We all know that marketing is the lifeblood for small and medium businesses. In the 15 years or so that I’ve owned and run SMBs, I’ve seen how hard it is to actually market to consumers (well, hard or expensive). Now there’s a whole new range of tools that put effective and efficient marketing into the hands of any Mom and Pop business.

Case in point, the release of the integration between KashFlow and MailChimp. KashFlow is a regular visitor to these pages – they’re a scrappy company with a scrappier CEO. But they have a passion, a belief and a commitment which is hard to fault. MailChimp is another product I’ve talked about – it’s a fantastic little email campaign tool that allows even the smallest business to make magic with their newsletters.

What I really like about this integration is that it has gone beyond the simple export-a-contact-list approach that many other integrations have used. In this case the integration takes some more valuable data – number of invoices, total invoice value etc – and puts that information into MailChimp where it can be acted upon.

So now MSBs can tailor their newsletter campaigns – not just geographically but also by some specific user data. Have customers that haven’t after their initial purchase? This integration will allow you to send an email out to all of them. Want to reward your highest spending customers – this’ll  let you do that too.

KashFlow - MailChimp Settings13/04/2011

And the best thing? The integration is free to KashFlow customers and so long as a business is under 2000 customers and 12000 email a month, the MailChimp part is free as well. Well done KashFlow and MailChimp – enabling SMBs everywhere!

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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