Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)

It has a good interface and user experience

It is easy to create a template choosing a variety of themes and options.

We can have easy out put of a particular campaign.

Any user can adjust it easily.

There is nothing that needs to be improved but it has to take care of its price where it is some what higher than its competitors.

Where it can also makes some themes and options for the paid users more flexibly.

Automation of transactional emails

Send rates

General functionality

Creating templates is done with html, would be easier with a better interface ie drag and drop.

General dashboard interface is not very good looking or inviting.

Mandrill's interface is simple to navigate and very intuitive.

Domain masking is very simple to set-up and the verification process is fast.

Our system adds a notification when a donor has opened an email; however, we've found inconsistencies with the system where a donor may have opened an email, but Mandrill hasn't sent that notification to our app.

For the scenario above, when we've reached out to their support, the response has been that it is what it is. I'd like to see the supports take be focusing on improving the platform rather than saying it is what it is.

Manages large amounts of addresses

Monitors addresses for suitability

The setup for integrations requires in-depth API experience and knowledge

Continuity of service is great. We have been happy with the uptime.

Speed, the emails are sent instantly.

Set it and forget it, once you have it set up, it works.

Integration with Mailchimp Templates makes it easy to design and change email formats.

The user interface is basic, dated.

Sometimes hard to find what you are looking for, some features are buried.

It would be nice to be able to make minor tweaks or changes within Mandrill, but you need to go back to Mailchimp, edit and redeploy to Mandrill.

It has a user-friendly interface. A non-technical user can also operate it easily.

Its analytical feature gives wide details of customers engagement with the campaigns.

Its HTML editor is very easy to work with.

Its integration with MailChimp is slightly difficult to understand for a non-technical user.

A bit expensive for new and small scale businesses.

Sometimes I found a delay in sending the campaign.

Sub-account control

Account and sub-accounts reputation

Sent email reporting and logging

More enterprise configuration so we could have roles and administration options

Option to edit the "user sending" for the account

Domain validation

Search and Logs of Sent Emails

Integrations and Client Libraries

Templates and Merge Fields (almost as flexible as MailChimp)

API is fantastic.

Pricing, although fair, is unfortunately tied into MailChimp and not a standalone service anymore.

Sometimes support is iffy via their ticket system.

The integration with our proprietary platform was seamless, and the emails were delivered reliably with very low bounce-rates.

The UI is clean and intuitive. It's a snap to create custom email templates.

Their documentation is extremely well made and laid out.

We weren't pleased when they switched from a freemium model to require that you also use MailChimp; however, MailChimp itself is my preferred email service, so this wasn't a significant hindrance.

They could have a more robust set of analytics available on-site, as opposed to leaving it to Google Analytics to do the heavy lifting, but it's hard to fault them for not trying to re-invent the wheel here.

Easy to use

Reliable

Great API

You can only use Mandrill if you have a Mailchimp account

Analytic part could be stronger

Mandrill is reliable. We rarely find that the information in Mandrill is incorrect.

Mandrill emails can be tracked from start to finish. We can have full view of the lifespan of an email sent using Mandrill.

Automation is game changing for our team. The ability to have email action generated from a prompt on our site is awesome!

We've had moments (very few), where emails have gotten "clogged" up and not sent out. Once the issue was resolved, the emails eventually were sent out.

Would love to see the metrics made less clunky.

Kind of a bummer that you can't get Mandrill on its own. You have to buy mailchimp first.

Dependable - we never encountered down time with the service in the three I developed against it.

Scalable - our typical use was several messages a second to bursts of 100/s. This level of requests was easily processed by the system. There were rare cases where there were delays of upwards of 10 minutes for messages to be delivered but it was always very rare.

Well documented - the API has very good documentation. It's a bit quirky in some implementations but the documentation makes it easy to implement.

Logging - understandably due to the volume of messages the system processes it would be a challenge to log messages older than the current few hours. But it would be ideal if there were webhooks for error events to allow for the creation of custom error notifications.

UI - A slick admin UI but very limited in some areas.

MailChimp - it's unfortunate that Mandrill has been brought back from its autonomous state to now being just a part of the large MailChimp suite of email products. I worry it's going to get lost if it's not a part of the MailChimp vision.

Ease of integration.

Availability of API logs and email send history.

Email deliverability.

The rate-limit system can be troubling. If you are switching providers and already have a large e-mail volume, you're going to want to transition slowly. The per-hour send limits are initially very low, and if you have any deliverability or complaint hiccups, they will plummet quickly. The Mandrill support staff is very helpful in this area - they will not (and claim that they can not) manipulate send limits for any account at any time for any reason.

Billing is combined in with a paid MailChimp subscription, which didn't used to be the case.

No free tier.

Mandrill is extremely reliable. We switched from using a platform that was very hit-or-miss, but we never had a single deliverability issue with Mandrill's transactional API. Every email was sent reliably and quickly.

Mandrill's reporting and debugging features made it easy to ensure that all our messages were getting delivered to the right place in a timely manner. In fact, Mandrill's tools were so robust that we used it as an end-around way of debugging another failing service we were using.

Mandrill is a very affordable add-on to an existing MailChimp account. Adding an extra layer of reliability was a no-brainer, and made the cost essentially negligible to our organization.

Mandrill used to be a standalone service, but now requires a paid MailChimp account to use. This is unfortunate for users of other email platforms.

Mandrill's analytics sometimes leave a bit to be desired. The interface is nice and clean, but drilling down into deep analytics can be cumbersome.

Mandrill lacks a mobile app similar to the ones offered by competing transaction email platforms.

Enables transactional email sending via MailChimp which opens up a ton of communication opportunities via Order Confirmation, Cart Recovery, or other transactional emails.

Monitors sub-accounts send reputation and notifies of high bounce/rejection rates.

Has a very friendly, usable UI and enables smaller companies to dedicate resources to transactional emails without as much setup work as other transactional platforms.

The platform is now limited to only MailChimp users whereas before it was open to anyone.

There's not a lot of support for advanced merge tag usage or using dynamic data in transactional emails.