Mobile application development platform, Parse, has announced a partnership with email marketing service MailChimp. Beginning today, MailChimp’s Mandrill trackable email API is available for developers to use through Parse’ Cloud Code feature.
It is the latest addition to a platform that has 50,000 Parse-powered apps in the market, of which make billions of API requests each month across more than 100 million devices.
If you’re not familiar with MailChimp’s Mandrill service, it’s a new way for apps to send transactional emails, something that powers MailChimp itself. Those using the service are able to send up to 12,000 emails per month for free and monthly MailChimp users receive an allotment of credits each month as well.
Now, Parse has created a Mandrill Cloud Module that enables developers to easily access its API and create trackable emails right from their mobile apps. In doing so, things such as password resets, order confirmations, welcome messages, personalized product recommendations and more is possible just by using a few lines of code from Parse’s SDK. Developers interested in using this module will find that they need to use or create a MailChimp account in order for it to work — a single login feature hasn’t been implemented.
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As users of MailChimp themselves, Parse says that it’s proud to have the functionality of the Mandrill API in its offering. Ilya Sukhar, the company’s CEO, says that it gets “a ton of inbound requests for this integration, so we’re happy to further simplify this piece of the mobile puzzle for both Parse and MailChimp customers.”
The addition of MailChimp is not the first time an email marketing service has been added to Parse’s portfolio of partners. It currently offers a Cloud Module called Mailgun that consists of several APIs that allow developers to “send, receive, track, and store email effortlessly.” The company has also partnered with SendGrid to provide easy SMTP and API integration to also allow emails to be sent and received from mobile apps.
So why did Parse add another email marketing service? It’s because it wants to have a well-rounded collection of services that suits its developer community. Sukhar tells us that the company recognizes that not everyone is going to be using MailChimp and may prefer another service, and it’s fine with it.
MailChimps partnership comes just a day after Parse announced that it had released the Crowdflower Cloud Module, allowing developers the ability to manage real-time photo sharing within their apps. It also has a Twilio module, and the aforementioned Mailgun and SendGrid modules.
So what lies ahead in the future of Parse? Surely it’s not going to keep adding another partner to its list, right? After a while, it, along with competitor Stackmob and others begin to engage in a service proliferation war where the one with the most companies wins the battle.
Sukhar says that it’s not about the partnerships that will dictate the company’s future. Instead, it will focus on building out its products and is striving to create a universal platform that can be used not only by developers, but also by marketers, producers, product managers, and anyone non-technical who is eager to interact with data from the app.
How exactly Parse plans on doing that remains to be seen, but says that it should be announced soon.
Photo credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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