What Stats Should I Review in Mailchimp
One of the smart reasons you use an email service like MailChimp is because it provides you statistical analysis that you can use strategically for your business.
In this video I’m going to show you what numbers to look at, what they mean, and how you can use them as a competitive advantage for your business to grow your revenue. If you’re ready to build your business go ahead and SUBSCRIBE to our channel, give us a thumbs up, and hit the bell to get notified every time we publish a new video which is every Thursday.
Hi, I’m Jeanne Willson with Six Figure Business Coaching and today I’m going to show you how easy it is to track your progress using the statistics in MailChimp. I’m also going to tell you a story about one of my clients who completely changed her business just by checking one statistic regularly.
So today we’re going to talk about stats on MailChimp and this really goes for any email service that you’re using but it’s really really important that you not only send out your emails, but that you’re looking to see how effective they are and so today we’re gonna go over some of the things that you should be looking at.
The most important things are your open rates, your click-through rates, your unsubscribes, your bounces. Those are probably the four that are the most important to look at but we’re going to talk about a few others just so you can look at this more strategically. The first place we’re going to go to in MailChimp is campaigns and you can kind of get an overview with this particular company, you can see here a little bit of an overview on their opens, on their clicks. It’s kind of nice that it gives you the percentage.
So the open rate is the percentage of people who received your email and opened it. It’s fairly simple. There is a percentage that is an average for all the different industries. I’m going to put that link in the description below so that you can look up your particular industry to see what percentage is the average for your industry because you always want to try and shoot for something that’s over the average and that might take a little while.
You might find, in the beginning, that you have some really high numbers. Because, sometimes when you first send out to people, they’re like ‘wow’ and they get a little curious and they want to see what you’re all about and what you’ve got going on.
So it’s natural to have a spike in the beginning and then for it to settle down a little bit. You want the overall average to be beating the open rate for your industry. You can see in this particular one it kind of fluctuates up and down a bit. That big one right here was a Thank You message for an opt-in so that’s a little bit different. That’s going to be a little bit of a different number than a regular weekly email. You can see these kind of jump up and down a little bit and that’s good information to know because you can look at the ones that had a really high open rate and you can go back and look at what was the subject of that.
Is that something that was really popular because it was very topical for that time of year or was it something that was of a lot of interest to my audience?
So those are the kinds of things that you want to evaluate when you are looking at your numbers. Because if it was a topic that was really popular, you might want to post something about that again and see if it gives you another spike. Then you’re kind of getting into the psyche, if you will, of your audience and you’re understanding a little bit more about what kind of information they want to see and they want to hear from you.
So, I think that’s really really valuable. If you like the fact that you can actually see who opened your email after you sent it to them go ahead in post ‘OPEN’ in the comments below! The second number – now you can see it’s kind of bouncing between how many people opened – the hard number and then what percentage they are. Both are important.
The second number is clicks and it’s also called a click-through rate and it is, of the people who opened your email how many of them actually clicked on a link in your email. That’s also going to be really important. It’s obviously a smaller number. I think that the overall average is is small. It’s like one and a half or two percent so, again you can kind of look around and see if you get a bigger number – I think one of these was almost a three percent – and you could say wow people not only opened the email but they really, really enjoyed this article or they were really interested in that product.
I’m gonna tell you a little story about that in a little bit but those are some of the things that I want you to understand. There’s a section here called ‘reports’ and it’s going to show the same information but it’s going to show it in a little different chart which I kind of like. So, here you go, here is kind of an overview of all the different emails
that have been sent out. You can put your cursor over them and look at which ones they were and up here the orange line is the open rate. If you know your average open rate is 15 percent you can say, excellent, most of mine are over 15 percent but this one went down.
These two are down a little bit. Maybe I’ll look back – and actually a couple over here too – well maybe I’ll look back and see what topics those were or what subject lines those work because now I know those were not of particular interest to my audience. I can also look at the ones that spiked and can see – maybe I want to do some more articles or some more subject lines that were more like those. Then down here at the bottom you can see the click rate.
And again, when you look at the article, you can see what was a good click rate. I can’t remember, for this client, I want to say it was like one and a half percent. This one had a three percent click rate so I might go back and look in that newsletter and say hey you know what was it that they clicked on, what were they so interested in and maybe do again a few more articles in that way. So that’s the chart. This gives you a little more information on how many subscribers you had. You can see the subscribers, they kind of go up and down a little bit which is interesting because what you want to see is the subscriber numbers going up. You want to see more people subscribing to your newsletter You want to make sure that your numbers are going up.
So that might be something that you can look at a little more closely. Maybe your opt-in isn’t bringing in as many people as it should. Maybe we need to look at what your opt-in is and tweak that and find something that is of more interest to people. Another way that our number of subscribers goes down is when people unsubscribe. So if we’re talking about unsubscribes there’s a couple different ways to look at it. I like to look at each email newsletter.
Once I send it out then I like to wait about a week because you’ve got to give people a little bit of time to look at it because once it hits their email, their inbox, they may not look at it right away because they’re busy, they’ve got other things that are more time-sensitive, they may wait a day, they may be working on a big project, so I like to give them a week because sometimes people will wait until the weekends as well to go ahead and read your email especially if you are a business to consumer business.
Sometimes people like to wait till the weekend so they can really dig in and really pay attention to what your email is all about and the information you’re providing them, so give it about a week and then put it in your calendar to check your report. So again, you’re going to look at your opens, your clicks, and then you’re gonna want to look at – and we’re gonna get a look at this specific email and – this is a really nice overview the way that they’ve done this. So this tells you what industry you’ve set it up for.
This tells you a little bit about your demographics, your audience size, so this tells you your open rate your click rate and your unsubscribes. It says this is what this campaign did 26%. This is what your campaigns overall do on an average basis for your open rate (we’ve selected open rate so this is just talking about open rate) so on average you do about 21% and then other people in your industry do 35%. So you might be thinking, hmm, I can do better! That’s what this would tell me! You can also click on ‘click rate’ so this campaign did 2.7%.
The average campaign that you send out does 2.3% so this did better than your normal ones, but the your peers, other people in this industry do 5.3% so you’re still falling behind on this one, there’s still a lot of opportunity for growth. If you click on ‘unsubscribe’ this campaign had 0.5% of people unsubscribe which looks like that’s what
is normal for you, it’s also normal for other people in your industry. This tells me that people unsubscribe and it’s not something that you should panic about. There’s lots and lots of reasons.
Maybe they signed up to get your special and now they’re just getting too much email in their inbox. Maybe things aren’t relative to them anymore. They changed their email address so they signed up again under a different email address and now they’re still getting things under this old address. There’s lots and lots of reasons that people will unsubscribe. It’s not something to be worried about because you really want people on your list who sincerely want your information. You want people on there who are going to open your email.
You don’t want them just to get it and and think ‘meh,’ that it doesn’t relate to me you want this list to be people who are actively engaged, who are excited. Who are going to buy your products and services. So don’t worry if they unsubscribe then they’re not your your raving fans. They’re not going to be your customers and that’s fine because not everyone is your customer. So if we look at this again – looking at some more numbers we can see that we sent this out to 408. 408 people received the email which was 99.3%. So there are a couple people who did not get it and we’ll talk about that in a minute. 145 people successfully opened it.
What you can see in these numbers is successful deliveries is 408 which is 99.3 percent which is excellent. That means that almost everyone who it was sent to received it and we’ll talk a little bit about that – it has to do with a bounce rate and we’re going to talk about that in just a minute. Total opens is a hundred and forty five so that is different to the hundred and six open rate because sometimes people will open it more than once. Maybe you sent them an article and when they opened it they scanned it and they said oh, I really liked that information or I want to read more about that but I don’t have time right now so they closed it.
Then they went back to it later on and opened it again when they had time to spend on it. So one hundred and six people opened it, eleven people clicked on the links, three of them bounced, and what happens when things bounce is sometimes it’s because the email address was incorrect so that’s definitely a list that you’re gonna want to look at each month because you want your bounce list to be zero or as small as possible. I mean three is very ,very small, so that’s good.
It’s possible that you uploaded an email address and instead of putting .com you put .co or instead of putting @Gmail you put @Gmail so make sure you have a look at the bounces because it can be human error.
It can also be that, again, the email doesn’t exist anymore. so there’s a few reasons for bounces but you want your bounce rate to be really low – then two people unsubscribed which, again, is a low number and we saw that that’s average, that’s normal.
However, if this particular email had a huge unsubscribe rate then you know this is either not the information that my audience wants to see or it’s not going to the right people. So you know these are really, really important things that you learn by going through your report that you wouldn’t know otherwise. If you just sent it out and pat yourself on the back cause you sent out an email.
It’s great that you did send it out but, again, you definitely want to make sure that you’re looking at the numbers. This is really interesting too. I like this graph this is a 24 hour performance so this shows you in the first 24 hours after your email went out when people opened it. This one went out at 6am so the majority of people who opened it, opened it right away and then it went down at 7am but it went back up at 8am so you could test when you send your email out. You might try sending it at 8am – maybe that’s a better time on this particular day, and then naturally you
know this number is gonna go down over time as things progress.
Sometimes, if it is more of a business-to-consumer you may find that there’s a jump in the 8 to 9 o’clock or the 7 to 8 o’clock because what happens is people go home in the evenings and that’s when they have time to sit down and open emails that are non-business related. So this is definitely important to see because you may find that you can get a better performance, a better open rate by sending something at a different time or a different day of the week.
This is going to help you with the time of day. This part of the report shows you different parts of your email. Each one of these are the links in the email and you can see that the first article was the one that everyone clicked on so obviously that was the most important and that was the one that everybody wanted to read so that’s awesome.
Then you can see that there are some people here who had – subscribers with the most opens. You can see some of these people opened your email over and over and over again and this is really, really valuable because what it says is that these people were really, really interested in this topic. If this topic were a blog post of yours or if it were a particular service that you offer or if it were something that related really closely to what you offer, these might be people you could consider a warm lead.
You might want to go ahead and send an email directly to them and just say – you don’t want to say ‘I saw that you opened my email a bunch of times’ – but you may want to say, if you don’t know these people, you want to say ‘hey, we’re reaching out to some of the people on our email list and we’re just wondering, we’re doing something special, we’re doing some one-on-one calls to see if there’s a way that we can help you.
Would you like to set up a time to talk to us or are there any questions that we can answer for you. If it’s a particular product, you can give them more information on it. You could capitalize or follow up a little bit with a small group of people who, you can assume from this information, that they might have been genuinely more interested in what you were promoting or what you put out there in this email, so I think that’s really, really valuable information.
It would be really smart to set aside some time when you do your analysis of your emails and you go through these numbers every week, to go ahead and block a little bit of time off to also follow up with some of these people. If you, by chance, have their their phone numbers then call them. I clicked on ‘more information’ so you can see a little bit of more information on them. It gives you their name. It gives you a member rating. You can see on this report, it gives us a little more information about each of the contacts. It gives us their email address. How many times they opened it. It looks like this gives you everybody.
So I think we can click on opens and it will sort them. If we click it once it sorts them lowest to highest. If we click it twice it puts the people who opened it the most at the top. This person opened it five times, so that’s a lot of times for somebody to open this. I would say they were probably very interested.
You might pick some people at the top here who opened it quite a few times and, like I said, send them something special. Now, there’s something over here called a ‘member rating.’ I think this is really interesting and I’m going to put a link to this article in the bottom as well. This tells you a little bit about how they rate people. When people start out on on your list they have anywhere from a zero to two stars.
As they stay on your list, MailChimp ranks them or gives them a rating based on their activity and their relationship to your emails. One star means this person unsubscribed and re-subscribed or they bounced in the past and i think what they’re doing here is they are trying to help you figure out who might be an ideal client for you. Somebody with five stars could be a really high potential client for you.
Somebody with one star, hmmm, maybe not so much. They’re trying to help you out figuring out who to target in the future. So two stars: no engagement, three stars: low engagement (they open or click your campaign but not consistently), four stars: they often open or click your campaigns when you send them, five stars: this person opens or clicks your campaigns on a very consistent basis. It’s kind of nice to have that little ranking here. You can see this person always opens.
I just think that’s really valuable information to have and if you combine that with how many times somebody opened a particular email that might be somebody who is a really, really warm customer. You can see how just going through these numbers can provide you a ton of information on people who are receiving your emails. So again, you can go through this is under the campaign’s tab. You can go through each one and see the report for each one and then you can also go to audience and look at and click on here – on view contacts. It starts out with the people who unsubscribed.
So you can look through that and that might be valuable to see if there are people on there who are past clients or people that kind of surprised you. It would be okay to give them a call and say, ‘I get a report that tells me who unsubscribed to my email and you did and I just wondered why?’ if that surprised you. Otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about that and, like I said, do not be personally offended by that. If you wanted to see your contact rating, you can click on that and, like I said, it it sorts them by one star but if you click on it again it’ll sort them by five stars – really valuable information.
If you wanted to click on here, you can export this information so that you could have a nice CSV file which you can open in Excel you can have that report. If you don’t have time to follow up right now, you can follow up at a later time. You can write a new email that just goes to those people and maybe send them something special, say ‘you know this month we’re offering a special just to our top five, or we have five spaces open for this particular one-on-one service, or we have just a few opportunities and we’re just offering them to certain people who are on our list… so kind of make them feel special because I think that’s always a good way to make people feel special.
It is also a great way to encourage them to buy from you. Again, there’s a column here under email marketing and that’s where we saw unsubscribed but there’s also one label, I guess you could call it, called ‘cleaned’ and I think this is actually a really nice feature on MailChimp that’s not a feature on all email programs.
What it is, is that when you send out an email and it bounces, which means you sent it out to an email address and it didn’t get there (and that usually means that the email address doesn’t exist anymore) so what will happen (or that it was it was a mistake… one of these actually I can see here says instead of @yahoo.com it says @yahool.com) so what happens is MailChimp turns around and says this didn’t make it. This email doesn’t exist, so we’re going to clean it out. Instead of you having to go back in there and say delete this, delete this, delete this, it just goes ahead and cleans it for you which is great.
However, you do need to go in here and check these because sometimes it’s just a mistake in the email address. MailChimp doesn’t allow you to change the email address once it’s been cleaned, however, you can go ahead and add it back in with the correct email address. So cleaned is kind of a really nice feature although I personally wish that they had indicated that these had bounced and then were cleaned because I think it’s a little confusing that in one report it says bounced and the other report it says cleaned, but you know there you go.
But it’s a really nice thing because they’re basically doing a step for you, where a lot of services won’t do that, they’ll just keep bouncing and bouncing and bouncing. Email services do not like when you have a large bounce list. So again, it’s really, really important to get your emails out on a regular, consistent basis and fill them with fabulous content, but it is also really really important for you to go back and evaluate how well they did, because then the emails that you set up and you send out going forward are going to be even more effective in helping you really impact your ideal target market and help them to be excited and want to buy your products and services.
So make sure that you are looking every time you send out an email, like I said, I usually like to wait about a week and then look at your open rates, look at your click rates, look at your unsubscribes, look at your bounces, and go ahead and look at those numbers for the people who did open and did click. Look at those really high numbers and maybe think about offering them something special or reaching out to them individually. I promised you that I would tell you a little bit about one of my clients who, after checking one particular stat, completely changed her business.
She happened to be a realtor client of ours and so we were sending out an email newsletter on a regular basis it was every week, I think it was, yes it was every week, and she would put a link to her current listings. What we were doing is, we were giving her a report on who was clicking on those links and so she was contacting them. She was following up with them. She would, if she knew who they were, she would give them a call and just say, ‘hey, I’m just checking in to see how everything’s going. How is the family? (because a lot of her clients were families and were repeat business.
She worked with a lot of generations of families) or if they weren’t somebody that she already knew she would send them an email and just say ‘oh, I’m just following up, I’ve had a new listing and I wanted to just check with some people on my list to see if anyone was interested. I’m holding an open house this weekend so feel free to send an email or just reply to this email and let me know if you’d like to schedule an appointment to go and see this property.
Well once she started doing that on a consistent, regular basis, she started selling more properties because what happened was, people were looking at her property who were obviously interested in buying it or buying something like it. So once she started reaching out to them individually and especially, obviously, the people that she already knew they would say “Oh, Debbie, wow, you know I was just thinking about you” and “oh, yes, I just love this property. I’d love to talk to you. it’s funny that you called, it was definitely something that was on my mind.”
They may not even remember that they opened your email or that they clicked on that listing but you know they will know that it was rattling around in their mind. The point of the story is by checking your numbers consistently after your send all your emails and by checking to see who’s clicking on the links and looking at what they’re clicking on and following up with them, you can use that information and you can, like our client did, possibly change the dynamic and change the landscape of your business completely. So don’t discount the information that you can gather from statistics and from following up with people and from just looking at how well your emails are being received.
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