Thing is, we’d rather focus on what we do best: making email marketing awesome. “Events” is not our specialty, so we felt we’d never be able to make it awesome enough.

Then we discovered Eventbrite, which is the best events management tool we’ve ever used. And it just so happens they also have an API.

So we’re really excited to announce that MailChimp is partnered with Eventbrite, and our services are seamlessly integrated. Build events in eventbrite, then design & deliver awesome invitations in MailChimp (and so much more).

Here’s how the integration works…

Let’s say I run the PTA (parents, teachers association) for a local elementary school, and we want to hold a car wash fund raising event for the 5th grade class. Just so happens that MailChimp user Morris Brandon Elementary did this very thing recently, so I’m going to use them as an example.

1. Create Event & Sell Tickets in Eventbrite

The first thing I’d do is create an event in Eventbrite. This is very easy, so I’m not going to walk you through all the steps, but I will point out some cool features.

First, you can sell tickets for your event. I’m going to create “PTA Members” tickets, and “Non-members” tickets. PTA members pay less for tickets, of course:

How do you collect money, you ask? Eventbrite makes that easy too. You can choose Paypal ,Google Checkout, or just let Eventbrite handle the credit card processing on their end. They take a teeny-tiny bit of commission on orders, but it’s cheap. Way cheaper than trying to handle it yourself. You can also let attendees “pay at the door” or pay with a combination of the above. Super flexible.

If your event is free, then you use Eventbrite free. And as you know by now, we like free.

2. Design Awesome Invitation in MailChimp

After your event is all setup in Eventbrite, you go to MailChimp, connect your account to your Eventbrite account, import the event details (all done seamlessly through our APIs) and design your invitation.

So I’m going to log in to my account, and create an email campaign. As always, the first step is to select the subscriber list I want to send to:

When it’s time to select my template, MailChimp has a new Eventbrite template as an option:

It’s under the “My Templates” tab, then scroll down to the “pre-designed templates.” Yeah, that’s sorta new. We’ll be adding lots more cool templates there soon. You’ll also notice the new twitter template there that we introduced a few days ago.

Anyway, the Eventbrite template will have a blue button asking you to “connect to eventbrite.”

When you click that button, we’ll ask you to enter your API key (you can get that from your Eventbrite account settings):

Just copy-paste that key into our little screen, and we’ll connect to Eventbrite using the magic of APIs.

After the connection is made, I select the event I want to import to MailChimp:

Next, it takes me to my pre-built template, with all the event details ready to go:

Notice it pulls in the event date, location, description, and even includes a Google Map.

Here’s where we can use MailChimp’s template design features to take this invitation a step further.

First, I’m going to create and upload a header graphic:

I’m a decent “photochopper” myself, but if I didn’t have a design application, MailChimp’s picnik integration would come in very handy here.

Once my header’s uploaded, I can tweak the template design a little by selecting one of MailChimp’s built-in color palettes:

And then I can use MailChimp’s handy iStockphoto integration to search for “car wash kids” photos:

and insert one into my invitation:

After the template’s looking the way I want, I just hit the send button like I always do.

But just for kicks, I actually backed up a step, and went to MailChimp’s campaign setup screen, and tried our new Subject Line Suggester to see if it would give me some ideas for a better subject line. I want as many parents to open this email as possible, afterall.

I typed “school, invitation, and invite” and here’s what I got:

Hmm. Based on these suggestions, I might try, “Exclusive invitation to Morris Brandon parents” vs. “Morris Brandon invites you to our 5th grade car wash fundraiser” in an A/B subject line test.

Twitter Integration & Tracking

If you’ve got a twitter account (who doesn’t?), be sure to choose MailChimp’s twitter integration option and let us post a link to your campaign. It uses our eepurl link shortener, which allows us to track who tweets and re-tweets your campaign:

Ticket Sales Stats, too!

Did we mention that MailChimp will pull your Eventbrite stats in to show you total ticket sales? It’s in the “Eventbrite360 report” and it looks something like this:

We’ll show you how many tickets you sold, and who bought them.

Followup Emails, Segmentation, and more…

What if the event needs to be postponed? This actually happened with Atlanta’s recent floods. The school had to send an email out postponing the car wash. Easy enough to send a followup email to the same list in MailChimp. And with our automatic mobile campaign feature, you can be confident that even parents “on the go” will receive your alert, properly formatted.

In another scenario, we might use MailChimp’s A.I.M. Reports in combination with our easy segmentation tools to send out a followup to all those who didn’t open or click the campaign.

Or, we can segment the list by proximity to a ZIP code:

For larger events with lots of lead time, I might even create an autoresponder sequence of reminders and followups before and after the big event. To maximize deliverability and click rate, I’d also suggest passing your event invitation through MailChimp’s one-click Inbox Inspector. It’ll render my campaign in all the major email programs, and check it in all the major spam filters to help pinpoint any problems with my campaign before I send.

RSS-to-email alerts for new events

If you host lots of events on Eventbrite, they’ll actually build an RSS feed that alerts people whenever you create a new event. You know where I’m going with this? Automate your alerts by using MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool with Eventbrite’s RSS feed.

Powerful Combination

As you can see, Eventbrite and MailChimp make for one extremely powerful, easy-to-use combination.

We think this video shows how excited we are about this (warning: there’s smooching involved):

Zendesk is an awesome help desk app, which is also part of the Small Business Web (so you can further integrate with Batchbook, Freshbooks, and more wonderful apps in the network).

Ever since we posted about our integration with Salesforce, people have been asking for Zoho, Javelin, and other CRM integrations as well. We can only integrate so fast, so it helps when other companies actually take the first step and integrate with us (our API documentation is pretty thorough). Batchbook did this, and it helped kickstart a wonderful relationship. Hint hint. Anyway, Javelin integrated with us a while back all on their own, and it impressed us. So we looked at their API and integrated right back at them. I hear they’re working on more.

Another popular request is SugarCRM, and we hear that a company is actually working on this. They’ve formed a group in the MailChimp Jungle for SugarCRM + MailChimp users. If you’re interested, you might want to give them some feedback, wishlist requests, etc.

There are a couple more exciting integrations in that screenshot, but we’ll post more details on those a little later.

You’d think that seeing “Google, Mountain View” on your caller ID would make us pretty excited. But the truth is, it’s more of a frightening experience (along the lines of, “Oh God did we break the internet?).

Turns out it wasn’t so bad…

They had opened up access to their awesome Analytics product through an API. This basically means you can program applications that go in and grab stats from a Google Analytics account.

They wanted to grant us (along with some other lucky beta testers) special access to the API, allowing us to greatly improve our old Google Analytics integration (which involved scraping email reports sent to you by Google — not very reliable if you got duplicate emails, or emails got junked, or if they changed the format of emails).

Long story short, that API experience eventually allowed us to create this new feature.

Google Analytics Stats Within MailChimp

In addition to all the other cool reports you get with MailChimp, you can now see how your email campaigns are affecting your overall site traffic:

Google Analytics stats embedded in MailChimp

The graph in the screenshot represents your website traffic. The little blue dots are email campaigns you’ve sent. If you hover over any of those little blue dots, they make a tiny little monkey-screaming noise (just kidding) and we provide a link to your email campaign archive  so you can see which campaign caused traffic to spike.

You’ll love this new feature if you’re an e-retailer (because I know you people are stats freaks).

You can click the tabs above the graph to filter results by “organic traffic, cpc traffic, email-generated traffic,” and more:

There are a bunch of other stats that we pull from your Analytics account below that chart:

How to turn it on

To get the stats, you’ll need to integrate your MailChimp account with your Analytics account. You do that under the “Account” page in MailChimp, then go to the new integrations panel:

MailChimp integrations panel

Activate Google Analytics syncing there, then you’ll see your stats under the “Reports” tab:

Click on the new “Site Analytics” button:

The idea isn’t to totally replace Google Analytics. If you’re a stats freak (like me), you’re still going to go log in to Google Analytics, CrazyEgg, Mint, YouCalc, Wordpress stats, etc. It’s just a way to show you more relevant stats while you’re logged in to MailChimp and checking campaign performance.

In addition to, “how many opens, clicks, and purchases did my email get?” we can also directly answer the question, “how much traffic did my email campaign actually drive to my website?”

Just in case you don’t already know, Formspring is a tool that makes it extremely easy to build an online form or survey to collect data. But these forms also come with power features, like self-calculating form fields, conditional logic, and smart-routing. The other nice thing is that Formspring, like MailChimp, also integrates with Highrise and Freshbooks (see all our other integrations here), so that tracking your clients, collecting payments, and sending newsletters is all a piece of cake.

Sweet, sweet googly-moogly chocolate cake.

Here’s a video tutorial from Formspring:

* Note: their opt-in check box to confirm subscription is a really, really nice feature. Very well done.

There are so many now, that managing your different integrations can be tough. So we created this new “Integrations Dashboard” under your Account page.

It’s a great birds-eye-view of all the apps you’ve linked to MailChimp, and what their status is. If you’re experiencing any issues sync’ing data with one of them, this is where you can go to diagnose.

You can now count MailChimp amongst the long list of integrations you can add on to your Expression Engine install. Say hello to SL MailChimp Subscribe created by Stephen Lewis at Experience Internet (a brilliant developer who is a pleasure to work with). SL MailChimp Subscribe will connect your Expression Engine new user signup process to a MailChimp list and do a few more cool things too:

• Automatically add a member to one or more mandatory mailing lists.
• Specify “opt-in triggers” to allow a member to control which lists he is added to.
• Associate custom ExpressionEngine member profile fields with MailChimp Interest Groups and Merge Variables, on a list-by-list basis.

SL MailChimp Subscribe is a sweet little tool that greatly simplifies managing your lists from Expression Engine, and it is the right price too – Free! If you’re super nerdy and want to tool around with the source code, you can check out the code repository on GitHub.

Download it and give it a try. We hope you find it useful, and look forward to your feedback.

Dialect, a small web marketing company on Vancouver Island in Canada, has developed a plugin that connects your Shopify online store with MailChimp.

It works by allowing you to process a Webhook from Shopify and subscribe the purchaser to a specific MailChimp list. In a nutshell, Webhooks enable you to collect information about events as they happen in near real-time. (read more about the MailChimp API and Webhooks here)

You can grab the plugin and installation instructions here. Then, all you need to get started is your Shopify Shop ID and MailChimp List ID.

Use another ecommerce or shopping cart solution? MailChimp also currently intergrates with Magento, osCommerce, PrestaShop, Foxy Cart and ZenCart. Be sure to take a look at our extensive list of plugins for more info.

Once setup, the module will keep your Magento Newsletter subscribers automatically synchronized with MailChimp.

If you’re a Magento user, be sure to also check out our ecommerce360 plugin, which synchronizes with your shopping cart and shows your email marketing ROI.

I’ll show you 4 easy examples anybody can build in the MailChimp interface, plus one clever way to use the API to trigger your autoresponder.

Trigger after subscribing to list:

This is the easiest autoresponder trigger, and the main reason we built our autoresponder tool. Schedule a series of tips and how-to-advice to automatically go out to people after subscribing to your list. In the example above, a wedding planner is sending wedding planning tips to new subscribers to get them interested in her services (here’s a more detailed example). The key here is to show off some expertise without making yourself obsolete. An alternative might be, “Top 10 wedding mistakes” to scare prospects into hiring you. I’m just saying.

Trigger based on a recurring annual event:

This works well for birthdays, anniversaries, or anything you want to happen every year based on a date that your user enters into your signup form. Maybe it’s a car tune-up reminder, or some kind of “bring your widget in for its annual checkup.”  Tip: Send belated birthday autoresponders to stand out in the inbox

Trigger based on a fixed date:

The example above is for a kids summer camp. Just before the session they’re signed up for, an email (or a sequence of emails) goes out with packing checklists, directions, etc.  Works well for travel, too. Just before the big cruise to the Bahamas, send some helpful emails on what to pack, what they’ll be experiencing (send lots of pictures), how to gloat in front of your co-workers,  etc.

Trigger after a fixed date:

In the example above, imagine you host a big event, and 2 weeks after the last day of the event you want to send a survey to all attendees asking for their feedback. Tip: In that survey, you should ask them to opt-in for news about the next big event. Actually, don’t do that. It’ll look so blatant. Hmm, how about in that feedback survey email, you point users to a landing page with pictures from the event, and where other attendees can post comments, pics, videos, and network with each other. Consider services like Crowdvine, or Ning, or even a simple Facebook Fan Page.

API – triggered autoresponders based on hidden date field:

Some users have told us, “I don’t want to send autoresponders based on subscription to a list. I need to trigger them via the API to send to people already on my list.”

Our answer to that is NO.

Autoresponders are very powerful, but they can also be very, very annoying and abusive (to be totally honest, this is why we avoided offering them in MailChimp for so long). In our interface, we deliberately built autoresponders so they’d only go to people who double opted-in to a list.

However, there are a few cases where we think it’s ok to use the MailChimp API to trigger an autoresponder.

You’d basically setup your list, signup form, and autoresponders in MailChimp, but then use the API to pass data into them.

Let’s say you’ve got an e-commerce system, and customers can order small samples from your site. Like carpet or tile or color swatches. The idea is that your product has a tall price tag, so you let them purchase a tiny sample for say, $5. The cool thing about that is you know these buyers are pretty interested if they’re paying money for samples. Anyway, upon purchase of the sample, provide a checkbox in your cart (check out our e-commerce plugins) that lets the customer receive a sequence of free “decorating idea” emails.

Maybe the emails can include inspiring photos from real customers, or perhaps a “Top 10 mistakes” sequence.

The key is to make it optional, and to set expectations about what they’re going to receive. You don’t want to “surprise” your own customers with unwanted emails.

Then, setup a list in MailChimp for customers who ordered samples from your site. Next, create an autoresponder that goes out 2 weeks after a date (the date that they ordered the sample).

Using the API, subscribe buyers to the list, and set their individual “ordered sample” date fields to be the date they purchased their sample. Tip: Set that date field in your MailChimp signup form as “hidden” in case a customer should happen to see their subscriber preferences page.

On a somewhat related note, here’s a tutorial on sending automated transactional emails with MailChimp’s powerful API, and here’s an awesome case study of using dynamic content in those transactional emails.

Since I have absolutely no idea what this means (I draw monkeys and I write stuff), I’m just going to point you to the MailChimp API documentation now. The only part that I understand is that this makes it much, much easier to keep your list synchronized with MailChimp:

Syncing Database Changes from MailChimp to You – Time/Delta based sync

MailChimp API Webhooks