Assessing Effectiveness with Mailchimp
Mailchimp offers two tools to help you evaluate the success of email campaigns: Audience and Reports. Audience is a big picture statistical analysis of your ministry’s email campaigns as a whole, where Reports provides in-depth analysis for individual email campaigns targeting different audiences. This document will provide an overview of these tools and how to best use them to more effectively communicate with your audience.
Audience
Audience is a broad statistical overview of all contacts in a campaign which provides three pieces of information: Recent Growth, Top Locations, and Email Marketing Engagement.
Recent Growth shows how much your audience has grown in the last 30 days. It also provides a break-down of which contact collection methods have helped grow your audience the most. This is especially useful in combination with Mailchimp contact collection tools which can be added to your social media accounts, or ministry-specific web pages.
Top Locations uses geolocation data to rank cities with the the most activity from your subscribed contacts.
Email Marketing Engagement is a continually-updated statistical analysis of your audience based on how often they interact with your email campaigns. The information is presented in three categories: Often, Sometimes, and Rarely. Each of these three categories can be specifically targeted by clicking the Target With Campaign Arrow.
Reports
Reports provides a statistical overview of open and click rates for each email campaign your ministry creates and sends.
After navigating to the Reports page, select your audience.
Once you have selected your audience, the Overview graph will populate with your team’s email campaign history, highlighting Open Rate and Click Rate, along with the Industry Average Open Rate for comparative purposes.
The graph allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your email communication with your target audience. Using the graph, you can quickly see what percentage of your audience is opening and engaging with campaigns. It also provides a comparative tool in identifying which email campaigns have been particularly successful and which have not.
Hovering your mouse over and then clicking on any particular point on the graph will take you to that campaign’s individual report.
Below the graph, you will find Individual Campaign Reports for each campaign created for the specified audience. Beside each campaign’s title will be information on the number of subscribers who received the email, the percentage of subscribers who opened the email, and the percentage of subscribers who clicked a link within the email.
View Report will take you to the individual Campaign Report. Individual Campaign Reports contain a deep analysis of the ways in which your subscribers interacted with your email campaign. Along with information seen on the main Reports page, Campaign Reports include information on the number of times your email was bounced from a recipient’s inbox, if your email was reported as spam by a recipient, and a graph detailing subscriber activity (opens and clicks) for the first 24 hours since the campaign was sent. For detailed instructions on utilizing individual Campaign Reports, Mailchimp has created a helpful guide.
The drop down menu next to View Report gives you the option to view the email associated with the campaign report, share the campaign on a website like Facebook or your ministry page on the Austin Stone website, share the Campaign Report with members on your team, and download or print the Campaign Report.