I haven’t used Mail Chimp for too long, but its a great free(mium) service. When I first signed up, I was a bit scared and confused by the site, but they have well put together videos and even free service chat as well. Having said that, Mail Chimp is a really powerful way to manage contact lists, and then send out emails, HTML-rich or plain, to a large group of people. Now I’ll go into a few cases where you might find launching your next iPhone project a whole lot easier…

Beta Testing
One step developers should take before releasing an application is to beta-test. This means seeding a build of your application to up to 100 different people. With all the permissions you have to jump through to release an adhoc build, it can be a daunting task to manage 100 UDID strings and entering the information into the developer portal page. Using Mail Chimp’s sign up form, you can create a custom form that allows your beta-testers to enter in their information along with their devices UDID. After people have signed up, you can export your new list of beta testers, and upload the data into the developer portal to add those devices. You can then use Mail Chimp to email the provisioning profile and the adhoc build to distribute the application so testers can try out the application.

Fans & Potential/Previous Customers
Okay, call me crazy, but you can use MailChimp for regular email marketing campaigns too. Many iPhone developers utilize this tactic to target their audience to push sales. Notably, 1Password and TapTapTap have used emails to send out information on current and new applications. People can sign up, and you can send out updates and news about your application. Of course, MailChimp makes it for people to unsubscribe from the email list just as easy as they signed up for the email.

Friends & Family

Whenever you publish a new application, you want to hook up your friends and family with a free copy. Again, if you have a lot of people you want to give the app to, this can be a long process. You’ve got to remember everyone you want to send a promo code to, request the codes, make sure each person gets their own unique one. With Mail Chimp, you can take a care of that easily. After you’ve entered in your friends email address and info, you can append a new field called Promo. Download the excel spreadsheet (from the list tab, go to “view list”, then go to the “view all” page) of the contact information and request the necessary number of promo codes from iTunes Connect. Copy and paste the promo codes into the correct column in the excel spreadsheet, and import the data back to Mail Chimp. Make sure you check the box to auto-update so you don’t recreate the data. Finally, you can send one email with each person receiving their individual promo code using the *|PROMO|* in the email contents.