You can do some amazing things with the new MailChimp API. For example, a lot of our customers (especially web designers) want to build private-label “mini-MailChimps”, where their clients can log in and simply grab email campaign stats (but not send campaigns, or mess up email templates).

That’s actually something you can do pretty easily with the MailChimp API. So we got an example from long time MailChimp customer, Murray Summers.

Murray Summers, owner of Great Web Sights (and Adobe Community Expert, MailChimp Expert, author, and biochemist), knows our API better than we do. When we wrote our very first API, he basically helped rewrite it. When we wrote our new API, we said, “We better get it right, or you-know-who is going to call us out for it.” Anyway, we asked Murray to show us an example of what he’s done for one of his clients, using our API:

Project Background:
Murray’s client, StaffMonkey (excellent name, BTW) sends HTML email updates on behalf of their non-profit clients. The emails are basically fund raising updates to donors. StaffMonkey wanted a way to let their clients see their campaign stats (opens, clicks, which donors opened, what they clicked, etc), but they didn’t want the clients to have full access to StaffMonkey’s “master” MailChimp account.

Here’s how Murray & his client did it:

1. StaffMonkey setup a MailChimp account.
2. Then they setup separate lists for each of their clients.
3. Then they installed the AIM reports add-on for their account (it gives the enhanced, recipient-level reports that the client’s clients need).
4. Murray setup a password protected page on the client’s website, which is hosted on Drupal (by the way, there’s a Drupal add-on for MailChimp here).
5. The client’s clients can log in to that page, and check their stats for every campaign. They can drill down to learn what their donors are reading and clicking, and how many times. They can even grab bounces and unsubs if they want (such as to sync with their own databases). And according to Murray, “The real benefit here is that client A cannot peruse client B’s data.”

Here’s a screenshot, with private information cloaked (click to zoom in):

Hopefully, this sparks a few ideas for some of our web design clients on how you can offer some new and useful services for your clients. We’ve seen agencies use the API to link their clients’ CMS tools into MailChimp, blogs, project management systems, and e-commerce carts.

If you’ve got an API example we can showcase, or any cool implementation of MailChimp, send it to me: ben -at- mailchimp -dot- com.

And we’re working on even more powerful additions to the API, to really open things up. Stay tuned.