14 DAY TRIAL // Email marketing giant MailChimp released at the start of February 2010 a revised version of their newsletter management service, named MailChimp v5. The service went live without any special fees for its 240,000 users.
During last year, MailChimps's competitors released many tools and add-ons for their services. The heat was especially felt from old rivals Campaigner and StreamSend, and also from the newly arrived Australian startup and community favorite Campaign Monitor.
While the competition has been focusing on mail design issues and price discounts, the MailChimp development team has been hard at work, putting the pieces in place to some very unique features.
Version 5 of the service will now provide geolocation options for email marketing campaigns, which means that when a user clicks on one of the links inside the newsletter, their geographical position is recorded in the sender's database, and can be displayed using a map in reports (30 countries supported at this moment).
This data can then be used by the admin in future newsletters to create and send more geo-targeted campaigns. The “Geolocation” feature also works in cases where the owner will want to issue a campaign only in specific geographical areas.
“Time Warp,” one of the features launched with version 5, will give senders the possibility to launch email campaigns by the recipient's local time zone, while “Autotranslate” can translate the entire content of a campaign into different languages.
Other options released with this version include: Quick polls (polls inside the newsletter's content), Flickr integration (adding entire Flickr-stored photo galleries inside an email campaign), Delivery Doctor (new troubleshooting and debug tool) and Design Genius (email template builder).
Besides these new features, some changes have been made to the core of the MailChimp service, like CSS3 implementations to some areas of the GUI, security enhancements for its API, and some other API changes to provide support for an upcoming iPhone app.
A short introduction video can be viewed below.