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.

Having your subscribe form connected to your Page is especially useful because it keeps your Fans from having to leave Facebook, or even your page, to sign up for your list. When you make things easy for your Fans and followers, they’re more likely to take action. And since they don’t have to leave Facebook, this makes your page more interactive and more sticky with very little additional effort.

And installing our new application (as opposed to employing the aforementioned hack) is nice because it’ll pull in your list’s actual signup form design (so go make ‘em pretty). But if you’re still not convinced and want to see what it looks like in action, you can check out how we’ve set it up on the MailChimp Fan Page.

Installing and Setting up The App

To get started, we’ll be connecting to MailChimp from within Facebook. Sounds a bit counterintuitive, but bear with me. Head over to Facebook, where you’ll find the MailChimp Signup Application.

When the Application’s profile loads, click ‘Go to Application’.

Next, you want to click “install”, which will ask you to  authenticate your Facebook login credentials and allow the application to have access to your Facebook account.

Then, connect by filling in your MailChimp username and password.

Finally, go ahead and select the list that you want your subscribers added to:

Adding A Signup Form to Your Personal Profile

This part of the set up process involves adding a form to your personal profile. Make sure you’re logged into Facebook, and then go to Account (top right) ==> Application Settings.

‘Add’ the MailChimp application as a tab.

Click “Okay” and you’ll see a dialogue that let’s you know you’ve successfully linked a MailChimp list to your personal Facebook profile. Head over to your profile page to make sure:

Adding A Signup Form to Your Fan Page

First of all you need to make sure you have a Page associated with your Facebook account (you need to have Page admin privileges). Note: this won’t work for Groups.

Head over to the MailChimp Facebook Application page. The best way to find it again (after you’ve already connected your MailChimp account with Facebook) is going to Account ==> Applications Settings, and then clicking on the “profile” of the MailChimp application.

Next, click “add to my page”:

and then select which Page you’d like to add it to (if you administer multiple Facebook Pages). Then you’ll need to navigate over to your Page to manage the application settings (Account ==> Manage Pages). Then click “edit page” so that you can see the list of all the Facebook applications installed on your page.

Click “Application Settings” in order to add a signup form Tab. (Although you’ll see an option for adding the application as a Box, it is not currently available as such.) Additionally, you’ll need to choose “edit” in order to select which list you want to associate with your Fan Page.

Head back to your page and you should now see an Email Signup tab on your Fan Page. Additionally, if you don’t like the position of the tab, you can drag it to reorder.

Autoposting to Facebook

Once you’ve connected your MailChimp account to Facebook, you should have the ability to autopost your email campaign to either your profile, or any fan pages linked to your Facebook account:

The Scenario

A couple months ago we blogged about the prototype for Chimpadeedoo, a MailChimp app for iPad. Even though it was just in the fledgling stages at the time, we wanted to let everyone know it would be coming soon. This introductory “sneak peak” video would have been a great opportunity to use Vzaar’s MailChimp integration. By using a verbal call to action or even including that call as part of the video, we could collect the email addresses of people interested in hearing when the app officially launched. Another idea is to incentivize signing up by allowing subscribers beta access and a special sneak peek. (Chimpadeedoo has since launched and is currently in v1.1.)

Cool and powerful– a winning combination.

The Nitty Gritty

You can get started with Vzaar by heading over to the site and signing up for a free trial. Once you get your account set up, you’ll be taken to your Dashboard and should click on settings. Scroll down to the ’3rd Party Tools Integration’ section.

In a new browser window or tab, go ahead and login to your MailChimp account. Click on the Lists tab in your Dashboard and drill down to ‘list settings and unique id’ for whichever list you’d like your video subscribers to go to. (Note: for this example, I’ve set up a new list and called it ‘Vzaar’.)

Scroll down to obtain your list’s ‘unique id’ and copy it.

Then head back over to the Vzaar window or tab you have open and paste your list ID into the ‘MailChimp List ID’ field.

You’ll also need to generate a MailChimp API key, which you’ll find under account > api keys & info (in MailChimp). Click the little ‘add key’ icon, copy the whole string, and then paste into the ‘MailChimp API Key’ field in Vzaar. Click ‘save’ and you’re all set.

This will add a standard, non-customizable form at the end of your video that includes First Name, Last Name and Email address fields. (You can see it in action by watching the video at the top of this post, or by clicking through here.)

If you’re interested in using this integration in an email campaign, we’ve also created a Vzaar video merge tag. The syntax is the same as our Blip.tv, YouTube and Vimeo merge tags– *|VZAAR:xxxx| * where xxxx is the video ID (highlighted in the image below).

In just two clicks, users are able to seamlessly create personal sharing points, upload content via web, e-mail, MMS, Facebook, Firefox extension, phone and fax inputs and share it on-the-fly through drop.io’s various outputs like web, e-mail, MMS, Twitter, iTunes, fax and more.

So to get started, just head over to http://drop.io. The site will generate a string of unique characters for your drop’s address, or you can enter a custom name if you’d prefer. Then simply select the specific files or folders you’d like to upload from your computer, and click “Create a drop”. Easy Peasy.

Back over to MailChimp. When you’re editing your campaign’s content and are ready to add images or link to files (in step 3 of the campaign builder), click on the little gallery icon in the editor’s toolbar. At the top of the screen, click the little “drop.io files” button.

This will bring up the following dialogue:

Simply fill in your drop’s credentials and click “load drop files”. This will open a new dialogue window displaying the contents of your drop, complete with the file name and file size. Select the asset you’d like to add and click import.

This will place the image or file in your gallery, and you can then insert it into your campaign just as you normally would.

One caveat that’s important to note: If you’re importing a non-image file type from drop.io (PDF, mp3, video, etc.), there’s a slightly different workflow. In step 3 of the campaign builder, you’ll need to access your gallery by clicking the “add link” icon inside the editor.

This will bring up a little window where you’ll need to click the large “browse media” button, and that takes you to the gallery view that allows you to see both your Files and Images folders. Any non-image assets will be uploaded and stored in the Files folder.

To begin, you’ll want to head over to Google Docs and login using your Google account information. Then, under the New Document menu, select Form. Go ahead and give your form a name and then include some information as to what the signup form is for or about.

From there, you’ll begin adding fields. By default, the blank form starts out with two “Sample Questions” for you to modify. For this example, we just added a separate field for First Name, Last Name and Email Address, and went ahead and made them all required fields. It’s also important to ensure that you select “Text” for the Question Type.

Once you have your fields created and organized the way you want them, you can work on changing the visual design of the signup form. Google Forms is pretty limited in this aspect, but they currently provide 69 different stock themes for you to choose from.

Since we’re creating a signup form for our burgeoning Picnic Club, we went with the “Picnic” theme. To see how this will look once it’s published, just click on the link at the very bottom of the Form Edit page. This will open a preview of your published form in either a new tab or a new window, depending on how you have your browser set up.

The second part of this tutorial is setting up MailChimp to import your signup form into a new list. First, login to your MailChimp account and click the Account link at the top left. This will take you to your account settings, and you want to click on Integrations.

Click on the first option: Google Analytics, Contacts, Docs and select Authorize Connection. This will take you away from your MailChimp account and over to Google (very briefly), and you will need to click Grant Access.

Once you click Grant Access, you’ll be taken back to your MailChimp Integrations page. You’ll see a green dot for your Connection Status, but may see a yellow dot representing Data Status. This is fine for now.

The next step is to head over to your Lists, and you want to click the huge orange button to Create a New List.

On the first page, you’ll need to go ahead and set up all the basic information, such as Sender Name and Permission Reminder. Next, select the Import My List option, and then select the source that you want to import from. In this case, Google Docs.

A dialog box will appear, telling you that MailChimp can connect to your Google Docs account. Just select the appropriate Form from the pull-down menu, and proceed with list import.