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.

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.

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.

MailMonkey was created by SevenPixel3 and was born out of CEO Chad Cantrell’s need for an email solution that he could easily integrate with his product, MinistryPage.com. MinistryPage is a website builder designed to provide an array of tools to church administrators that will make many of their overwhelming administrative tasks easier.

In addition to creating a professional-looking website and having access to MinistryPage’s ministry planning tools, Chad wanted his users to be able to sync their contacts, manage their email campaigns and view their reports all in one convenient space, without having to leave their own website. Plus, since MinistryPage is built on Concrete5, Chad knew he could also release his integration as an add-on into Concrete5’s open source community, allowing even more people to benefit from his development work.

So, Chad applied to the integration fund with his idea and we decided to fund the project. If there’s anything I love more than the Internet, it’s kittens on the Internet, (I’m just trying to be honest). And if there’s anything I love more than kittens in the Internet, it’s an integration that extends the utility of our application to as many groups of people as possible.

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!

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.

Don’t know what an API is? It stands for “application programming interface. “It’s a way for programmers to link other applications (blogs, CRMs, CMS, eCommerce, etc) with MailChimp. You do your thing, and let MailChimp handle email delivery, tracking, and list management. Powerful stuff.

Related MailChimp API News:

1. Batchbook CRM Integration with MailChimp
2. Ecommerce Integration w/MailChimp (Magento, osCommerce, FoxyCart, ZenCart, & more)
3. API Wrappers in Ruby, Python, .Net, PHP, Coldfusion and LOLcode (yes, LOLcode)
4. Blog Plugins for WordPress, MovableType, TypePad, and more
5. Drupal and Joomla plugins for MailChimp

1. RSS-to-email: When you create your HTML email newsletters, do you find yourself simply copy-pasting from your blog a lot? We did too. So we figured we’d make that process faster by just creating an automatic email newsletter from your blog’s RSS feed. Now you can just publish news, events, or documents to your website or blog (or anything else you publish with RSS) once, and then we’ll send that to your subscribers automatically. And unlike other RSS-to-email tools, MailChimp lets you create eye-catching HTML email templates around your feed, insert targeted advertising using our advanced merge tags for dynamic content, and then track your opens and clicks. Yes. Pretty designs, targeted advertising, and tracking. In your RSS feed.
2. Analytics 360: We’ve made some enhancements to our Google Analytics integration that eRetailers in particular might find useful for tracking your ROI.
3. International Translations: Whenever you setup a new list in MailChimp, the entire opt-in process is now available in 16.5 different languages. The translations include signup forms, landing pages, error messages, welcome emails, forward-to-friend pages—everything that your end users see when they opt-in to your lists. Our agency users across the globe might find this useful for setting up their local clients.
4. Batch Unsubscribe: Used to be, you had to unsubscribe people one at a time in MailChimp. No more. Now you can copy-paste a big list of people, and we’ll unsub them all in one swoop.
5. MonkeyRewards expanded: A while ago, we quietly launched MailChimp MonkeyRewards, which was a simple affiliate program where if you refer customers to MailChimp, you and the customer get $30 in MailChimp credits each (which you can use for purchasing add-ons, email credits, whatever). Now, we’ve expanded that program to include free Inbox Inspections. For every $100 the people you refer spend new customer you refer, we’ll give you 3 free inbox inspections. All you have to do is stick a MailChimp badge in your email campaigns, and help us spread a little monkey love.
6. Smarter Bounce Handling: In the past, MailChimp categorized bounces in black and white (hard vs. soft). These days, there are all kinds of shades of gray when it comes to bouncebacks. There are spam filters that bounce back emails with embedded “if you’re human, try again later” messages. There are ISPs that bounce back emails with embedded “whoah, slow your deliveries down” messages. And there are improperly configured email servers that just bounce back garbage. Many of these new servers and spam filters are ignoring standard SMTP header protocols. In short, there’s a lot of trickery (and a little stupidity) going on out there, so sometimes we have to clean emails from your list that don’t necessarily need to be cleaned. So we’ve scanned hundreds of millions of bounce backs on our servers, looked for patterns, and classified all the different bounce messages. The net result is your lists will be cleaned a little more “gently” moving forward.
7. B.A.R.F. Download: Okay, I made that name up just now. Until someone thinks of a better name, that’s what I’m going with. It’s a Big A$$ Report File that you can download from the Reports page, and see all your stats across all your campaigns in one spreadsheet. We heard a lot of you were creating spreadsheets like this by hand, so we thought we’d save you a step. Just click a link, and we’ll barf out all your stats at once, so you can compare them side-by-side.
8. Mini-signup box: When you setup a list in MailChimp, there’s a new mini-signup box that you can customize and copy-paste onto any page of your website (instead of linking people to a totally separate page that we host). Think of it as a signup form, but really tiny and cute, and we give you all the code.

MailChimp API enhancements:

1. API v1.1: The MailChimp API has been overhauled and beefed up so that now you can do almost anything with the API that you can do in the app’s interface. We’ve added A/B split testing to the API, along with segmentation, the CSS inliner, merge vars and interest group management, the ability to import a campaign from a URL, and more. There are even some things that you can do via the API that you can’t do from our app. Like build a campaign with 10 different segments (instead of the standard 3). See this email announcement to our API list for more info.
2. OpenSocial API Integration: MailChimp can now be integrated with any application following Google’s OpenSocial standards, like MySpace, Ning, Orkut, and more.
3. More code samples and help: We’ve added 60+ error codes, and added more code examples to the list. So in addition to PHP, XML, .Net, and Ruby, we’ve added a little documentation for LOLCODE, an emergent programming language that’s taking the world by storm (some say it’s more scalable than Ruby, will probably replace the ARPANET completely, and may become the foundation for web 3.0). KTHX!

We’ve also made some enhancements to the MailChimp interface:

1. Inbox Inspector Campaigns: Some of you use other email marketing services (and they’re perfectly fine. seriously.) and you just use MailChimp for our inbox inspector tool. Problem was, we assumed you were also sending campaigns in MailChimp, so we required all the special MailChimpy tags, like for the unsubscribe link. This could get really annoying if you already had your own unsubscribe link in place. So we’ve created a new “inspection-only” campaign type that lets you jump straight to the Inbox Inspector, without having to insert any special tags whatsoever. Note that you won’t be able to send anything from this campaign type—only inspect.
2. Accessible opt-in forms: We’ve made some minor tweaks to the opt-in process to make all signup forms, confirmation pages, etc., accessible by WCAG 1.0 standards. Technically, you could customize and modify our built-in signup forms to be all crazy and non-accessible, but that would be mean. So don’t do that.
3. Jump to “My Templates” from Dashboard: You can jump over to your saved email templates now, without having to go through the entire campaign building process. If you’re a creative professional who just wants to setup a bunch of email templates for a client, this makes things extremely easy for you (see: 7 HTML email templates every email marketer needs).
4. Add border around template: In the template designer, you can now add a border around your email design.
5. 128-bit Secure Login: The login process is done over secure lines, so your username and password are a little safer when you sign in.
6. Mini Signup Box: You can now embed a tiny version of your list signup form onto any page of your website. We’ll supply all the code you need. Just copy-paste. Also includes TypePad blog integration.