Last week, Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) launched, which is a very simple, very scalable, very affordable, API-based email delivery service. People in the dev and email communities were geeking out over it, because this is potentially a very disruptive force in the email industry.

Some people pointed out that SES appears to be (mostly) a transactional email service. In case you don’t know, transactional messages are usually one-to-one “system” notifications (examples include account setup emails, password reminder emails, purchase receipts, shipping notifications, etc). There’s a good techie discussion over at Hacker News about all this.

Other people wondered out loud how this might affect ESPs like MailChimp, who specialize in sending one-to-many messages. Did Amazon just make it extremely easy for programmers to develop a competing email delivery service?

“What does MailChimp think of all this?”

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As a part of the $1 Million Integration Fund, there’s a new way to bring in your content from an iOS device. The team over at Second Gear has updated their MarkdownMail app to integrate with MailChimp! What does this mean for you? Now, you can create content on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad and send it to your MailChimp account as a new campaign.

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