Today MailChimp are planning to release v8 of its popular email marketing service. As MailChimp Experts we take a particular interest in all new features & news surrounding this cracking service, so below we’ll outline exactly what this new update will be bringing.
The major change or rather introduction surrounds user control and the way they interact interact with the service. In the past there was an all or nothing approach, with account keys giving users access to all or none of the features, well MailChimp have now introduced user permissions in an aim to control exactly what users can and can’t do. For example you may want an agency taking total control of an account, where as a user who writes content for newsletters may only need access to the interface to add content to an existing template. MailChimp have created four different roles which have been outlined below.
Admins
Admins have total access to MailChimp. Only the account admin can manage billing and assign user privileges.
Managers
Managers can design templates and send campaigns, plus they can manage mailing lists and view reports.
Authors
Author status makes sense for designers, writers, and editors who need to work on templates and campaigns, but don’t need to send them. Authors can notify managers and admins when a campaign is ready to go.
Viewers
Viewers can log in and view reports. They don’t have access to campaign creation or list management.
Logging in
Not a dramatic difference but due to how users will have access to many different accounts with different permissions, users will have the option of which account they’d like to use.
Switching Accounts
When you’re within an account and wish to switch you simply jump to the top right drop down containing all your profile options, where you can simply select the name of the account you wish to switch to.
Author Submissions
Due to the new permission levels, Authors will have the ability to create a newsletter however they won’t be able to send them, meaning once an Author is happy with the contents and it’s ready to be sent out, they’ll have the option to send a notification to Managers and Admins who will get a chance to review these before sending.
This update is strongly focused around the admin functionality rather than the back end and the creation of campaigns. For users such as ourselves this is great news, it allows us to control certain aspects of users accounts whilst limiting the functionality for other users who like to go fiddling and breaking things :D.
There are range of other tweaks which will be released within this update all of which can be found within the official MailChimp Blog.