One year ago today, MailChimp’s Lead Engineer went rogue and formed a little startup inside our company called Mandrill. In one short year, Mandrill has grown to over 55,000 active users. That’s 100X the total number of users they had in May 2012. Since launching, the amount of email they’re sending every month has grown 100X, and revenue has grown 200X. We’ve begun the process of tightly integrating Mandrill data into MailChimp, and Mandrill is innovating like–well, like a bunch of rogue MailChimp engineers. Every week it seems they’re launching new features, dropping prices to infuriatingly disruptive levels, adding servers in more continents, and shaving milliseconds off delivery times.

We considered getting a congratulatory cake for the Mandrill team today, but I’ve learned that if it’s anything “offline” it’s not real to them. Instead, we put together this little comic strip: Purfickt Bahnana

Mandrill’s still got a way to go before it matches MailChimp’s 3 million users and 5 billion emails per month level, but something tells me they’ve got some tricks up their sleeve to make their graphs turn all exponential on me. I’m told Chad, the man who is out to destroy MailChimp from within (there, I said it) will be posting a one year retrospective on the Mandrill blog soon. That’s a good blog to follow if you’d like to learn more about transactional email, or destroying MailChimp from within. Happy Birthday, Mandrill!

A little less than a year ago, we launched Mandrill as a startup inside our company, and already these jerks have +40,000 users. What’s Mandrill? Well, if MailChimp was a car, Mandrill would be an engine–built just for developers. As you can imagine, marketing is not exactly a favorite pastime for most developers, so they aren’t always up to speed on email marketing vendors. These devs often ask us if Mandrill has an “email marketing plugin of some sort,” so they can “get their marketing team off their back.” Ha. Well yes, as a matter of fact we do have a marketing plugin for Mandrill. It’s called MailChimp. And in v8.1, we’ve begun unifying Mandrill and MailChimp data.

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Today we begin rolling out MailChimp v8.1, which includes some very nice changes to our Subscriber Profile page. Back when we first built MailChimp, this page was designed to simply tell you if someone was subscribed to a newsletter list or not. My how things have changed. It’s become clear that a ton of you are using MailChimp as a pseudo-CRM, so we’ve been making incremental improvements in that direction since last November. For example, you want different members of your team to be able to quickly search for a customer (even from their smartphones), then see all their relevant interactions and activity in one place (maybe even submit a note?). Here’s how we’re making that even easier.

Log in to MailChimp, and from the Dashboard, search for a customer:

When you arrive at the Subscriber Profile screen, you’ll notice a few changes:

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I’ve become accustomed to weird looks when I tell people, “I’m a Delivery Engineer.” It’s not the easiest job to explain, and I’ve heard all the jokes about trains, pizza, and wonderful-sounding trains that deliver pizza.

There are a few quick answers I’ve worked up to help explain what a Delivery Engineer does:

• “I’m like the fireman on the ol’ steam engines,” which is surprisingly accurate, but assumes people know about that very particular type of fireman.
• “I make sure emails don’t go to spam,” though that sounds like I’m pushing spam, which is the exact opposite of what I do.
• “I make the emails go,” which is good enough for most folks.

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Well isn’t that confusing: the first link I get from Google for “transactional email” actually contains incorrect information! It’s not really about financial transactions at all, anymore. (Though e-commerce does happen to generate a lot of this kind of email, more on that later…)

Definitions, Synonyms, Examples

So what is transactional email? Coming from a MailChimp state of mind, you might simply think of it as “anything that isn’t bulk“. Basically, it is email sent to an individual based on some action. It could be:

• an action they took directly
• an action they were the target of or,
• perhaps even inaction on their part

A warm welcome sets the tone

For example, if a user signs up for your website, you should probably welcome them with a lovely email. Bam! That’s a transactional email. Signing up is the “transaction” in this case. Simple, right?

An example of an action happening to a user might be the familiar “so-and-so commented on your hooza-whatsit” alerts we all receive from our favorite social networking sites. In these cases the action was taken by other users, but the recipient was the target of the action, so they receive a notification email letting them know something of interest happened.

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