You’ve sent your email campaign. Now what? It’s time to analyze your email reports! We’ll walk you through Mailchimp’s email reports so you can measure your return on investment and understand how customers engage with your emails.
Dive into your email reports.
In your Mailchimp dashboard, navigate to “Reports”. The next screen will show you an overview of email campaign reports: a summary of your email campaign, email opens, clicks, and unsubscribes.
Note: Choose your company’s industry in your Mailchimp account to view the industry average open and click rates. Use this as a guide to compare your own list average to the industry average.
Celebrate email opens and clicks.
Open and click rates are usually the first way to measure campaign success. The higher the open and click rates, the more interested customers are to engage with your product or your brand. BUT if you really want to dig deeper, our favorite hidden feature is Mailchimp’s Click Map.
Here, you can visually see which articles and links are most popular, whether people prefer to click images, text links, or buttons, and see what content is being engaged with the most.
For example, if a button at the top of your email gets more clicks, then move important message buttons higher in the email to increase click rates. Use the Click Map as a guideline for possible email template updates.
On the Overview page, scroll down to see the top links clicked, and the subscribers with most opens. You may use these reports to target specific customers or audiences. Viewing the subscribers with the most opens report really helps target those email addresses, to reach out with sales and revenue opportunities.
Reach out to subscribers who didn’t open the email.
Under the Activity dropdown at the top of the Reports Overview page, Unopened reports may help you target an audience that hasn’t yet seen your product or used your services.
Check the Unopened list at least one week after sending the first email campaign. Export the list, and then re-deploy your email campaign for second-chance engagement.
Tweak the subject line – add “REMINDER” or another line to let subscribers know it’s a second email in case they missed your first email.
Keep an eye on bounced emails.
When Mailchimp can’t deliver emails, these email addresses land in the bounced reports category. There are two types of bounced emails: soft bounce and hard bounce.
Soft bounced emails
A soft bounce means there’s a temporary delivery failure. Your customers’ mailboxes might be full, or email servers might be busy. If email servers receive too many email requests at one time from a single sending address, slowing down your sending queue. Mailchimp will continue attempting to deliver the emails.
If you notice a large amount of soft bounced emails in one campaign, consider redeploying to those email addresses, and throttling future email campaigns. Export the list of users and send a separate campaign.
The next time you send an email to the full email list (if it isn’t particularly time sensitive), throttle the emails to send at a slower rate. Instead of Mailchimp trying to send 100,000 emails all at once, Mailchimp will slow down to a rate such as 1,000 emails per hour.
Hard bounced emails
A hard bounce indicates a permanent delivery failure. That email address doesn’t exist; it might be a typo or an old deleted email address, but the email servers will block if and let Mailchimp know. These usually pop up when someone tries to upload a list of old contacts, or a purchased/scraped list (big no-no, Mailchimp can generally tell when you’re doing this and may flag or ban your account).
If there are only a handful hard bounces that’s usually nothing to worry about, Mailchimp will automatically remove them from your list and won’t send any more emails to those users.
Successful Deliveries: watch out if it gets too low
Aim for a deliverability in the high 90 percent range. Your 24-hour reporting performance chart will provide an overview of your email open rate so you can determine the times when people are most engaged with your emails. Consider adjusting your campaign send times based on these reports.
Authenticating your custom domain may also increase email deliverability, making it more likely for emails to land in the inbox instead of the spam folder.
Abuse Reports: avoid getting flagged.
Keep an eye on your abuse report numbers, most email inboxes include a “report as spam” option to report unwanted emails. If too many users flag your emails as spam (this means very likely you’re sending low quality emails, too many emails, or sending to folks who haven’t opted in) Mailchimp may blacklist you if they receive too many abuse reports from your emails sent from their email servers.
Only send to folks who have opted in, and tailor your content to your audience, and always let your list know how they signed up to avoid being flagged.
Analyze additional email reports.
There’s a lot more to Mailchimp’s reports, if you’d like to dig deeper, we’re here to help. Drop us a line, and we can chat.