For many small businesses, getting a mobile app created for their restaurant, coffee shop or retail store seems time consuming and expensive. But it doesn’t have to be. Lately we’ve noticed several applications popping up that make creating a mobile app as easy as creating a web page. One particularly neat example of this (and the newest app to create an integration with MailChimp via the integration fund) is Bizness Apps.

Bizness Apps is “making mobile apps affordable and simple for small businesses.” They make it easy for anyone to create, edit and manage an iPhone and/or Android app online without any programming knowledge. But, what good is your new app if your customers can’t get it on iTunes or in the Android app store? Don’t worry, the staff at Bizness Apps will handle that part for you.

Even better, thanks to the integration fund, Bizness Apps now integrates with MailChimp, making it super simple to add a newsletter sign up form to your mobile app and have all your new subscribers automatically added to your MailChimp list.

For a complete walk through of how to set up the MailChimp integration in Bizness Apps, check out this tutorial or this screencast.

One of the neat things about the integration fund is that it allows us to fund development work with a huge variety of applications – including those that are targeted to specific industries. For example, we’ve got hundreds of churches using MailChimp to communicate with their congregations and, just like any other non profit, they have a hard time keeping track of their members, ministries, contributions, events etc. Which is why I’m excited to announce the next integration to launch out of our fund.

Church Office Online’s flagship product, Church Membership Online, is an inexpensive, user-friendly and accessible church management software with to goal of helping churches use technology to keep track of their ministries, volunteers, attendance trends, contributions, plus manage events, meetings, fundraisers etc.

Now they are integrated with MailChimp, allowing churches to sync data from their Church Membership Online account into their MailChimp lists, all with just a click of a button. Sending regular newsletters to update your membership as a whole or stay in touch with smaller segments like youth ministry or the softball team just got a whole lot easier.

They even put together a nice step by step video that walks you through using MailChimp with your Church Membership Online account.

I’ve been in the throes of managing our newly launched integration fund and I’m starting to notice a really neat trend. Many of our applicants want to build integrations with MailChimp for their own products, while also releasing the same integration functionality as an open source add-on for the open source application they’re using to power their product. This is really exciting because it means developing applications that integrate with MailChimp continues to get easier.

The latest project to be launched out of the integration fund is called MailMonkey and it’s an add-on for the free, open-source CMS Concrete5.

MailMonkey allows you to add site users to your lists in MailChimp and easily create special interest groups within that list. You can also add a signup form to your website, create and edit email campaigns, and view real-time statistics on how your email campaigns are doing, all from within your website dashboard.

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Using the MailChimp API, you can connect and sync just about any application with your MailChimp account. And we’re not just talking about passing emails back and forth. We’re talking about every tiny little stat you could ever want. Your affiliate links. Your segments. Batch subs & unsubs. Updating member info. Interest groups. Segments. IP address and signup datestamps.

Batchbook (a cool online CRM) recently linked all of their users’ accounts with MailChimp.

We’ve seen MailChimp users create entire extranets for their clients using the API.

It’s extremely powerful, because we have an API team that’s dedicated to nothing BUT developing new features and integrations with the API. And it’s totally free. Check out the API documentation, and here’s a sea of logos from applications we’ve linked to, or created plugins for, with the API:

Note: that image is a slide from a recent presentation. The “Salesforce” and “Highrise” integrations are going live in January-ish with our v4 launch. If you’ve created an interesting integration with MailChimp’s API, or if you’ve used one of our plugins, please comment below. We want to showcase your work!

A little monkey love for our API users. Very soon (this weekend if not sooner), under your MailChimp –> Account settings, you’ll be getting a new screen:

It’ll allow you programmers to troubleshoot your API implementations, find out if you’re hitting our limits, and let you see overall usage by day. There’s even a handy graph to indicate any usage spikes.

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