Our v8.7 release is a relatively light one, with lots of updates and housekeeping, but there are a few things worth noting. We’ve got a powerful Mandrill update and some usability improvements throughout.
Mandrill triggers for autoresponders
Autoresponders can now trigger based on specific Mandrill activity, such as clicks, opens, or sends. Here’s why this is a big deal:
In the past, the development cost to build an autoresponder that was triggered from a transactional email was very high, since you would end up having to build it all in-house (APIs, cron jobs, schedules, yada yada yada…). The “marketing” guys would have to beg and plead the developers to make time to work on something that developers are generally never very interested in doing.
Now, all the marketing guys have to do is just ask a developer to add a “tag” to a Mandrill transactional email. This is actually super easy, and shouldn’t require too much bribing. Once the email is tagged properly, MailChimp can handle the rest of the work. You can choose to trigger an autoresponder based on an email being sent, opened, or clicked, which opens up a lot of possibilities on how you can better serve your customers or users.
To use the new autoresponder triggers, you must have Mandrill connected in your integrations page (Account > Extras > Integrations > Mandrill).
Folder tweaks
We took some time to make browsing folders in campaigns, autoresponders, and templates just a little bit better for you organized people. Now, you’ll see a count next to each folder so that you can get a better idea where to find your stuff. Also, the current folder you’re in is remembered when you navigate away from the page and come back to it. Neat!
Other, smaller stuff:
SocialPro links added to subscriber profile pages: If you use SocialPro, we’ve now made it easier to see your subscriber’s social media accounts by showing them closer to the top of the profile. This comes in handy with our fancy new way of browsing subscribers that you’ve segmented using our “Discovered Segments” feature from the last release.
Bye bye, IE8: We are no longer actively testing MailChimp in Internet Explorer 8. This means that you can still use it for now (although we really recommend upgrading to Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or IE10), but we will officially stop supporting it soon.
List import tweaks: We’ve updated the design of the entire list import section to make it cleaner and easier to understand. We’ve also made the column matching process more efficient by showing how many unmatched columns you have left and automatically skipping advanced columns that do not get imported.
Inbox Inspection updates: We spent some time going through the Inbox Inspection flow, and have added a new icon in the campaigns list, making them easier to find. We also now show you when inspections are processing, and have made it easier to select what spam filters and email clients to select for testing.
This release gave our teams a breather from the last few big releases. Going forward, we’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled, fast-paced iteration cycle. As always, we’ll be listening closely to your feedback as well.
