Bear Group’s Experience with Mandrill
Two of Mandrill’s greatest features are its reliability and its analytics. The decision to integrate Mandrill should be determined more by the amount and frequency of emails sent rather than the platform, as Mandrill integrates well with both Magento® and Drupal systems. Ideally, Mandrill best fits the needs of a website that has a community of subscribers or a wide membership base that is being sent a large amount of emails on a regular basis.
An email marketing automation system handled natively within a website platform itself may be incapable of managing such a large amount of content when it comes at the cost of your server. Mandrill solves this problem by sending your emails from its own server, saving you from potentially missing email addresses on your list. In the past, we’ve worked together with companies such as World Vision, GALA, and Mirren - all of which are websites that cater to a community of subscribed members - to integrate Mandrill within their various platforms.
The Benefits
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Sends Volumes of Emails: One of the most appealing aspects of Mandrill is its powerful deliverability. Because it enables you to send emails from beyond your own server, you can send many thousands of emails, at once, without having to worry about crashing your server or generating data errors.
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Webhooks: Mandrill uses webhooks, which allows for two systems to “talk” on a scheduled basis without using an API. With a webhook, Mandrill will listen for specific activity within your website on a scheduled basis. For example, the website administrator can specify what actions conducted in Drupal or Magento trigger an email to be sent across Mandrill, but Mandrill will also deliver analytics reports to your platform, enabling you to evaluate your data in one place.
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Incredibly Detailed Data Collection: Mandrill can also provide a wide body of data on email recipient response, allowing you to better tailor your messages or email lists. It’s in Mandrill’s best interest to send and generate emails that aren’t received as spam, and by providing detailed data reports and ensuring an excellent rate of sendibility, they do everything they can to assist your email marketing success rate.
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Spam Alert: Mandrill is equipped with an automatic feedback loop registration, and its IPs are automatically registered for feedback loops with ISPs, allowing you to track spam complaints through Mandrill.
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Customized Email Templates: Mandrill is a more customizable email marketing automation system. Because of its communication with your website platform, it can automatically send emails that incorporate specific details - pictures, names - into its body of content making it more relevant to the recipient. Mandrill incorporates a large body of user-generated content or notifications gleaned from the behavior of your website’s users.
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Interesting and Helpful Preview Tools: Preview potential email templates while you customize and design them, enabling you to maintain a complete perspective along every step of the creative process.
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Robust API: Mandrill’s API - developed by the MailChimp team - can integrate seamlessly with whatever platform it needs to. Some platforms offer modules for Mandrill integrations - such as Magento’s Mage Monkey module - which support list building and triggers notifications that come out of the platform to be sent through Mandrill.
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Custom Tracking: Add custom tracking to your emails to view and filter stats on bounces, opens, clicks, and spam complaints. You can also integrate Mandrill with Google Analytics and optimize your email marketing with split testing, custom metadata (customized tracking data), and comparative reports.
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Control Inbound Emails: Mandrill can also manage any inbound emails you may receive by enabling you to set up custom routes for email addresses and patterns.
When Do We Recommend Mandrill
We recommend Mandrill for companies that are looking to deliver high volumes of emails on a regular basis typically from a custom system, like a subscription-based content service where users are creating accounts.
For example, the website Domu allows its users to create daily, weekly, or monthly email notifications for housing they’ve indicated an interest in. Similarly, Mirren allows its users to subscribe to receive periodic notifications on new business development leads, and World Vision International sends a series of “welcome emails” as soon as a new user registers with their website.
Although Mandrill is the tool for sending any kind of transactional email, generates analytic detail and can inform your email marketing strategy, it is not the best tool for the initial creation of an email marketing campaign. Mandrill’s focus is delivery; it’s provides that very last step for a system that needs to send a lot of email. Transactional email, and a high volumes of it, is where Mandrill shines.