More than 115,000 customers use MailChimp’s marketing automation. And 23,000 of them have created automated workflows since last August. That’s a lot of growth! But it’s also a lot of emails—in the past 6 months alone, we’ve sent more than 200 million automated messages. While MailChimp automation already offers a robust feature set, with that kind of volume, we’re excited to keep innovating. Our new release gives automation users more power and control, and sets the stage for even bigger things to come in the future.

With version 3.0 of MailChimp’s API continuing in open beta, we’re pleased to announce the debut of its marketing automation functionality. As we near full feature parity on API 3.0, we wanted to give our growing automation customer base access to the new functionality a few weeks early. We’ve also added 2 new features that have been in popular demand: List Group and Subscription Date Workflows. These features are rolling out with our new release, and will be available for all MailChimp users by the end of the week. Let’s take a look at each of these new additions and see what future API updates have in store.

API workflow

Our new API workflow allows you to bring a much greater level of customization to your automated emails. First, you can now trigger a series of emails on a single API request for a particular subscriber. For example, after submitting a subscriber’s email to the URL in the screenshot above, the automation email "Shopify for MailChimp Update" will immediately queue and send.

Where previously you could only trigger emails with engagement events like open and clicks, now you can trigger a workflow email based on pretty much anything, including e-Commerce webhooks, Wistia video player events, and CRM profile updates. We’ve effectively brought transactional email support to our automation platform.

You can also trigger individual workflow emails on an API request. Now, not only can workflows be started via the API, but each subsequent workflow email can be triggered through a different API call. Where previously you could only trigger emails with engagement events like open and clicks, now you can trigger a workflow email based on pretty much anything, including e-Commerce webhooks, Wistia video player events, and CRM profile updates. We’ve effectively brought transactional email support to our automation platform, and this will let you to build more personalized emails. There’s a tremendous amount of power hidden in this little feature, and we can’t wait to see what you do with it. Frankly, we think it sounds pretty API-tizing.

Other new workflows

We’ve also added List Group workflows, which allow you to send targeted emails based on users joining or leaving particular groups. This will allow you to deliver more relevant content to your subscribers as their interests change. You also have the option to send based on a user’s subscription date. You can use this new functionality to more precisely deliver targeted emails to subscribers who’ve been on your list for several years, or new folks who have just joined.

Looking forward

Next up on our automation to-do list? Getting campaign creation into API 3.0. Until then, you can still build API workflows in the web application, with sending triggers fully functional. We expect plenty more updates to API 3.0 in the next few weeks, including campaign creation. In the meantime, check out our current documentation for a full list of supported commands.