Every other week, Customer Love offers a quick snapshot of one of MailChimp’s wonderful users.
Who: John Malloy 
What: An illustrator
Where: Westfield, NY
Why we love him: He’s found a place for his distinctive style in outlets as varied as Businessweek, AirTran, and Tiger beer. Whether he’s drawing Al Green, working on a children’s book with a cast member from The Wire, or finding inspiration in Occupy Wall Street, Malloy’s illustrations tell stories through pictures.
MailChimp offers great built-in campaign reports, but high-volume senders who are especially concerned with their list size might be looking for more detailed analytics on their lists, as opposed to individual campaigns. This stuff’s important—especially if you’re sending campaigns daily, and your business revolves around email. A closer look at your list’s health can help you understand your subscribers’ behavior and make sense of MailChimp’s campaign reports. What percentage of your list is opening your emails? What about the click rate for your “power users” list? Is the open rate better when you send on Sundays or Mondays? MailChimp Labs created a new app called ListMD to answer these questions and more.
Pinterest “lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web” with anyone. This popular pioneer in the new trend of visual bookmarking is a free service for everyone. It’s fun to use and its user base is growing incredibly fast. Last month alone, Pinterest received 104.4 million unique site visits, landing them third in line behind only Facebook and Twitter. That’s pretty mind-blowing. This unprecedented growth is likely due to the friendly atmosphere that is created specifically by each individual user. If all you want to see when you log in are pictures of baby giraffes, whatever this is (no judging), or in our case, beautiful campaigns, then by all means go for it. Pinterest steps out of the way and allows you to make their product yours – and now you can share that customized bank of inspiration with your subscribers.
Pinterest can be a great asset to any company. Think of it as a public space where you can find common ground with your customers, thanks to a shared love of pretty pictures. Pin what you love—whether it’s badass machines, delicious food, or modern furniture.
To use this integration, head over to the Pinterest Chimplet.
We’re always trying to find new ways to accomodate the needs of our users, and this integration is no exception. Type in your Pinterest username and you will instantly see a drop-down menu of your individual boards to choose from. You can create your campaign using all of your pins, or your pins from just one board!
Last August we released an Adobe Air app called Hairball. Hairball allows you to perform complex list segmentation queries offline on your own machine. When you’re done, you can push a static segment containing the results back to your MailChimp account. In depth installation and use discussion for the previous version can be found in the Hairball knowledge-base article and How to Use Hairball guide. Today, we’re happy to announce a second version of that software which is available for download here:
Along with various bug fixes and speed improvements, the new version of Hairball includes some fancy new features that users have been asking for. Specifically, the new features beef up what Hairball can do with campaign-performance data, allowing users to take the first step in interest-based segmentation using historical reader engagement data. Read More
About a year ago, we launched STS – a transactional email service built on top of Amazon SES. In that time, we’ve seen the integration grow to a moderate success, now sending on average over 100,000 messages every day. While we’re happy with the cool things people have built on top of our integration, we’ve received a ton of requests from customers for features that we felt we really couldn’t accomplish on top of a limited platform like Amazon’s. We’ve also spent years building a world-class platform for email delivery and analytics, so the devs were constantly saying “why don’t we use this platform to build an email service that’s MailChimp through-and-through?” That thought turned into a prototype labs project called Mandrill which we are excited to announce has graduated to public beta.
At its core, Mandrill is similar in functionality to our STS integration, but using the same optimized delivery engine that MailChimp uses for the delivery of our bulk newsletters – slightly modified for one-to-one email. You still need to be a programmy nerd to use it, so if you’re not comfortable with code and APIs, you’ll need to find someone who is before you get started using Mandrill.
