We’re launching MailChimp v4.1 this weekend, and it’s a real doozy. Here are the major new features:

1. Autoresponders – Schedule a series of email campaigns to automatically send to subscribers. Also includes birthday and anniversary reminders.
2. Lots more email template options – We’ve changed the way our template designer works whenever you’re creating new templates. There will be lots more options available, including rounded corners (See: Want 700,000 email templates?)
3. Freshbooks integration – Easily import your customer contacts from Freshbooks into MailChimp
4. Redesigned Lists Dashboard – While working on autoresponders, we got some good ideas for redesigning the way our lists dashboard is laid out. We’ve refreshed the look and feel, and made it easy to sort your list of lists.
5. List Activity Score – You’re going to see little stars next to each of your lists. The more stars you have, the better your deliverability. See: Your List Activity Score and deliverability.
6. Reports section redesign – The growing number of amazing email campaign stats and reports that MailChimp generates are starting to crowd the interface. So we’ve re-structured things.
7. Detailed regional data added to geomaps – Our very popular “where did people open from” geomap report is getting updated so that you can zoom in on more regions: Canada, Venezuala, Denmark, and Belgium. Also, we’re adding a little chimpy personality to the opens data with local slang, contributed by our own customers.
8. New language updates – Armenian and Icelandic translations have been added, while our Dutch, French Canadian, German, Hungarian, and Romanian translations have been updated (thanks again to our international users!) See: Does MailChimp support my language?

API related upgrades

1. API List synchronization – Made it easy to simply ask the MailChimp API for “what’s changed?”  so that you can keep your lists synched between MailChimp and your own internal dB.
2. API Callbacks – whenever a subscriber makes a change to their profile settings (or when they subscribe or unsubscribe) we can send you a notification via the API.

More details about each of these new features (and a few others we’ll announce) will be posted after rollout.

Rolling upgrade process starts Sunday 3/29

This will be a “rolling upgrade” process where we keep all servers running, and update each user’s account one at a time (really, really fast). There is no expected downtime for this upgrade. But there are so many accounts to upgrade, some of you might not see autoresponders right away. It might take until Wednesday or Thursday for some users to see their account upgraded.

You’ll know your account has been upgraded when you see a big “You’ve been upgraded” screen upon login.