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.

These days, everyone’s on the go. You probably need access to MailChimp reports and the ability to add new subscribers from home, the office, the car (not while driving, of course), wherever you are. MailChimp’s mobile lab works hard to bring native apps to popular platforms (like Chimpadeeoo, Golden Monkeys and MailChimp for iPhone), but we know there are lots more devices to address. Our mobile web app helps fill that gap.

You might have noticed that we updated the mobile version of the app when we redesigned the app earlier this year. The original mobile web app was released back in 2008—it was time for an update.

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Yesterday we announced the integration of MarkdownMail with MailChimp! Today we’ve got some more exciting news with this application. As mentioned in the original post, the app is $3.99 on the App Store. Not a bad price, but how does FREE sound? Little better, huh? We’ve decided to reimburse you for the cost of the application if you decide to use it within the next 30 days. The reimbursement comes in the form of MonkeyRewards credits, so you will have $3.99 added to your MailChimp account to go towards your monthly plan, pay-as-you-go credits or Inbox Inspections. To qualify for the credit, MailChimp subscribers will need to set up a draft campaign using the Markdownmail app before February 11, 2011 and we’ll automatically add the credit to your account. Yay!

A little while ago we sneak-peeked Pyow, our iPhone app that helps store owners send, scan, and track coupons. We’re happy to announce that it’s been approved and is now live in the iPhone App Store.

In case you haven’t heard, with Pyow, you can create a beautiful coupon-embedded email inside MailChimp:

Then your customers can print the coupon, bring it into the store, and you scan it with Pyow:

Since each customer gets a unique, trackable QR code, we can show you in your MailChimp stats who redeemed, and how many friends they referred to you. For more details on how to send a coupon in MailChimp, check out this blog post.

In other MailChimp Mobile news:

• Sundrop Mobile just announced their integration with MailChimp. It allows customers to sign up to your list via SMS. More on that later.

Back when we first launched MailChimp, one of the first features our customers asked for was the ability to generate unique UPC barcodes and embed them into emails, so that they could send “e-coupons.” But back then, UPC codes were difficult to create (there were no APIs) and even harder to track. I’m glad we never sunk the time and money into that.

Because now, we have QR codes. And generating QR codes is super easy. You can scan them with your iPhone, iPod touch, or just about any smartphone, and actually point users to web pages. Which is why we’re seeing QR codes pop up in so many places. Even the Dalai Lama uses them.

Factor in all the tracking we’ve built into MailChimp, plus all our built-in templates, and suddenly, creating a coupon tool for our customers is actually kind of easy. We just have to piece together all the parts. Which is exactly what our Mobile Lab did when they created “Pyow!”

Pyow! is an easy way for store owners to send QR coupons to their subscribers.

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