The Agency Guide to Mailchimp Analytics

Scheduling emails to send at a peak time for engagement and whipping up a grin-worthy subject line is always satisfying. But if you can't put a number on it, how can you prove the value of your email campaigns to your clients? 

Regardless of whether clients share your appreciation for a fine-tuned email sequence, it's important to provide clear and comprehensive reports on the performance of your agency’s Mailchimp campaigns.

Today, we’re digging into some of the basics of Mailchimp analytics and sharing the key metrics your agency should be tracking for email campaign success.

What Is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is a leading email marketing platform used to create, manage, and analyze email marketing campaigns. Plans for businesses of all sizes are available to help users build engaging email campaigns, automate workflows, and track key metrics like open rates and click through rates. All this is accomplished with key features like:

• Customizable email templates

• Audience segmentation

• A/B testing

• Built-in analytics tools

The most important aspect of email marketing is the ability to share highly targeted messaging. Your potential customers are at different stages of the buying cycle. Some may be in the consideration stage, while others may be at the research and compare stage, and even others in the ready-to-purchase stage. 

Having the ability to segment your audience and create buyer personas helps you determine what kind of content to create for each step. Segmenting these customers into appropriate email marketing lists helps businesses target these groups more effectively. Customers need information to move them to the next buying cycle stage; pushing the right content does just that. It's all about moving these prospects down the sales funnel–not as quickly as possible, but as efficiently as possible.

Bryan Lozano, Vice President of Operations, Ad-Apt

A Quick History of Mailchimp

Mailchimp was founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius, and emerged during the early days of email marketing. Initially developed as a side project, it quickly gained traction for its user-friendly interface and helpful features to manage and schedule emails. Throughout the 2000s, it established itself as a go-to platform for small businesses seeking to engage with their audience through email campaigns.

In the early 2010s, Mailchimp expanded its offerings beyond email management, introducing features like automated emails, A/B testing, and analytics tools. This marked a significant shift towards providing a more comprehensive email marketing solution, and set a precedent for other marketing software providers. 

In more recent years, Mailchimp has further diversified its product suite. Now, it integrates with various ecommerce platforms, social media channels, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Mailchimp's acquisition by Intuit in 2021 was a significant milestone that signaled its value and influence in the marketing software industry.

With millions of users worldwide and a reputation for reliability and innovation, Mailchimp continues to be a trusted partner for businesses looking to scale their email marketing efforts effectively. As businesses increasingly prioritize digital marketing strategies, Mailchimp remains at the forefront, empowering organizations to connect with their audience and drive meaningful results.

Making Sense of Mailchimp Analytics

Monitoring Mailchimp analytics is the process of tracking, gathering, and analyzing insights from Mailchimp email campaigns. This can be done both natively within the platform or by using third-party tools like AgencyAnalytics, which allow you to combine your Mailchimp data with other data from Google Analytics or ecommerce platforms like Stripe to create a more holistic picture of campaign performance.

These analytics help your agency track and make sense of specific email performance metrics. You can also create detailed reports to gauge the success of your efforts, and make data-driven decisions to improve outcomes. Mailchimp analytics empower your team to optimize email marketing tactics, enhance email campaigns, and maximize the effectiveness of strategic efforts across marketing channels.

How Mailchimp Analytics Help Your Marketing Agency

Wondering how Mailchimp analytics are relevant in the context of your digital marketing agency? Here we outline 5 key ways these tools support your business.

1. Enhancing Email Campaign Effectiveness

Mailchimp analytics provide comprehensive insights into email campaign performance, including open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. By analyzing these key metrics, your agency teams identify what resonates with a client's audience, and refine their subject lines, email content, and targeting strategies accordingly. Not only that, you'll be able to put tangible numbers on the performance of your work, so your clients will have a clear picture of the impact of each campaign.

The AgencyAnalytics Mailchimp integration creates comprehensive email marketing reports in just a few clicks. Try it free for 14-days.

2. Optimizing Your Marketing Strategy

Analyzing email campaign performance helps your teams gain a deeper understanding of each audience's preferences, behaviors, and engagement patterns. This enables marketers to tailor strategies to better align with the needs and preferences of paying customers. When you're working with multiple clients in various industries, this is essential for driving higher engagement and conversions.

3. Maximizing Marketing ROI

Not only will tracking the performance of campaigns help your teams improve their strategies, it will also help them allocate resources more effectively. By identifying high-performing channels and optimizing underperforming ones, your agency will maximize the ROI you're providing to clients–it’s a great way to drive business growth for both your clients and your agency alike.

4. Facilitating Data-Driven Decision-Making

Mailchimp analytics equip your agency with insights derived from data analysis. And these insights help your teams make more informed decisions about campaign optimization, audience segmentation, content creation, and overall strategy. All this will build up everyone's knowledge over time, and allow marketers to apply prior learnings across clients, projects, and strategies.

Pull in-depth email marketing metrics for your clients with the AgencyAnalytics Mailchimp integration. Try it free for 14-days.

5. Fostering Continuous Improvement

Through ongoing monitoring and analysis of key metrics, your agency will continuously iterate and improve work for clients. This iterative approach fosters innovation and ensures that marketing strategies remain relevant and effective even as things change. Regular monitoring and optimization shows clients that you won't take a one-and-done approach, and helps you maintain those key relationships and extend your value over time.

Where To Find Mailchimp Analytics Within the Native Platform

Within the Mailchimp platform, accessing analytics is straightforward. Once you're logged in, just navigate to the "Reports" tab located in the top menu. From there, select the specific email campaign or marketing activity you wish to analyze. Mailchimp provides comprehensive analytics for each campaign.

Users may also explore audience insights and trends to better understand their subscribers. Of course, there are certain limitations to the native analytics tools, and third-party tools will help your agency dig deeper and uncover more nuanced insights.

Metrics Available Natively in Mailchimp

Within Mailchimp, the following specific metrics are tracked natively:

1. Open Rate

2. Click-through Rate

3. Subscriber Activity

4. Revenue Generated

5. Unsubscribed Contacts

6. Social media engagement

7. Website Activity

8. Ecommerce Performance

9. Growth Trends

10. Audience Engagement

Native Mailchimp Metrics vs. KPIs

Mailchimp's native platform metrics encompass various aspects of email marketing, audience engagement, and campaign effectiveness. But while these numbers provide valuable insights into how campaigns are performing, they may not always align directly with the key performance indicators (KPIs) that clients prioritize.

For agencies aiming to demonstrate the value they provide to clients, it's essential to bridge the gap between Mailchimp's native reporting and client-centric KPIs. This requires a strategic approach to data analysis and reporting. You'll need to identify which Mailchimp metrics directly contribute to achieving the client's overarching business goals and KPIs, and where you'll need to supplement data from other sources to demonstrate progress.

By aligning Mailchimp data with client-specific KPIs, agencies reinforce the value they bring to the table. Selecting and prioritizing metrics that directly demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives on key business outcomes shows that you're aware of and aligned with your client's bottom line. This might mean highlighting factors like:

• Revenue growth

• Customer acquisition and retention

• Overall return on investment (ROI)

Ultimately, while Mailchimp measures several metrics, agencies must translate these numbers into data-driven insights that resonate with clients' business goals and KPIs. By doing so, you effectively showcase the value your agency delivers in driving tangible business outcomes through strategic marketing initiatives.

Use AgencyAnalytics Smart Reports to generate in-depth Mailchimp reports in 11-seconds flat. Try it free for 14-days.

Top 9 Mailchimp Metrics to Track for Clients

Mailchimp offers a wide array of metrics to track the performance of email campaigns and other marketing initiatives. But how do you decide where to start? The following 9 metrics will give you a solid basis to start with in your Mailchimp analytics endeavors, helping your agency gain a clear grasp on email marketing performance.

1. Open Rate

The open rate is one of the most fundamental things you can measure in email marketing, and is the percentage of recipients who opened an email. You can also track multiple opens, seeing how many people came back to check out your email a second or third time. Tracking an email's open rate and multiple opens helps your agency measure the effectiveness of subject lines, send times, and audience targeting.

A high open rate suggests that you've reached the audience at the right time with an effective message. A low open rate, on the other hand, may indicate that you failed to hook them with the subject line, or that you might want to try to send emails at a different time of day.

Track the open rate of multiple email campaigns with the AgencyAnalytics Mailchimp integration. Get started today, it's free for 14-days.

2. Click Rates

The click-through rate measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link or call-to-action (CTA) in your email. A more precise version of this is the click-to-open rate (CTR), which measures the percentage of people who clicked on a link or CTA out of the number of people who opened the email. Each metric is useful in its own right, providing a subtle difference in perspective.

Click-through rates and email click-to-open rates indicate the level of engagement and interest generated by the email content. They help your agency determine whether the content effectively drives traffic to the desired destination, such as a website, landing page, or product page. This is an important metric because it will help you parse out the performance of your emails against the performance of your landing pages, web forms, etc.

All email marketing metrics are important (sent, delivered, opened, clicked, unsubscribed) and can't be looked at in isolation. Any metric has to be considered against a desired outcome. But certainly, Opens & Clicks are what I pay attention to most closely.

James Middleditch, Director, Digital Group Media

3. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate measures the percentage of recipients who completed a desired action after clicking on a link within an email campaign. Such actions might include:

• Making a purchase

• Filling out a form

• Signing up for a webinar

• Downloading a document

• Creating an account

Conversions might come directly via the email, for example by clicking a link or CTA, or they may come from a secondary action once a user clicks through to a landing page. Tracking conversion helps you evaluate the effectiveness of an email in driving meaningful outcomes and generating revenue.

4. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate indicates the percentage of emails that were not successfully delivered to recipients' inboxes due to invalid email addresses or other delivery issues. A sudden spike in bounce rate could also indicate that something's wrong with that particular email setup, the email server, or another technical factor.

Monitoring bounce rates helps clients maintain a clean and up-to-date email list, and remove outdated or unengaged addresses. Not only does this help ensure messages reach the intended audience effectively, it can also help to avoid getting flagged as spam. Healthy email lists help to maintain deliverability proactively.

5. Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate measures the percentage of recipients who opted out of receiving future emails from a client's mailing list after receiving an email. While it's natural for some subscribers to unsubscribe over time, a high unsubscribe rate may indicate issues with content, frequency, or relevance. Keeping an eye on unsubscribe rates help you know when it's time to reevaluate the email strategy.

6. List Growth Rate

The list growth rate measures the rate at which a client's email list is growing over time. Tracking list growth helps clients assess the effectiveness of their lead generation and acquisition efforts, while keeping an eye on the total number of recipients on a list. A healthy list growth rate indicates that clients are successfully attracting new subscribers and expanding their audience reach.

Demonstrate to clients how your agency's efforts are growing their email list, month after month. Try the AgencyAnalytics Mailchimp integration free for 14-days.

Meanwhile, if email subscribers aren't growing it might be a sign to promote email campaigns more prominently on other marketing channels, such as social media or the website. Or, if growth is stagnant due to high unsubscribe rates, it could be indicative that the content isn't matching the expectations of subscribers.

Email is an important channel to analyze within the context of your whole marketing mix. We view email as a mid-funnel marketing channel that helps us increase overall sales and revenue when coupled with top-of-funnel efforts from our advertising and content marketing efforts. This means that we look at how traffic generated from other channels leads to new subscribers to email and how the entire funnel leads to revenue-producing conversion events.

Bryan Lozano, Vice President of Operations, Ad-Apt

7. Device and Location Insights

Device and location insights provide information on where recipients are engaging with emails, and through what devices. This helps clients optimize email design and content formatting for different devices and personalize messaging to specific geographic regions, for example through timing, language, or local references. It also helps you understand more about the target audience and their preferences.

8. Engagement Over Time

Engagement over time tracks the evolution of recipients' engagement with email campaigns, including open rates, click rates, and other engagement metrics. Monitoring engagement over time helps your agency identify trends, patterns, seasonality, and audience preferences. This enables you to optimize your email marketing strategy for maximum impact.

9. Revenue Attribution

Revenue attribution measures the direct impact of email marketing campaigns on revenue generation and conversion metrics like purchases, order value, and customer lifetime value (CLV). By attributing revenue to specific campaigns and segments, your agency is able to evaluate the ROI of email marketing efforts and optimize strategies to maximize revenue outcomes.

Turning Raw Mailchimp Data Into Actionable Insights

Providing clients with raw numbers from Mailchimp analytics is just a first step. To drive tangible results, it's important to transform this data into actionable insights that inform strategic marketing decisions and help you optimize marketing efforts.

So how do you go from mere numbers to a comprehensive report that really says something? Follow these tips to make Mailchimp marketing data more useful and applicable for clients:

• Set Clear Goals & KPIs: Define specific objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) to guide analysis and measurement efforts effectively.

• Identify Key Metrics: Focus on relevant metrics that will provide the most valuable insights given the nature of the email campaign and client objectives.

• Analyze Trends: Look for patterns and trends in marketing data over time to identify success factors and areas for improvement or optimization.

• Benchmark Against Competitors: Campaign benchmarking and competitive analysis means you'll be able to compare performance outcomes against industry standards and your client's competitors.

• Connect the Dots With Other Platforms: Integrate Mailchimp data with other marketing platforms and tools to gain a holistic view of marketing performance and identify cross-channel insights.

• Use Insights To Drive Strategy: Translate data into actionable strategies and tactics that align with client objectives and drive measurable results.

Understand what they value, understand what's important to them, and then report the data honestly and accurately and our analysis. But then explain it in the way that that fits for that client, so you got to know the clients, you have to know their business, what their goals are, and then and then speak directly to that. 

Michael Gasser, Co-Owner/Partner, Squeeze Marketing

How To Create Reports Using AgencyAnalytics

AgencyAnalytics is an automated data reporting solution designed specifically for the needs of marketing and advertising agencies. The platform consolidates data from multiple sources, creating a single source of truth and giving you a one-stop-shop to draw up client marketing reports. 

Use AgencyAnalytics reports to analyze the performance of marketing campaigns across different channels, demonstrating the ROI of your work to clients and providing them with data informed opportunities for optimizations, new strategies, and more effective campaigns.

Using AgencyAnalytics to create Mailchimp reports is as simple as connecting your Mailchimp account via the integrations module. Once it's hooked up, either select from one of the available email campaign report templates or set up a customized report. Create a custom dashboard for a particular campaign, and display your Mailchimp data alongside data from other sources like Google Analytics and Facebook Ads.

AgencyAnalytics saves us hours of time each month. The integrations with Mailchimp and Klaviyo make it easy for us to report on specific email campaigns and overall channel performance without having to copy and paste metrics from each platform into a PowerPoint each month. Also, having the ability to share access to the live dashboards with clients allows them to dive deeper into the analytics without needing us to dig up specific metrics on their behalf. This has reduced the number of requests/calls we receive from clients throughout the month.

Bryan Lozano, Vice President of Operations, Ad-Apt

Widgets are easily customized to display different data points from different sources. This allows you to set up a completely bespoke visual representation of the most important metrics for all of your campaigns. 

Permissions access allows you to keep client data secure, and white labeling lets you customize the look of your marketing reports. Automate reports to update on a schedule, ensuring clients receive regular, accurate measures of their email marketing KPIs.

AgencyAnalytics helps you keep track of your Mailchimp metrics, monitor your social media marketing efforts, and draw up landing page reports all in one place. Track an email campaign from end to end with the user-friendly BI tools that make data reporting a breeze. 

Join more than 6,500 marketing agency users and start creating stunning Mailchimp reports in just a few clicks. Try AgencyAnalytics free for 14-days.

5 Tips for Creating Mailchimp Reports That Wow Clients

Crafting compelling Mailchimp reports helps you impress clients and demonstrate the impact of your work. Here are a few key tips for building reports that truly wow clients:

• Combine Mailchimp with Other Campaign Data: Bring data from Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Facebook, Linkedin analytics, SEO rankings, and other sources into your Mailchimp reports. This helps you provide clients with a comprehensive view of their marketing performance across multiple channels.

• Track the Right Mailchimp Metrics: Focus on tracking metrics that align with client objectives and KPIs. These might include open rates, click rates, conversion rates, and revenue attribution — whatever will provide the most meaningful insights into campaign effectiveness.

• Focus on the Results That Matter: Highlight key results and outcomes that demonstrate the impact of Mailchimp campaigns on client business goals. This could be increased website traffic, lead generation, sales conversions, and customer engagement. Include a report summary to outline the most important takeaways for your clients.

• Use Automated Reporting Tools: Streamline your reporting process by leveraging automated reporting tools like AgencyAnalytics Smart Reports to generate reports in 11 seconds flat. 

• Wrap Results in Your Agency’s Brand: Customizing your Mailchimp reports with your agency's branding, including logos, colors, and messaging, adds that extra touch. It reinforces your agency's identity and professionalism while presenting data in a visually appealing and cohesive manner.

A great email marketing report is straight to the point, highlighting the KPIs for the analysis timeframe and providing actionable insights.

Bryan Lozano, Vice President of Operations, Ad-Apt

Comparing Mailchimp's Native Analytics Tool to AgencyAnalytics

While Mailchimp's native analytics tool is included with Mailchimp at no additional cost, AgencyAnalytics offers a range of benefits and third-party integrations tailored specifically for marketing agencies. We've outlined the differences between the two platforms in the comparison table below, to help you understand the added value of AgencyAnalytics:

By leveraging AgencyAnalytics, marketing agencies access advanced reporting capabilities, streamline client management, and consolidate data from multiple platforms. Your agency will deliver more comprehensive, well-rounded insights to your clients—proving your value and solidifying your relationships.

Mailchimp Analytics: Summary & Key Takeaways

Mailchimp is a leading email marketing tool that benefits all different types of users in building, managing, and analyzing campaigns. But your agency’s campaigns are nothing without clear data reporting to quantify and visualize their impact! Here are a few key takeaways about how to improve Mailchimp analytics at your agency and derive tangible insights for your clients:

• Evaluate Your Agency’s Current Mailchimp analytics approach: Start by assessing where you currently stand, what data you're measuring, and the processes your agency has in place. Do you rely on the native analytics tools in Mailchimp? Do you leverage third-party tools? Is your analysis approach consistent? Do different teams look at different metrics? These are all things to look into so you can get a clear picture.

• Explore Third-Party Tools: Look into third-party data analytics platforms like AgencyAnalytics to learn more about how they support a more comprehensive, streamlined approach to managing campaign reporting. Consider your agency's current challenges around data accuracy, and time management and use these factors to help determine exactly what types of features and functionalities you're looking for.

• Customize Your Client Reports: A personal touch goes a long way. Customizing Mailchimp reports with your agency branding not only looks professional, but reinforces your team's hard work when clients see their results.

• Set Up Automated Reporting: When reports are automated, you don't need to do the manual work of updating them on a set schedule and notifying your clients. Clients can simply click 'view report' and get an up-to-date view of their campaign's performance in real time.

Your agency’s email campaigns are most certainly valuable, and solid reporting makes them all the more so. Taking your Mailchimp analytics from good to great will enhance client satisfaction and trust, which is essential to the success of your agency. Use the tips, tricks, metrics, and methodologies outlined in this article to deliver better email campaigns—and better email campaign reports!