Well, sort of– technically, we’re supporting Pseudo-Transactional Email Campaigns. (We are not your SMTP server… yet.) But what exactly is a Transactional Email Campaign? Our Transactional Email Campaigns aim to give you the ability to send the same campaign over and over again without changing much of the content. For example–
- 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?
- Create a new List via the web interface
- Configure any Merge Vars or Interest groups for the List – this can be done via the API or the web interface
- Use the campaignCreate() method to create your campaign. Be sure to use a type of “trans“
- Now just rinse & repeat…
- Call listSubscribe() for each email address. Note that if you’d like, it is perfectly reasonable to add multiple addresses before sending.
- Call campaignSendNow() to send to everyone who has not received this before
- 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.
Simply awesome. We can now replace our ugly/boring welcome e-mails with some monkey sexiness. Well done! Look forward to trying it out.
This is really great! I love when you add new features to the API.
I love the transactional support however I’m wondering if it supports our use case. We have a number of transactional emails; new users, password resets, etc. We would like people outside the development group to manage the content of these emails. I figured, create an email template for each transaction type. The problem though is that the API requires you to specify the content array which overrides the values in those templates. The API does the same thing for values like Subject, From, etc.
Is there anyway to allow the template default values, and the list default values to be used?
Please feel free to email if you have any clarifying questions.
Has there been any response to your question? I have the same requirement. I don’t want to have to manage the campaigns in the code or in a database and reinvent the wheel that mail chimp already has for editing templates.
Is there a way to edit the template of a transactional campaign inside the mail chimp web interface?
I would love to see this expanded. I am in the process of launching a new site that has 50+ transactional emails to handle a variety of things. I would LOVE to run all of this through MailChimp and would happily pay to do so but right now, this isn’t possible while you only support one off transactional email.
This is a feature that is so, so desperately needed by small and medium sized business alike. Its archaic to have to keep going back to the dev team in order to amend the content or template for an email.
Please add this soon – you will be swamped with customers!
[...] in love all over again. Its so easy you can’t help but feel warm and fuzzy. They have limited transactional email support which will in short let you handle welcome emails and forgot your password emails. Pricing of [...]
We are currently engaged in a spirited debate in our office about the use of MailChimp for transactional emails.
As the marketing director for our (startup) company I love the idea of using MailChimp and it’s sweet little tool set to manage all aspects of our client/prospect communications.
I hate the idea of having to use disparate systems to get a complete picture of how people are responding to our communications. (i.e MailChimp for marketing and another ESP or in house system for true transactional.)
The transactional emails (signup/welcome, step 1, step 2, step 3, congrats your site is live!) are as important to me as the marketing emails we send out to prospects. It’s a way for use to see what is working in our site development process (what we sell) and find inefficiencies and up-selling opportunities. To do that I need the Chimp’s awesome reporting and testing abilities.
Our tech dude, however, doesn’t like the pseudo-transactional capabilities of MailChimp. He’s pointed me to the JangoMail Transactional Capabilities.
MailChimp is my preference because of the tools (A/B testing, API, Integrations) it offers that normally cost a lot of money at other ESPs.
I should stop talking now. I guess I don’t really have a point other than to say, “Super Chimp! Save me from nasty user interfaces and dumbed down feature sets. Hurry!”
Hi Mark, something is in the works. But it will take some time to get live.
Well that makes me feel better. I’m just hoping “some time” means in the next month or so;)
Hi ben,
Pseudo Transactional email it’s good. But when mailchimp it’s ready for real transactional email ?
I search to send a transactional email message to a single email recipient.
Hi Mark, and Ben K
You can take a look at our transactional email system (par excellence) at http://postageapp.com
It’s been built from the ground up to handle all of these app-driven email message requirements.
Hope you find it useful.
Cheers,
Dom
Dominic: postageapp is awesome!!
Thanks for sharing!
Just wanted to follow up… was full transactional support ever added? Is it still in the works?
I vote for Transactional Emails, we will pay more for it. It costs us hours of developer resources that I would prefer to be focused on solving the problems that we show up everyday to solve, not how to send an email to our customers, that is what MailChimp does best!
Cheers!
so after some additional research, here’s what I discovered for my fledgling project:
1. Mailchimp will not fit the bill for transactional support – if someone requests a password reset twice, using mailchimp for sending that email out is hard.
2. Postage: requires an smtp server on my own – so not sure what the app buys me
3. JangoMail – seems like the cheapest freemium solution for transactional mail support – 300 Free emails – solid api and documentation.
In light of the above, I think it would be great if mailchimp could support real transactional emails.
We ended up using MadMimi for transactional email on the site I recently launched. It was very easy to set up and there is a free package. Really, REALLY wish MailChimp would get this in place though as so many solutions integrate with MailChimp. Come on guys! =)
Is it necessarily for transactional campaigns to have UNSUB link?
Thanks
If I am inferring correctly.. I can subscribe an email to a list, send the event-based message, and then unsubscribe them from this list through the API. This way we could potentially send multiple messages to the same email as necessary (subscribe -> unsubscribe ->subscribe loop).
If the above is possible, my question here is..
- What happens to email stats under this scenario? Are snapshots still available for unsubscribed users after the fact?
- Does the unsubscribe API action cause the list to be blacklisted ?
Thanks in advance for your reply!
It is possible, and I have the same question about blacklisting…
MailChimp has been strangely silent on this transactional email problem lately.
Back in March 30, 2010, someone posted that its “in the works”. Here we are a year later.
Any progress? This is starting to a real road block for enterprise customers that do lots of transactional emails.
We launched a transactional service that piggybacks off of Amazon’s SES in February: http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-launches-transactional-email-service-on-top-of-amazon-ses/
Is there any way to change the content of the campaign using same campaign ID and without creating the new campaign
Thank You