Apr 2, 2012

Public Beta of Mandrill SMTP Email Service

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.

What Mandrill does:

  • Uses MailChimp’s awesome email delivery engine
  • Has a simple and powerful API
  • Allows simple sending directly using SMTP
  • Tracks opens and clicks
  • Automatically adds Google Analytics tracking data to your URLs
  • Has pretty, visual reports of your email results
  • Allows you to tag your messages and see your stats filtered by tag
  • Integrates with MailChimp’s templating system, letting you export your MailChimp templates to Mandrill and use them in your transactional emails

How much does it cost?

If you have a free account with MailChimp, then Mandrill is also free for up to 12,000 emails per month. If you have a paid MailChimp account or if you want to send more than 12,000 Mandrill emails per month, it gets a bit more complicated. Basically, your Mandrill and MailChimp email volume is added together, and then billed based either on your MailChimp list size or your combined email volume, whichever one is greater. Each monthly MailChimp plan is allowed a sending volume equal to six times the largest allowed list size for the plan.

For example, if you are a paid MailChimp customer with a list of 5,000 members, you’re allowed 30,000 combined MailChimp and Mandrill emails. If you only send to your list twice per month, you can send 20,000 Mandrill emails absolutely free. If you want to send more Mandrill emails, you’ll be bumped into the next 5,001-10,000 plan for $25/month more, which will increase your limit to 10,000 list members or 60,000 emails.

Update: In response to confusion with the pricing plans, we’ve updated the Mandrill pricing information to be a bit simpler. First, if you don’t have a paid MailChimp account, then Mandrill’s paid accounts start at $9.95 per month for 40,000 emails per month. After that, you just pay as you send. The Mandrill home page has the full pricing chart.

If you do have a paid MailChimp account, you’ll get free sends in Mandrill based on how large your account is. If you are on the 5,000 member monthly plan, you’ll get 10,000 free Mandrill sends per month. If you are on the 10,000 member monthly plan, you’ll get 20,000 free Mandrill sends per month. The 50,000 member monthly plan gets 100,000 free Mandrill sends per month, and so on. The pricing calculator will include your MailChimp discount if you’re eligible for one.

Confused? The Mandrill signup page has a handy pricing calculator to see what your price will be given your sending volume.

 

To add Mandrill to your MailChimp account, just sign up. You can also sign up for Mandrill without a MailChimp account. More detailed setup information can be found in the Mandrill Knowledge Base.

What next?

We think Mandrill is an interesting addition to the MailChimp platform, but it’s far from finished. Now that we have an SMTP email platform that’s entirely MailChimp, we can move faster and do more to make Mandrill a compelling and necessary part of your email world. So if there’s something Mandrill doesn’t do that you need, please let us know. Just to whet your appetite, here’s something that our Mobile Lab has been working on:

 

Posted By

Chad

Tagged

Discussion

  • twitter_ericcholis

    I’m assuming this is recommend for use with transactional emails? Would shopping cart abandonment emails also be acceptable?

    04.02.2012

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  • Jana

    Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get your email marketer to set up a transactional email in Mandrill as easily as you can in Mailchimp – set up the merge tags etc. and then tell the developer which email to trigger and what variables they need to send.

    That way you could amend the creative without having to talk to a developer!

    04.03.2012

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    • Chad

      That’s exactly the use-case for our templates integration. You set up the template and the creative, then mark the elements that the developer needs to change with mc:edit. Then you can modify everything else about the template and push changes without involving the developer at all.

      04.03.2012

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  • momo

    I have a free MailChimp account, is Mandrill a different sign-up? Thanks, I would like to give a test try and test the Beta.

    04.10.2012

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    • Chad

      For now, your Mandrill account must be tied to an existing MailChimp account. You can enable Mandrill for your account by going to https://admin.mailchimp.com/mandrill/. When you do that, you’ll see Mandrill in your list of enabled integrations with links to the Mandrill interface where you can configure settings and see the rest of the reports and documentation.

      04.10.2012

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  • Michael Wilde

    Great idea! What about eBook sales… does it provide a service where some can buy an ebook through the email and instantly download it once the transaction has gone through?

    04.11.2012

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  • Andre

    cant you guys compete with amazon’s per email pricing of $0.10 per 1000 emails?

    04.11.2012

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  • Abhishek Shah

    howz this different from mailchimp API – cant one take an unlimited account and use the API to integrate and send transactional emails? sorry but excuse my ignorance

    04.15.2012

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  • Si

    Although it sounds interesting you have made an assumption that we have an idea of what you are talking about. I have no idea what a transactional or SMTP email service is and how it differs from the current service offered. From your explanation, I thought I was already doing that with my current Mailchimp account. Please explain for those of us who don’t talk techie.

    05.04.2012

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    • Chad

      The short description of the difference is that MailChimp is an application to let anyone send good looking emails and see the results. Mandrill is an application to help developers add email functionality into their applications and track the results.

      The even shorter description is that this is an email product for people who do talk techie.

      05.04.2012

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      • Tristan

        I’m a dev and I talk tech, and I even send transactional emails in my app, but I still didn’t understand what you’re offering and why I should want it from the get go. It’s a problem with your description of the product in the original post, not with our understanding or ability to “talk techie.” Make no assumptions about your audience, especially not pretentious ones. Start with a good description from square one and I might be enticed to read the rest. Simple as that.

        05.05.2012

  • Jóhann Marion Jóhannsson

    Sorry im not techie either.
    Can I use this like a confirmation email that when I confirm shipment, this tool sends automatically an email to the customer?

    05.05.2012

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  • Alice

    I am also confused as to whether this is a transactional email service or is actually able to replace my email client and do MailChimp-y things with my regular email.

    05.05.2012

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    • Ben

      Alice and Jóhann – Mandrill’s a transactional email service. Your app can send transactional emails with it by using our API, or by using our SMTP method (which makes setup seem “as easy as configuring your email client” but it can’t actually replace it). Think of MailChimp as a car built for speed, plus a large trunk to hold a ton of marketing email, plus lots of airbags and other safety features. Think of Mandrill as an engine. If you’re handy with tools, you can bolt it into your app and let it power your email.

      05.05.2012

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  • peteforde

    I’m a developer currently using the MailChimp API. Mandrill sounds exciting but I’m at a loss to understand what it gives me over the existing MCAPI.

    My suggestion is that you consider preparing a simple two column graph with a list of features, so that you can check off which has which.

    Alternatively, some case examples that clearly illustrate when one API is preferable to the other would go a long way.

    05.06.2012

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    • Chad

      The “features” of MailChimp and Mandrill are really very similar if you put them in a grid. The primary difference is the type of email that you’d send through the different services and the cost. A really simple example where you would use Mandrill rather than MailChimp is password reset emails. They are emails sent to one person at a time, when the person requests it. You don’t really have a “list”, and you don’t really have a “campaign” that you’re sending, so if you try to do this with MailChimp, you’ll find yourself having a very tough time making it work within MailChimp’s limits, and you wouldn’t get very good results out of it. The MailChimp API discussion group is littered with developers facing pain and frustration trying to do things like this where MailChimp wasn’t built for you.

      Basically, if you want to send pretty much the same content at pretty much the same time to a bunch of double-opted-in recipients with an unsubscribe link, you should use MailChimp – it’s designed for that and it works really well. Any other type of email at all (password resets, order receipts, confirmation messages, completely dynamic content – anything, really), you should use Mandrill. It’s more flexible and much cheaper.

      05.06.2012

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  • GTL Dev

    It is really great that Mailchimp has finally started its own transnational email service. Mandrill is still Public Beta. So can we use it for applications on production ?

    05.08.2012

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    • Chad

      Sure. We have many customers using Mandrill for production work right now, including TinyLetter and MailChimp itself. We consider the actual email sending side to be fully stable and production ready. The beta label mostly applies to how quickly and broadly we’re iterating on analytics and reporting features and the user interface.

      05.08.2012

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      • Mike

        Not all of my MailChimp templates are able to be sent to Mandrill. Is there something different in the template making process that I need to do to make them compatible with Mandrill?

        05.08.2012

      • Chad

        Due to some differences to how Mandrill and MailChimp process templates and handle merge fields, only “code your own” templates are allowed to be used in Mandrill. You can create them by going to “Code Your Own” in the templates area of MailChimp, or you can export and re-import an existing template.

        05.08.2012

  • Johnny Wong

    Can you confirm if Mandrill supports Email Authentication, just as you already do with MailChimp?

    05.13.2012

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    • Chad

      Mandrill does support DKIM and SPF authentication in the same way MailChimp does and then some. Mandrill will authenticate every email message – it’s not optional, and Mandrill provides tools to help you add our servers to your own domain’s records so you can easily authenticate with your own domain and remove the “on behalf of” from your emails.

      05.13.2012

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  • Kate

    So can we use Mandrill to send the sorts of once-off emails that are against Mailchimp’s TOS – like cart abandonment, post-order follow ups, etc?

    06.18.2012

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  • Aaron

    Would anyone know who designed the Mandrill logo. Looks fantastic!
    thanks, ap ~

    10.03.2012

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    • John

      Thanks Aaron, I’ll pass on your compliments to our in-house design team. They’re the ones who put together all logos and such for MailChimp and Mandrill.

      10.03.2012

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  • Dhiren

    Plug in works perfectly. using magento 1.7.X. Followed the instructions on the ebiz support site to a T and had no problems

    12.14.2012

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  • Kapil

    How Can I import my mailchimp templates into mandrill ?? I plan to use mandrill but only if this feature is available and easy. In mandrill , I could only find “code your own” template. Should I copy it from mailchimp and paste it to Mandrill ? Please enlighten

    04.08.2013

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    • Ben

      The Mandrill team has posted a lot of great support docs. Here’s one for templates:

      http://help.mandrill.com/entries/21694868-Getting-Started-with-Templates

      “In MailChimp, go to Dashboard > Templates > My Templates. Hover over a template stored in your account and click Send to Mandrill. If you update your template in MailChimp, you’ll need to send the template to Mandrill again to update it. Updates are not pushed automatically.”

      04.08.2013

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