At our creative agency we’ve helped some of our clients use Mandrill in the past, so we thought we’d publish a helpful post outlining what this development means.
Mandrill is a popular delivery service for transactional emails from websites and applications, it’s used by some of the biggest tech companies such as Spotify and UBER. It was also developed by well known email marketing platform Mailchimp.
Simply put Mandrill is a behind the scenes service which is used to automatically send emails from a website or application such as thank you emails when users sign up to your newsletter. As one of the top go-to transactional email services for developers (800,000+ organisations and individuals currently use Mandrill), it is very possible that your organisation’s websites and/or applications are using Mandrill to deliver emails.
So why does this matter?
Mandrill has recently announced changes to the structure and setup of its user accounts which will now be merged with Mailchimp and will require a paid Mailchimp account – free accounts are now a thing of the past. In this blog post from Mailchimp, they explain the reasons for their decision to merge the two services but to summarise – Mailchimp are now focusing on providing a personalised and template based transactional email service for e-commerce customers and moving away from providing simple transactional email services for the masses.
From the 16th of March, existing Mandrill users will be able to merge their Mandrill account with a paid Mailchimp account only. Users will have until April 27th to merge their accounts after which their Mandrill account will be disabled and no longer function on their website or application.
How do I know if we are using Mandrill?
Unless you have the necessary technical knowledge and know where to look, you will need to get in touch with the developer of your website and/or application. If you are like many who don’t have the knowledge and your developer is nowhere to be found then we would love to help. Get in touch with our team via the form at the bottom of these post or give us a call on 02 9438 1280.
I am using Mandrill, but is a move to Mailchimp right for us?
This decision mainly boils down to a single question: Will your organisation use the personalised email services of a paid account with Mailchimp? If your organisation is using Mandrill as a simple email transaction service behind the scenes, then the answer is probably no. If that is the case there are a number of alternatives and we have listed out a few of these options below:
- Sparkpost: Free up to 100,000 per month and are honouring the original pricing structure of Mandrill
- Amazon SES: Free up to 62,000 outgoing emails per month
- SendGrid: Free up to 12,000 emails per month
Mailchimp’s paid accounts start at $20/month and go up from there depending on the size of your contact/subscriber list.
We strongly recommend that all organisations, large or small, be proactive with investigating if their websites and applications are using Mandrill. If the organisation is using Mandril then it is important that the necessary steps are taken to either merge with Mailchimp or setup a new service to avoid any disruption to your users once the April 27th deadline passes.
