MailChimp can be a lot of fun. You get to drag and drop to create your own emails, adding pictures and links and proudly telling interested parties about the latest happenings in your organisation. And that’s before you’ve even got to the reporting part.
Measuring the effectiveness of a campaign in itself and against other campaigns can provide many useful business insights. Open, clicks, unsubscribes, you can see all sorts of information and the MailChimp reports drill down into some fairly complex detail. There’s a world of stats that you can lose yourself in.
So it’s worth creating a dashboard of stats to review yourself or to create reports for senior people in your organisation who would like to see how well your email marketing campaigns are performing.
With such a variety of reports available, it’s hard to figure out what is most relevant. Here are our picks of the 6 most useful reports in MailChimp:
- Open Rate and Click Rate. On the overview, look at both the open rate and click rate of you campaign to gauge impact. Compare these rates against your other campaigns to see which have worked particularly well and against the industry average to make sure you’re on the right track.
- Subscribers with most opens. Again, you will find this on the overview, Subscribers with most opens shows you who has opened your email a number of times, potentially identifying a future client or customer. This gives you the opportunity to take action if you wish, perhaps a courtesy call to these highly engaged clients/ customers while you know they are considering using your services.
- Click map. Get to this through the “Links” tab. This map gives you visual clues as to what people find interesting enough to click on and rather revealingly, how far down your email they are likely to click. This will save you lots of time creating long emails that no-one will actually read. Patterns will emerge showing you which type of email content prompts the most people to click through to your website.
- Subscribers who did not open the last 10 campaigns. Find out who hasn’t opened any of your last 10 campaigns in Lists -> Manage subscribers-> view subscribers-> segments-> new segment -> Subscribers match any of the following, campaign activity, did not open, last 10 campaigns. You might want to target these subscribers specifically, giving them a courtesy call to see if they require any of your services, or sending them an email whose subject line makes them an offer they can’t refuse.
- Most engaged subscribers. To find out your most engaged and loyal subscribers you can see who has clicked on links from your 10 most recent campaigns by choosing campaign activity-> clicked-> Last 10 campaigns. As well as customers, these people may just be your strongest brand advocates so offering them a reward for their loyalty could do wonders in terms of the word of mouth they will spread.
- Unsubscribes. Unsubscribes in themselves are fine, people may lose interest in your products and services over time, or may have had their needs fulfilled by you or another provider and are no longer looking for what you can offer them. The unsubscribes report becomes very important when a) you get a lot of people unsubscribing after one particular campaign and b) if the unsubscribe reasons are frequently did not sign up, inappropriate content or spam. So keep an eye on these.
If you’re interested in learning more about MailChimp, we’ve written about why you should use it and how to join as well as 7 things we bet you’re missing from your email campaigns and 12 ways to get people onto your newsletter list.
Photo by William Iven on Unsplash
