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MailChimp v5 is Alive

Posted by Ben on


MailChimp v5 officially went live across 240,000 accounts at 1am ET this morning. We’ll be blogging about it all in more detail shortly, but here’s a list…

First, we’ve created a video of what we think are the biggest features:

Here’s a quick list of the major new features:

  1. Geolocation, so you can segment lists and send targeted campaigns to subscribers by location
  2. TimeWarp lets you automagically schedule campaigns by recipient timezone
  3. Delivery Doctor will scientifically dissect problem emails to diagnose the exact cause of delivery issues
  4. Design Genius helps you design a better email template
  5. Autotranslate your email content, or segment by language prefs and send your own translations
  6. Flickr integration lets you insert photos from your photosets into your email campaigns
  7. Quick polls can be added to your emails with a new merge tag

Refinements

Now, we all enjoy shiny new whiz-bang features (and helicopters) and all, but v5 is also packed with refinements to the app.

  • Security enhancements to accounts. In light of recent high profile hacks, we’ve put some security measures in place.
  • Security enhancements to API. Same as above, but for API users.
  • Completely reorganized the template gallery and template building interface. For example, you can now create folders, then drag and drop to organize all the templates you’ve created
  • Added new options for importing lists, and made it more clear when background processes were ongoing with big list imports
  • New option to collect “reason for unsubscribe” for your lists
  • Embedded signup forms had validation JavaScript that some people didn’t like. New option to turn that off and generate a “lite” signup form.
  • The geomap under reports that shows you where people opened has been expanded with +30 new countries you can now drill down into (the list of countries is in the comments here)
  • Made some behind-the-scenes changes to our API to prepare for an upcoming iPhone app (in the meantime, here’s MailChimp for iPhone users)
  • We’re using CSS3 in a few places to make the interface look crisper and more elegant. It’s an extremely subtle thing, but makes a big overall impact to the feel of the app