Mailchimp is a free to use email marketing service. The software allows you to create and manage mailing lists and campaigns. Getting started with email marketing and analysing email campaigns using Mailchimp is simple, but as your business expands, you will discover that the service continues to grow with you and offer more options.
MAILCHIMP METRICS
There are four main metrics to pay attention to when analysing email campaigns in Mailchimp. These all do pretty much what they say on the tin, but this post will hopefully clarify any queries you might have.
1. Open Rate
The open rate is the number of people who have opened your email.
Subject lines are the best way to improve your email campaign open rate. As a general rule of thumb, subject lines should be no longer than 5 words – anything much longer could get cut off when displayed on mobile and definitely won’t be snappy enough to entice your reader.
TOP TIP: No matter how much you want to attract a recipient’s attention, avoid using all capital letters in your subject line. This can often send your email straight into the junk folder, impacting your open rate.
One particularly useful function on Mailchimp is the A/B split test. This is a great tool for testing your subject lines as it allows you to send a couple of different subject lines to different contacts and analyse which has had the best open rate.
Another good use of the A/B split function is to divide customers into those who have opened a lot of your emails recently, and those who haven’t. This is worth doing as soon as possible as the Apple iOS 15 update will impact your email marketing.
If people have been opening a lot of emails and clicking on the links within them, you can reward them with discounts. For those that haven’t opened an email, you might want to ask them whether they would still like to receive your emails. In this instance, quality is better than quantity.
2. Click through rate
Once a customer has opened your email, the click rate will measure whether they click on any of the links.
It is a good idea to have a lot of links in your email, with most of them sending the customer to the same place. Make sure to get these in at the start, as 80% of people won’t go past the point where they have to start scrolling in your email. This is also a reason to schedule frequent emails with a lower amount of content.
Due to the different ways that people engage with emails, it is essential to have a good balance of text and images, and ensure all of these have links. Linking to one destination also maintains your focus when writing email copy, which in turn means that the message you’re sending out is as clear as possible.
3. Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that have not been delivered to the subscriber.
There are two categories of email bounce: hard and soft. Hard bounces include invalid email addresses or email addresses that don’t exist. Soft bounces are when the subscriber’s inbox is full, or the email is too large. Other than checking your emails aren’t too large, your bounce rate is not within your control.
If your campaigns have a particularly high bounce rate, it can make Mailchimp suspicious that you have imported a dubious email list from somewhere. However, this is not a cause for concern if your email list was obtained following GDPR guidelines.
4. Unsubscribes
Unsubscribers are simply those who have unsubscribed from your mailing list.
It is mandatory to have an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your emails. The number of unsubscribes is difficult to account for – however, if you notice a peak in the unsubscribe rate after a campaign, it could be something that needs further investigation.
One way to better manage your subscribers, and potentially reduce the number of those unsubscribing, is to create segments in your mailing list. You can segment customers based on several conditions including, location, age, interest groups, and whether they tend to engage with your campaigns or not. The more emails you send, the more effective your segments will become.
If you feel that your business could benefit from outsourcing email marketing, analysing email campaigns, or that further training would make a positive impact, then get in touch with Mackman today at customerservice@mackmangroup.co.uk or call 01787 388038 for more information on how we can help you.