Because of its accessibility and ease of use, Mailchimp is a popular gateway to email marketing for small business owners everywhere. Its free and paid plans give you the flexibility to grow and adapt your email strategy along the way.
One feature that’s included in the Mailchimp contact dashboard is a Contact Rating, which is expressed in a star value. If you have a Mailchimp account and you’re ready to take the next step to improve your email marketing strategy based on engagement data, this 5-minute tutorial is your go-to guide.
Mailchimp Contact Ratings simplify a lot of information into an easy-to-read star system. Based on how often a contact opens your emails and clicks on each message’s contents, Mailchimp generates a score for that contact to reflect their engagement.
The platform also takes into account how often you’re sending emails when assessing opens and clicks. The resulting Contact Rating is like a contact’s batting average: How often they receive messages from you is compared against how much they interact with those emails.
It can be a lot to process when you get down to the nitty gritty details of how the data is assessed and measured. Thankfully, Mailchimp does the hard work for us and simply assigns each contact a star rating to show how engaged they are.
Behind the scenes, we use a 16-point scale to measure subscriber engagement. To help you see at a glance how a subscriber rates among others, we convert that number and display an associated star rating. Everyone starts at zero, or two stars.
Not every contact on your email list has the same level engagement with your content. That’s to be expected, though! Everyone interacts with your emails differently, thus the five-star rating system Mailchimp has created.
Let’s say that any contact with a three-star rating or below has a “low rating,” and explore exactly what that means:
This contact may have unsubscribed from your emails at one point and then resubscribed. Alternatively, they may have soft bounced in the past for one reason or another. People with a 1-Star rating has sporadic interest in your content. They may have given you their email address to access a signup deal and then unsubscribed thereafter, repeating this cycle any time they shop on your site.
This contact is not engaged. Since a 2-Star rating is automatically given to new subscribers, it’s likely that contacts boasting only 2 stars are new to your list. It’s also possible, though, for previously engaged contacts who have gone a bit dark on you to fall back into this category from a higher contact rating.
Contacts with a 3-Star rating are considered to have low engagement. While they may open your campaigns and click through them, their engagement is inconsistent. But don’t fret! 3-Star rated contacts may also still be new to your list and merely working their way up to a higher rating.
A low contact rating can tell you a lot about the way a contact interacts with your messaging. If you find that many of your contacts have low ratings, it may be a good idea to segment those folks and incentivize them with an offer. You may also consider improving your campaign designs and content with the guidance of an expert.
Soft bounces happen when the email server recognizes your message, but they return it to sender because of issues like the mailbox being full or temporarily unavailable.
This is different from a hard bounce, which occurs when an email can’t be delivered due to an invalid email address or error during sending.
Keep in mind which data points influence contact ratings when designing campaigns and segments around them. Mailchimp Contact Ratings only measure contact engagement in regular and A/B testing email campaigns. Any engagement your contact has with your Mailchimp ads, automations, and landing pages isn’t factored into their star rating.
This is the fun part! Using the data that Mailchimp provides allows you to design campaigns according to engagement and prune your list of contacts who aren’t participating. Here are a few ideas for putting these insights to work to make the most of your email marketing:
Explore more of our training sessions to learn more about email marketing and strategically communicating with your customers.
Mailchimp is often a launchpad for small business email marketing, and its many features and plans can accommodate certain businesses comfortably for years. However, there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to email marketing. If you’re looking to hop to a different platform, consider trying Klaviyo.
Klaviyo offers:
Start building beautiful campaigns with the data-driven insights and intelligent integrations of Klaviyo today!
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