Email marketing provider MailChimp has recently made a move that Mandrill will become an add-on for monthly paid MailChimp accounts. Mandrill is transactional email delivery API used to send emails to developers and marketers.
As per Mandrill MailChimp Merger, Mandrill was developed for the specific requirement of sending one-to-one transactional emails to customers, especially by small and medium enterprises and developers.
Mandrill was launched in 2012 and in three years, is being used by more than 800,000 users and has delivered more than 88 billion emails till now.
Transactional emails have evolved in two separate branches:
- Users who want a service to provide transactional emails as a utility that only delivers emails and that too in an efficient manner
- Users who want a service to provide smart emails (read personalized and value-added emails) to their customers/subscribers
For transactional email delivery as a cheap and reliable utility service ( the first point mentioned above), there are better services available in the market like Amazon SES, MailGun, nd SendGrid.
Transactional email services are simple and utilitarian providers innovate focusing mostly on increasing efficiency and reducing cost.
On the other hand, personalized emails ( the second point mentioned above) requires expertise in design, a lot more data and is more sophisticated and complex to build. MailChimp has decided to take this second route as they do not want to compete with the process but would rather compete on features.
Moreover, the mechanism to send emails is fundamentally different for MailChimp and Mandrill. Mandrill is a distributed service in which smaller number of one-to-one emails are sent to customers quickly requiring a distributed infrastructure.
On the other hand, MailChimp is an aggregated service in which a set/template of email is loaded on the server and copies of the same email template is sent to a huge number of customers, requiring a centralization of infrastructure to make things more efficient.
In short, this decision of merging Mandrill services with MailChimp is a strategic move to weed out bad accounts and to improve the revenues for MailChimp. There were users who used the Mandrill free service for felonious activities like sending spams.
Also, this strategic decision of Mandrill MailChimp Merger was taken consciously to make sure that small businesses and users who could not afford to pay for a high-end service would move away from MailChimp.
How Developers are adopting with this Mandrill MailChimp Merger
As the email marketplace continues to evolve and in the light of the recent Mandrill Mailchimp merger, several competing entities have pitched in with their support to help Mandrill users migrate to their platforms.
SendGrid is one such product which is a pioneer in the transactional email services category since 2009.
Sendgrid continue to be the market leader in email infrastructure, sending over 23 billion emails a month (3 times the volume of Mandrill).
They offer world-class deliverability, SMTP server, and API integration options in the transactional email services category. They have scale, expertise, and resources to help the users migrate from Mandrill to their platform and be successful in the long run.
SparkPost is another transactional email service provider with great email inbox deliveries. It has also extended their support with 100,000 free emails and wanted to match the price of Mandrill. It claims, world 25% legitimate emails are delivers through their platform. Some of the well know customers include, PayPal, SalesForce, Groupon, Linkedin, Oracle, Comcast, Twitter and many more. SparkPost detail about this announcement is available here.
As a comparison on the new pricing structure, through Mandrill, 25,000 emails can be sent at $20 per month. Now for free, SparkPost allows their customers to send 100,000 emails.
Pros of using Mandrill MailChimp Merger:
- Built in list management feature from MailChimp panel
- Ability to send personalized emails to customers with better design features
- Aggregation of data from both platforms leading to huge benefits for users
- Ability to design campaign flow and send email triggers
Cons of the Mandrill MailChimp Merger:
- Multifold increase in costs especially for low volume transactional emails, calculate new Mandrill Price.
- Diversion of precious development time on shifting from Mandrill to MailChimp API
- Small developers cannot afford services that they don’t want.
- The users of Mandrill updated their policy, which are not align with the uses of transactional emails
- It takes time to shift to an alternate transactional email delivery service
The Path Ahead for MailChimp as-as whole:
- Better template design and thus better email personalization
- Better E-Commerce automation workflows (MailChimp has 150,000 email automation customers)
- MailChimp and Mandrill Integration allows all the data to be located at one place. By providing huge benefits to both MailChimp as well as Mandrill users
- Single-minded focus on personalization, making those services better
- Investment on architecture and infrastructure to improve personalization services
- Appreciable reduction in prices for its customers using personalization services
Why EasySendy Pro hybrid solution is the future
EasySendy Pro integrates with many SMTP relay service providers, using which you can easily deliver email campaigns. You add your subscribers to the list, micro-segment and micro-deliver emails to them, using SMTP relay services of your choice.
This also opens the ability to send one-on-one personalized emails to the end subscribers. As, discussed about the micro-delivery factors which can drastically improve email delivery and then, email open rate. EasySendy Pro is the way forward to send email campaigns. Following are advantages of using EasySendy Pro:
- One can hot-swap their SMTP relay server from their existing SMTP relay ( Mandrill, in this case ) to a variety of new SMTP relay servers like Amazon SES, SparkPost, Mailgun, etc. instantly and painlessly
- Option to instantly hot-swap also give the ability to test and optimize wide variety of SMTP relay servers to get much better email delivery rates
- Availability of 7 different SMTP servers integrated with the platform. You can integrate it instantly, and they will be releasing a few more in the next few months
- EasySendy Pro has complete focus on improving email open rate
- Has best in class email list management features with micro-segmentation
- Far better and user-friendly email list segmentation capabilities
- Ability to send emails based on past behavior of email subscribers.
- Advanced features for personalization of email campaigns
- EasySendy Pro APIs, which will enable EasySendy Pro users to save and send transactional email templates too
- EasySendy Pro Marketplace, this will enable marketers to use upcoming innovation in customer communications like email to push notification services on mobile and electronic devices.
- Ability to optimize email marketing budget.
Available Alternatives for Mandrill:
Customers who are using Mandrill on EasySendy Pro, our support team is helping them to migrate to following SMTP relay choices:
- SparkPost
- Amazon SES
- MailGun
- LeaderSend
- ElasticEmail
- SendGrid
- Dyn
Wrapping up,
Apart from above, if the EasySendy Pro customer wants to use the new Mandrill add-on after Mandrill MailChimp Merger, then, they will have to signup with MailChimp and start using Mandrill.
A good option to go with.I appreciate the decision of merging Mandrill services with MailChimp which has already proved itself in market as spammers are blocked and revenues seems increment. And the best part is its cost effectiveness to the users.
Yes Bobby; Mandill was available at quite affordable cost and so was used by many for not good reasons. Now Mandrill merged with MailChimp; the cost of Mandrill has also went high.
Hey Ankit,
This is a great write up. Yes, merging Mandrill with Mailchimp is a great idea. It has stopped quite a lot of fraudulent activities. Also, hybrid email marketing is slowly taking the lead in the market.
The entire blog post gives a vivid picture about Mandrill. The pros and cons properly described for the developers to understand the functioning in a proper way. The alternative choices of Mandrill like Amazon SES, Spark post, and MailGun are also discussed in details. This post is likely to be a good material for a developer. Do read for a better understanding. Thanks for sharing!
Glad you liked it Eva!
great tips thanks
Hmm..this article was not entirely enjoyable. And this is not due to the writer. It took me a long time to understand what are transactional emails. Certain technical terms such as transactional emails are so misleading. I feel the nomenclature for these emails should be Notification emails or Alert emails, or update emails as these emails are generated not to conduct any transaction but to alert the user about the stage of development of his main action initiated (for e.g. the status of shipping of his online purchase)
The inclusion of the Mandrill for the MailChimp accounts is a revolutionary step, it is the most certain that Hybrid emails are the future. To me, efficiency is the most important and this serves the purpose by delivering value added emails.
The foremost advantage of the Integration of MailChimp and Mandrill is that it will allow all the data to be located at one place hence providing huge benefits to both MailChimp as well as Mandrill users! It has also freezed quite a lot of deceitful activities.
Responsive Hybrid emails are definitely the future. It is also very important to choose the right mobile-friendly email approach because on an average a consumer owns 3.64 internet-connected devices. A fantastic article! Keep writing such good posts.
I think Mandrill MailChimp Merging was a bold strategy change that weeded out some of the bad accounts and then ultimately improved the revenue stream for MailChimp. Thanks for listing the Pros and Cons, it was very helpful.
Yes, I think adding SPF and DKIM records and verifying ownership of sending domains is a great step by MailChimp to curb bad accounts.
This is so chock full of useful information, thanks for sharing, Ankit. Not allowing to send any email from unverified domains or domains without valid SPF and DKIM records, including public domains like gmail.com and yahoo.com is an excellent step towards removing bad accounts on MailChimp.
Hybrid emails are definitely the future! Thanks for sharing this wonderful article.
This article was really insightful yet enjoyable. Good work.
By utilizing a hybrid solution, you can add your subscribers to the list and micro-deliver emails to them of your choice at the same time.
Hey, Thanks a lot for updating the content about the Hybrid Emails, which is the future of email marketing. I appreciate the efforts of Ankit, as he has framed this topic in a significant way.
Thanks a lot, Ankit as he had put lots of efforts in updating the content about the upcoming hybrid emails.
If you want to get rid of bad accounts and improve the revenue stream for MailChimp, then data is quite helpful for you.
Thanks a lot for listing the pros and cons.
If you want to get rid of bad accounts and improve the revenue stream for MailChimp, then data is quite helpful for you.
Thanks a lot for listing the pros and cons.
Hey Ankit, Great info, thanks a lot. The idea about merging Mandrill with Mailchimp is a great idea which can help you improve my email marketing campaigns!
I wanted to understand Mandrill Mailchimp Merger, and finally, I got this article to read. I analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of the Mandrill Mailchimp Merger.
Hey, I was not aware that hybrid emails are the future. It was a valuable insight for me and great to know that we can use EasySendy Pro with SMTP relay services to micro-segmenting list of subscribers.
Spot on! We are delighted to see this piece of the write-up on Mandrill MailChimp Merger and how developers are adopting it.
This is outstanding work…thank you for sharings the alternatives of mandrill and for highlighting the idea of how easysendy pro hybrid finds solutions in future… great work…keep growing…