If you’re a web designer who manages lots of different MailChimp accounts for your clients, keeping track of all your client login/password info could be a real chore.
Not anymore! We just launched the MailChimp Keychain.
Here’s how it works…
Basically, your clients give you “keys” to access their accounts (they send an invitation to you via email).
All your different keys show up on your Keychain (located in the “Account” area in MailChimp).
Then, you can just login to those different accounts with one easy click:
No more passwords to memorize! No more sticky notes all over your monitor!
What’s really nice about this “peer-to-peer” approach is that if you and your client ever “part ways,” they can just revoke their key and moooove on. No need to help them setup a new account, export and re-import lists, etc.
Also, if you have a keychain with access to multiple accounts, you can give your own key to someone else in your agency (maybe someone with “super account status”) who will also have access to your keychain.
Special thanks to Creative Media Farm and Ice Design Group for helping us beta test this!
This seriously rules.
Awesome!
I just had a bad dream that all my accounts were merge into one, and just the lists were seperate. I was so upset when I woke up, that I emailed for a solution to the logout/login problem and found out about this!
Thanks for the mention!
We were thrilled to help at the jungle.
Love this feature. Guess the days of tattooing our customer’s passwords on grandma’s forehead are over…
Keep those beta coming!
While I appreciate the new feature, I would much rather have it the other way around. In other words, I would love to keep my clients list on my account and provide them with “keys” to access their individual lists to view reports. The biggest benefit would be discounts on pay-as-you-go credits.
I agree with Leroy – some method of administrating multiple users (in one account, preferably) would be a wonderful feature.
Jason, multi-user access is one of those features that can potentially “wag the dog.” We’ve intentionally held off on that, along with a couple of other features, till we feel we’re ready. It’s on our radar, but we’ve got a few other big things we want to get done first.
Thanks for your reply, Ben. A couple follow ups:
1) Do you have an ETA for the multi-user feature?
2) Do you plan to build it so that folks that have multiple accounts that are keychained can migrate their accounts into a single multi-user account?
These are important questions for me to answer for some strategic planning I’m undertaking at the moment. Thanks!
Jason, I have no ETA. Sorry. Keychains are meant for another use-case scenario altogether (agencies managing multiple clients, not a company w/multiple users) so I can’t see us “merging” those features. One thing I’ve noticed with a lot of customers who have the need for multi-user access is that internally, they often have some kind of CMS tool w/all the permission and access controls and workflow tools already in place. A lot of times they’re using WordPress as their CMS (which has its own user access controls). Or maybe Drupal, Joomla, etc. If that’s the case, MailChimp has lots of ways you can integrate with your CMS, so that your publishers never even have to log in to MailChimp at all. You can just use MailChimp as your delivery engine. If that’s *not* the case now, then it’s food for thought for your strategic planning. You might want to invest in your own content and workflow tool (CMS) for your film library, then integrate that w/MailChimp instead of relying on this feature when it eventually goes live. I only bring this up because there’s a chance we might launch it w/out the exact functionality you want (since we’re designing for so many different users).
I was wondering if the 15% discount that is available on agency accounts is in some way applicable on the client accounts that are introduced to the keychain
I’m wondering the same thing, having the discount for key-managed accounts would be great.
Ben,
Looks we ran out of nesting levels. Thanks for the additional info. The primary thing we need is for each of our distributors to have access to their own subscriber list (or a filtered version of a master list – best, but would require multi-user account) while our corporate office still retains the ability to access and send to the entire list.
Right now, we can only do that manually with each of our distributors having their own account and us accessing each account to pull/merge the subscribers into a master list on our corporate account for promotion messages across our entire network.
Will the functionality you’re building for the multi-user version be able to do what I’m needing, and what do you recommend in the meantime?
Hmm. Would a CRM integration work? Where you centralize your master dB in one place, but link each distributor’s account to it?
I agree with Leroy and Jason. Lack of sub-account support is what’s forcing me to look elsewhere, and I hate to do so because MailChimp has a LOT going for it. I’m going to think through whether this keychain idea would be an acceptable hack for me, but Ben clearly indicated that it’s not built for the sub-account scenario, so I’m worried about going down that road.
Great stuff,
This makes a lot of sense, and is a positive stop-gap until you introduce a way to give clients access to master account.
I agree with a couple of guys on here that it might make more sense having things the other way round, but from experience clients generally want to have complete control of their lists. Both have their merits.
Look forward to future releases!
I also agree that a Sub-Accounting feature would rock!
I’d allow me to bring several thousand clients, their lists, & contacts over to your service, allowing for seamless integration with our existing Admin Interface (Currently playing the stall game so that ‘The Zookeepers’, aka bosses, don’t make us go elsewhere).
Some methods added to the API in the form of CreateSubAccount, etc… well that’s just a chocolate covered banana isn’t it?
Please toss some poo my way if you need any help, feedback, testers, etc… I R Software Engineer!
it would help to know how up to date these replies are by adding the date of the reply…
Regards,
Chris.
I was just today looking at a multi user scenario, as I have about 100 clients that want to have a centralized yet, separate mailing list, as an example, say we have 100 wedding shops that wish to maintain their own lists, but have a common franchise branded application, concept. where we would provide them with specific software solutions, integrated using MC as a service.
I was asked to check into this as an option but so far I do not see a solution. I looked at the Agency option but could not find much information on its use, there was some rather vague info but no real solid info or I missed it, anyway, a multi user interface with billing would be way cool for us.
This is really nice, will make our life easy.
Hi Ben,
I was able to get access through account key, but I was not able to find out how to I login back to my account e.g. 72interactive and competent.
The access was provided by competent to 72interactive. Now using 72interactive account details I can login to competent, but then how do I return to 72interactive, without log off.
Please explain.
Hi Amit, the way it works is you have to log off, then go back to 72interactive’s account. I’d personally prefer it this way, to prevent you from accidentally corrupting client accounts with the wrong data or content. We also have security measures in place that require this behavior. If you have a strong use-case for keeping multiple sessions alive, let us know.
Yes, thats I know Ben, but as you go into account key to login into client’s account, it would have been better if there was a button on top saying “Back to 72interactive Account”.
This would make life easy I guess.
I’ll pass that on to our UX team as a suggestion. Thanks!
It would be great if there was a way to initiate the relationship from the agency account… somehow.
Then have them just agree or approve. Or maybe as part of the agency account referral link… it asks when the user is setting up the account:
Do you want OpenPotion to have administration access to your account? Yes, they are helping us with our account. No, they just told us about you, but we don’t need their help.
Ben, in reference to what Amit was saying, it’d be nice to have a button back to your own “root” account.
maybe there could at least be a piece of information in the upper right hand corner of the page (next to the Help button?) that states what account you are in.
there have been several times when i’m working on multiple email campaigns for different clients… and just want a visual cue as to what account i’m using via a key… the MailChimp humor doesn’t always state the client’s name.
the keychain is great though!
One of the features we’ve been building up to — which might make all this moot — is the ability to slightly customize the design of the MailChimp app to match your (or your client’s) own brand. We’d basically allow you to upload your (or your client’s) own logo at the top of our app. To set expectations, this isn’t so much a white label thing, as it is a way to decorate. Like putting your favorite stickers on your laptop, or customizing BaseCamp to make yourself feel “at home.”
I’m thinking once this is live, there will be no confusion about what account you’re in. That being said, will still show this to our UX team. We may want to display some account info in our top toolbar anyway. Thanks all for your feedback.
I am trying to get my friends mailchimp account to allow me access… I have sent myself the email from his account, but I have not received the email to enable this feature (tried 3 times now).
We are both on FREE accounts… does this effect it working?
Shouldn’t affect it. For now, we don’t explicitly block any functionality from freemium users, aside from stricter different send limits. This is something you’ll need to talk to our support team to diagnose.
I have an RFP where there are 27 local groups, in a state-wide Consortium, like the franchise models mentioned before, where the parent group wants to be able to mail to the local “chapters”.
Hi Ben,
I saw that you wrote about this:
Like putting your favorite stickers on your laptop, or customizing BaseCamp to make yourself feel “at home”.
Is this in place already?
yep:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/introducing-co-branding/
I would love the multi-user function.
I plan to have a number of lists in my account and have a separate employee create the content for each list.
I’d like to give each employee a login which will
1) Allow them to send out emails only to their list.
2) Not allow them to have access to the actual emails in their list (that’s my property).
If anyone has any ideas on a solution for this – please let me know!!
So far, all I can think of is to get the employees to submit their content to a designated “sender” employee who will send out the various emails to the appropriate list (hopefully). Not that great.
You might tinker with the email beamer feature:
http://mailchimp.com/features/email-beamer/
Each employee could send email content to a private email address for each list, and MailChimp will deliver it w/out them logging in.
I’ve seen some companies wire our rss-to-email feature:
http://mailchimp.com/features/rss-to-email/
to their internal CMS. Basically, each employee publishes their own content to an RSS feed, and MailChimp will pull the content into a daily/weekly/monthly email.