Mailchimp Reports Explained

Sending a campaign in Mailchimp is just the beginning of the work. Once the first emails settle in and recipients begin to interact with them, Mailchimp reports begin to populate. Each new message, every email opened or clicked creates new data points that can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

There are plenty of reports up for grabs and many things you can do with your Mailchimp data outside of the platform. We’ll explore the available options in this article.

The basics of Mailchimp reports

There’s no one specific place where all Mailchimp reports would sit. Instead, they can be found in different sections around the platform. For example, audience reports reside in the Audience section on the menu; campaign reports can be found in the Campaigns tab, and so on.

We’ll explain where to look for particular reports in the respective chapters below.

The availability of reports also depends on your subscription plan – the higher the plan, the more reports at your disposal. You’ll want to upgrade to the Standard plan or higher for the most comprehensive set.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s available with each plan:

	Free	Essentials	Standard	Premium
Audience Dashboard	✅	✅	✅	✅
Campaign Engagement	✅	✅	✅	✅
Purchase Behaviours	✅	✅	✅	✅
Campaign Reports	✅	✅	✅	✅
Website Reports	✅	✅	✅	✅
Customer Journey Reports		✅	✅	✅
Comparative Reports				✅

Mailchimp reports explained

Let’s now look at the various types of reports available in Mailchimp. In general, we can split them into basic and comparative reports.

Mailchimp basic reports

Mailchimp basic reports are nothing else than the standard set of reports available on each plan. The only exceptions are Customer journey reports that require an upgrade to the Essentials plan.

These include:

• Audience dashboard – the go-to place for monitoring your audience dynamics – list growth, the campaigns that drive subscribers, or tags in common use.
• Campaign reports and Campaign engagement reports demonstrate the vital stats of each campaign and the latest data on how your contacts interact with emails, pages, or even postcards.
• Purchase behavior reports analyze what drives sales and make it easier to set up behavioral campaigns.
• Website reports do precisely what you would expect them to do – track website conversions, sales, bounce rates, etc.
• Customer journey reports track the performance of automated emails sent via Mailchimp – funnel completion rates, opens, clicks, and individual stats of each message.

Mailchimp comparative reports

Comparative Reports are a premium feature, available only with the Premium plan as well as Mailchimp Pro. As the name would suggest, their aim is to compare different campaigns and simplify the analysis process.

Mailchimp Comparative Reports allow you to pick any campaigns sent out from your account over the last 18 months. The stats for each campaign will be added to the joint view so you can easily compare things like open or click rate, bounces, or abuse reports. 

Each report also features a Baseline segment that demonstrates the overall engagement of this particular audience – for easy comparison.

There’s no limit for how many reports you can stake against each other. One limitation – the campaigns must have been sent to one particular audience to be featured in a joint report.

When creating a Comparative Report, you determine the criteria that campaigns should meet. Every campaign that matches the conditions will be added to the report.

What’s more, future campaigns will be added to the report as well if they meet the criteria. For example, if you choose to consider campaigns sent out over the last month, different reports will be taken into consideration over time. 

Once you specify the criteria, you’ll be able to preview the campaigns that were found to meet your conditions. If you’re not happy with the outcome, you can manually select or deselect campaigns or simply adjust the filtering criteria.

Finally, once everything checks out, save the report and wait until it’s prepared. Now, and at any time going forward, you’ll be able to generate a Snapshot of the report by clicking on Finalize Report -> Generate Snapshot. 

Mailchimp campaign reports

Campaign reports are some of the basic Mailchimp reports. They’re closely associated with campaigns you send out from the platform. For that reason, you’ll find them nested under the Campaigns tab in the menu.

By default, all available Mailchimp campaign reports are displayed. You can filter for specific Mailchimp report types using the View by Type menu.

Different types of reports focus on different things:

• Email reports feature basic stats such as opens, clicks, deliveries, bounces, social media engagement, as well as a comparison to industry benchmarks
• Automation reports focus on the email automation campaigns offered by Mailchimp and show they’re interacted with, what the conversion rates are, and also how individual messages play out.
• Landing page reports track how each of your pages performs and give you metrics such as views, clicks, signups, and others.
• Ads reports focus on ads available via Facebook, Instagram, and Google integrations. They talk about views, clicks, conversions, and revenue.
• Postcard reports help you monitor how many postcards are sent, where they’re shipped, and also how they convert into the desired goal.
• Social post reports show how the content posted to social media via Mailchimp performs, including the number of people reached, as well as impressions, clicks, and other engagements.

Sample Mailchimp email report

Despite the additions to its portfolio such as landing pages or postcards, email still remains the core of the business for Mailchimp. As such, most users jump to Mailchimp campaign reports to check how their emails perform.

Email reports relate to one-off campaigns sent out from Mailchimp – newsletters, product updates, sales messages, and virtually anything else you can think of. Automation reports also rely on emails but we’ll discuss them in more detail in the Mailchimp automation reports chapter.

A typical email report starts with:

• Number of recipients
• Audience
• Data and time when a campaign was delivered
• Subject line

It also includes stats on emails opened, clicked, bounced, and those that led to a recipient unsubscribing. Plenty of related stats are also available: successful deliveries, total opens, clicks per unique opens, and more.

If you have a connected store, you’ll also see the revenue numbers for this particular email campaign – number of orders, average, and total revenue.

Below you’ll see a fresh addition to reports – Content Optimizer. It aims to improve the content of your email so it converts better with each new campaign sent. 

A basic report is available to all users. If you’re on a Standard plan or higher, you can view more detailed reports with specific suggestions for improvements.

Next, you can see your Click Performance. Here, the top links clicks are listed. You can also see the map demonstrating precisely where users click. Perhaps a link you had particularly high hopes about is largely overlooked? So it may be a good idea to experiment with a different placement next time and compare the reports.

The following section shows how your campaign stakes against your average campaigns as well as those sent by your peers.

The final sections of the email report show:

• The 24-hour performance
• Subscribers with most opens
• Social performance
• And top locations by opens

Mailchimp automation reports

Automation reports are generated by various automations you have in place at any given moment. This could be welcome emails, messages nurturing leads, or chasing those that abandoned their carts. You’ll see the Mailchimp report for each automation by going to Campaigns -> Reports and filtering for Automations type of emails.

Automation reports are similar in a way to classic email reports. They also show how many emails were opened, clicked, or bounced. What’s different are the stats depicting how many subscribers completed a sequence – meaning that they reached the designated final stage.

In the bottom section, you can also see the list of emails sent within the campaign and their basic stats. Clicking on View Report next to either takes you to a classic, more detailed email report for this message.

Mailchimp bounce reports

The more emails you send, the more likely you are to encounter delivery problems known as bounces. This is particularly true for new audiences that haven’t heard much from you before and/or their addresses haven’t been properly verified.

To find the bounce reports, head over to the campaign reports page. Pick one of the Emails or Automations campaigns and click the View Report button to the right.

While on the report page, click on the number demonstrating bounces for this campaign.

You’ll see a more detailed bounce report. It features once again the total number of bounces as well as a split between hard and soft bounces.

Hard bounces indicate a permanent email delivery. The most common reason is an email address that doesn’t exist – possibly because it was mistyped or was typed in incorrectly on purpose. It’s also not uncommon for email servers to reject emails – because of server policy, spam rules, or other limitations.

When an email hard bounces, contact will be removed from your audience and no further emails will be sent to them.

Soft bounces, on the other hand, indicate temporary problems – full inbox, message too large, transmission problem, etc. Mailchimp will usually attempt to re-send such messages several times, until they eventually hard bounce or are delivered.

Below the numbers for bounces, you’ll find a useful table with the list of contacts that bounced. The bounce type field indicates whether a soft or hard bounce was in play.

If you scroll to the right, you’ll see a Bounce Reason link for each contact. Clicking on it will load a file in a separate tab. Look for that kind of information somewhere midway through the message:

Mailchimp audience reports

Audience reports give you a holistic overview of your audiences. Rather than focus on a particular campaign or a sequence of emails, they look at all past interactions with a specific audience. 

Although they’re not referred to as reports in the Mailchimp interface, they look very much alike. You’ll find them under Audience -> Audience dashboard.

Here you’ll see the recent additions to an audience and the path that led them to subscription. You’ll also see the overview of tags most commonly associated with an audience.

In the Predicted demographics section you’ll see an AI-powered evaluation of your subscribers’s age and gender. It can be very useful for more detailed targeting and gaining a better understanding of who you send emails to. It’s a premium feature, though, that requires a Standard plan or higher.

Lastly, you’ll see the engagement stats for your audience and the top locations. 

What’s very useful is the ability to target one particular segment of your audience with a campaign. It could be, for example, leads with a particular tag to their name, from a certain country, or those that rarely interact with your emails. 

To send a targeted campaign, simply hover on a particular category and then create a relevant campaign.

Mailchimp custom reports

Mailchimp offers different types of reports but at some point, you may feel that you want to get even more out of your data. When that happens, consider building a custom report outside of Mailchimp. 

Although some data analytical skills will help, this is not something that requires a highly-skilled professional. In fact, anyone can, for example, export Mailchimp contacts to Excel and build simple, self-updating reports with ease.

We’ll demonstrate how it’s done, step by step using Coupler.io – the tool for automatically exporting data from Mailchimp but also apps such as Hubspot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and many others. 

Mailchimp analytics report 

In this particular example, we’re interested in the stats of our audiences as we want to track how they grow. 

Export data

Coupler.io offers Mailchimp importers capable of fetching data directly into a spreadsheet (Google Sheets, Excel). Mailchimp to BigQuery integration is also available if you prefer it.

We’ll focus on bringing Mailchimp reports to Google Sheets but the process is very similar for Excel if you prefer. The data can be refreshed on a chosen schedule – for example, daily or weekly. 

Here’s how to set it up:

• Create a free Coupler.io account. Click the Add importer button.
• Choose Mailchimp as a source. We’ll go with Google Sheets as a destination, but Excel will also work well if you prefer it.

• Name the importer and connect your Mailchimp account. Log in and authorize Coupler.io to import the data on your behalf.
• Now it’s time to decide what you want to import. We’ll go with Audiences, which will import various stats about, well, our audiences.

• Connect your Google account and decide where the data should be imported in the Destination settings.
• By default, each new data refreshes overrides the previous data with the fresh information. This is called a Replace import mode. In our particular case, we’ll want to preserve each import to compare how numbers change over time. So we switch the Import mode field to Append.

• Finally, decide on the schedule at which the data should be refreshed. In our case, a once-a-week refresh on Monday morning will work just fine, but you can pick any other schedule that suits you.

• Hit the Save and Run button.

How to create a report for Mailchimp?

The importer will bring the list of your audiences with the corresponding stats for each – subscriber count, unsubscribes, cleaned contacts, etc. Open and click rates are also available. In our case, we imported two rows of data for two audiences we have set in Mailchimp.

Coupler.io will bring the latest counts into a spreadsheet with each new data refresh, adding them below the previous results. After some weeks, the spreadsheet will look like this:

This gives us something to work with. For example, we’ve decided to build charts demonstrating the growth of each audience and all audiences combined.

As the first step, we separate stats for each of the audiences. If you only have one audience, skip this stage and get to building reports already.

Otherwise, in a new tab, in the A1 cell, we type in ‘=’ (equal sign) and then point to the A1 cell of the original tab (the one with the Coupler.io import). This will link both cells. Then, we stretch the formula onto the entire row to link the entire menu.

Then, we use the following FILTER formula in the A2 cell:

=FILTER('All Audiences'!A:AU,'All Audiences'!C:C="Newsletter")

All Audiences is the tab where we imported the data. The formula links the data imported there and filters out all the results that are not “Newsletter”.

We can then duplicate the tab and do the same for the other audience we’ve imported – “Weekly Digest.”

Once the data is separated, we can build simple charts, demonstrating, for example, how the audience grows:

The numbers will also auto-update when the data is refreshed according to your set schedule. This will form a self-updating dashboard you can use to track audience growth dynamics.

Mailchimp monthly report

Using Coupler.io you can adjust the frequency with which the data is imported. If you’re up for fetching data monthly, jump back to the Schedule part of your importer’s settings. Change the interval to “Every Month” and pick the date and time that works best for you. For example:

Audiences is just one of the data entities you can fetch from Mailchimp. With others, you can pull campaign stats, lists of contacts, automations with their individual stats, and more. All of these can make for an excellent base for a handy, self-updating dashboard in your spreadsheet.

And if you need more than that, it’s easy to plug in, for example, Google Sheets to Data Studio, and Excel to Power BI.

Export of Mailchimp email reports

Continuing with the previous example, we’re going to export the thing that Mailchimp users love the most – campaign reports. This will include the list of campaigns, their status and the vital stats of each campaign, including opens, clicks, total sent, or revenue.

• Set up Coupler.io and connect Mailchimp as we did above. If you already set up a Mailchimp  importer, click the Add new button to create a new importer.
• This time, choose the Campaigns data entity.
• The following fields are optional but it may be useful to configure them. If you leave them blank, all finished, ongoing, and scheduled campaigns will be imported. Here, for example, we choose to import the campaigns created in April that are currently sending.

• Alternatively, leave those fields blank and do the proper filtering in your spreadsheet or database. Each campaign is imported with its create_time.
• Set up a destination and optionally a schedule and then hit the Save and Run button.

Here’s a small piece of our campaigns report imported with this Mailchimp to Google Sheets integration:

Mailchimp weekly email reports

A report that we exported in the previous chapter rarely makes sense as a one-time activity. Instead, it’s very useful to have email reports updated every week so that you can report on your progress or come to the weekly meeting with the latest information at your disposal.

When importing with Coupler.io, you can set up schedule reporting for automated data refreshes. To create a weekly report, pick Every Day as an interval. Then, select one of the days below and the time that works for you. For example:

Following this schedule, the data will be refreshed every Monday at 8am.

What are the most important Mailchimp reports?

There’s not one single report that beats them all. Each Mailchimp report contributes in some way to better understanding your audience and how they interact with your emails. However, there are some that can indeed give you a lot of valuable insights you won’t find elsewhere.

One possible candidate is the click map available with campaign reports. It tells you where precisely users click and which areas they avoid on your email templates. Such heatmaps can be invaluable resources for optimizing your templates and testing out new approaches.

What’s more, audience segmentation and the ability to target only a small chunk of an audience is a powerful weapon. For example, looking at the dashboard for an audience of thousands or even millions may not always give you the insights you need. As it’s the quality of that data that can be most useful. 

If you, however, segment the audience to see only those that clicked links in either of your last 3 sales emails, you’re possibly looking at high-quality leads. You can see where their interests lie and target them with a personal offer.

Lastly, Mailchimp comparative report makes it easy to compare even dozens of campaigns at the time. They’re excellent if you’re testing new approaches – different link placements, tweaked templates, various types of content – and want to see what resonates best with an audience.

And if you’re not on the Mailchimp plan that allows for accessing these reports, do not despair. Exporting campaign stats into a spreadsheet in a way we described in the Mailchimp custom reports chapter can make for a viable alternative.

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