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.

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.

Dialect, a small web marketing company on Vancouver Island in Canada, has developed a plugin that connects your Shopify online store with MailChimp.

It works by allowing you to process a Webhook from Shopify and subscribe the purchaser to a specific MailChimp list. In a nutshell, Webhooks enable you to collect information about events as they happen in near real-time. (read more about the MailChimp API and Webhooks here)

You can grab the plugin and installation instructions here. Then, all you need to get started is your Shopify Shop ID and MailChimp List ID.

Use another ecommerce or shopping cart solution? MailChimp also currently intergrates with Magento, osCommerce, PrestaShop, Foxy Cart and ZenCart. Be sure to take a look at our extensive list of plugins for more info.

• Welcome/Sign-up emails for your website or mailing list
• Follow-up/Reminder emails
• Forgotten Password emails

This all happens through the magic of our API, or Application Programming Interface, which is essentially a set of code that allows MailChimp to interact with other applications.  Not a programmer?  The API is for nerds only.  If you can’t call a function or find a programmer in your company to bribe, you can always contact one of our MailChimp Experts.

Since you’ve decided to set up a Transactional Email Campaign, the next question is HOW?

1. Create a new List via the web interface
2. Configure any Merge Vars or Interest groups for the List – this can be done via the API or the web interface
3. Use the campaignCreate() method to create your campaign. Be sure to use a type of “trans“
4. Now just rinse & repeat…
   1. Call listSubscribe() for each email address. Note that if you’d like, it is perfectly reasonable to add multiple addresses before sending.
   2. Call campaignSendNow() to send to everyone who has not received this before
5. Done!

The documentation for campaignCreate() method can be found here.  Also, take a look at the more in-depth technical overview information for some additional caveats and things to note about MailChimp’s Transactional Email Campaigns.

Hire a MailChimp Expert. We just added 3 more to the growing list.

There are experts from all over the globe, ready to help you, from Australia, Austria, Canada, France, London, The Netherlands, Uruguay, and the U.S.

If you’re a MailChimp user, and you want to get listed, just apply here and tell us your expertise.

The new API has a number of improvements, namely:

• Ability to pass content to MailChimp for delivery
• Ability to schedule campaigns
• Ability to send test emails

MailChimp has always allowed you to use our API to seamlessly sync list data and campaign stats back and forth with your server. But passing content was the “missing link” in our API. No more!

You focus on content, we handle delivery.
So if you code a CMS, or run an internal publishing system, you can now build content and designs (the fun stuff) on your system, then pass it off to MailChimp for the delivery and list maintenance part.

If you’re not a programmer, and you don’t have any programmers on staff to help you with our API, you can hire a MailChimp Expert here.

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.