We’re launching MailChimp v5.3 late tonight. The changes are big, but they won’t require any reboots of the server or anything that would affect scheduled email campaigns or reports. While we’re launching, you may not be able to log in to the service. We plan to begin around 10PM ET (see this in your timezone), and the upgrade process should only take a few hours (if all goes well). The changes might take some time to propagate to all user accounts, but by 9am ET tomorrow, all accounts should be upgraded.

Here’s what’s in v5.3…

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We launched a slew of new features this weekend, which upgrades everyone to MailChimp v3.4. We’ll post more details about each feature soon, but here’s a quick breakdown of the major ones…

• View Mobile Version: When recipients on mobile phones click the “View this in your browser” link to see your campaign’s archive, we’ll redirect them to an automatically generated, mobile-browser-friendly version of your campaign. Speaking of mobile: See MailChimp’s versions for iPhone, Google Android, and Yahoo Widgets.
• Auto-Designed Email Templates: Whenever you create a new email template, MailChimp will visit your website, find your logo, look at your CSS code to determine your brand’s color scheme, fonts, etc., then he’ll automatically design an email template for you that matches your brand. It can be a real time-saver for people who don’t have their own graphic designers on staff. And it’s free!
• E-Commerce Integrations: MailChimp now integrates with Magento, ZenCart, and osCommerce so that you can track sales, conversions, who bought what (and more) from your email campaigns (kind of like our Google Analytics 360 integration). Plus, you don’t have to add code snippets to your website, and you don’t have to “tag” links in your campaigns. It’s all automatic. Just in time for the holidays! Read more about it here.
• New Language added: We’ve added Serbian to our list of languages (thanks to Nate and all our friends at the Serbian Cultural and Arts Center)! We’ve also added a few more “pseudo” languages, just for fun (including “Swedish Chef,” Jive, Hacker, and Elmer Fudd). This brings our list of languages to—honestly, I’ve lost count. Something like 25 or 30.

All of the new features are free to MailChimp customers (they’re already live in your account), and we’ll be posting details, screenshots, and tutorials shortly.

When you send your email newsletters, do you get customers asking you to change the email address you have on file, because they’ve changed jobs or something? In the past, you had to log in, find their profile, and then make the edit for them. That’s not so bad, but if you’re like me, after you’ve spent a couple hours writing your newsletter and sending it off, the last thing you want to do is track down a profile to change someone’s address.

Subscribers to your MailChimp lists can now edit their own profiles (email address, name, interest groups, company name, whatever) by just clicking a link in the email footer.

To add the link, use our *|UPDATE_PROFILE|* merge tag. Wherever we see that tag, we’ll replace it with each recipient’s unique link.

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