We have a motto that guides our work here at MailChimp: Listen hard and change fast. We’ve been doing a lot of both in the past few months. Last year some curious patterns emerged in feedback from our customers. There was so much feedback relating to the mobile experience. Let’s be honest—mobile devices aren’t just an industry trend; they’re a revolution changing our culture. We get that, but we wanted to find out how broader industry trends were shaping our customers’ day-to-day work.

We did a lot of traveling to meet with customers, and spent hours in interviews learning how people use MailChimp. We compiled hundreds of pieces of feedback from customers and our support team, and conducted surveys with thousands of users. All of this helped us see some places where MailChimp was falling short, but more importantly, it helped us see bigger trends. We realized people are still doing the same kind of work they always have, but there’s been a shift in how they get that work done. Most people are trying to do more with less. They have a ton of responsibilities to address by the end of the day, many are accountable to a boss who tracks their work, and there are still just 24 hours in the day. They’re using mobile devices to get stuff done during what would otherwise be idle time. 9-5 just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore.

With limited time and resources, teamwork is more important than ever. 35% of our customers are working collaboratively today, and we see this statistic increasing steadily. People are passing the baton to colleagues when they’re unable to complete a task. They’re collaborating in order to do better work and get it done quickly.

So the requests for a mobile experience were just symptomatic of a bigger change. We’re all feeling extra pressure to get more things done these days, and because we can’t work any harder, we have to start working smarter. That’s why we’ve created a brand-new MailChimp that will hopefully help you do just that.

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One year ago today, MailChimp’s Lead Engineer went rogue and formed a little startup inside our company called Mandrill. In one short year, Mandrill has grown to over 55,000 active users. That’s 100X the total number of users they had in May 2012. Since launching, the amount of email they’re sending every month has grown 100X, and revenue has grown 200X. We’ve begun the process of tightly integrating Mandrill data into MailChimp, and Mandrill is innovating like–well, like a bunch of rogue MailChimp engineers. Every week it seems they’re launching new features, dropping prices to infuriatingly disruptive levels, adding servers in more continents, and shaving milliseconds off delivery times.

We considered getting a congratulatory cake for the Mandrill team today, but I’ve learned that if it’s anything “offline” it’s not real to them. Instead, we put together this little comic strip: Purfickt Bahnana

Mandrill’s still got a way to go before it matches MailChimp’s 3 million users and 5 billion emails per month level, but something tells me they’ve got some tricks up their sleeve to make their graphs turn all exponential on me. I’m told Chad, the man who is out to destroy MailChimp from within (there, I said it) will be posting a one year retrospective on the Mandrill blog soon. That’s a good blog to follow if you’d like to learn more about transactional email, or destroying MailChimp from within. Happy Birthday, Mandrill!

For a lot of our customers, MailChimp campaigns are a team effort. They collaborate about content, send tests, gather feedback, and then request approval and sign-off. So in v8.2, launching today, we’re adding some collaboration tools to MailChimp to make all that easier. Here’s a preview of what’s coming.

Let’s start with the new “Comments” tab in the drag-and-drop editor:

Amazing things happen under that little tab.

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A lot of our customers use MailChimp as their CRM. We don’t think the world needs yet another CRM (there are already too many good ones), but we do think we can make your customer data easier to access. For example, we’ve redesigned our subscriber profiles to be less about subscription status, and more about customer data. We’ve also started to unify your customer data from outside sources.

Yesterday, we updated MailChimp Mobile (for iOS) to make managing your customer data easier on the go:

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Lately, I’ve heard a number of people saying something like “Send volume is the key to email success!” Basically, that means sending more email=engaging more, making more money, and doing better (whatever “better” means to you).

Their argument is simple:

1. My data shows that the more people receive/open/click my email, the more money I make.
2. Since I can’t magically conjure up new email addresses, I should therefore send more frequently to those email addresses I do have.

If you’ve got 10,000 addresses and every time you send to them you get 100 purchases, then by sending to these addresses twice a month instead of once, you’d expect to get 100 more purchases, right? That’s money in your pocket! Why not go for it?

And to a point, these folks are right. But it’s not that simple.

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