Using MailChimp to Measure Your Marketing Results

Measuring your marketing results with MailChimp is not only easy, but it is necessary in order to figure out if you are on the right track when communicating with your audience.

Here’s some key metrics to measure in MailChimp and why they are important to your future email marketing efforts.

Measuring List Growth

This matters when you are trying to grow your list through specific efforts. For instance, if you are promoting free opt-in offers through paid advertising or if you are promoting free opt-in offers in your blog posts you will want to know if your list is growing as a result of those efforts.

MailChimp makes it easy to measure list growth. Just log in to your MailChimp account and select Lists. To the right of your list’s name, you will see a “Stats” button. You’ll want to click the word “Stats.”

Next, you’ll see statistics related to your list. Scroll down the page just a bit and you’ll see the “Audience Growth” section. To the right of the word “Audience Growth, ” you will see “Past 7 days.” “Past 7 days” is the default setting. From the drop-down menu, you will be able to choose “past 30 days” and “past year.”

MailChimp will then display a bar graph showing list growth for the period of time you selected. The lighter yellow color reflects how much your audience changed in number over the given period of time. I like to look at change on a month-to-month basis unless I am working with a super aggressive campaign with lots of exposure. The reason is that most small businesses have smaller reach with their campaigns and growth efforts, so that means it takes longer to see the results of the effort. If you recently added an opt-in to your site and you’re not seeing a significant spike in list growth, I’d consider a couple things.

1. The first would be to test the opt-in with a larger audience because .usually most people won’t experience an opt-in rate of more than 3%. 3% of 100 is 3. So if you are only exposing your opt-in to 200 people through a paid ad or if you have 200 people see the opt-in through other means of traffic to your website, you probably won’t see more the 6 opt-ins during the time it took to get the 200 views to that page.
2. Next, if you’ve exposed the opt-in offer to at least 1,000 people and your opt-in rate is less than 3%, I’d consider trying a different opt-in.

In my next article, I will go show you how to see how many unsubscribes you have had in MailChimp, why they unsubscribed, and possible reasons for the unsubscribes.